Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

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> ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't

This claim is mostly overblown at this point. It was a legitimate concern early on, but it hasn't been true for some time.

The vaccine claims are also misleading. Herd immunity by vaccination is not the only way to protect society, and the distinct lack of discussion or recognition of immunity from infection is conspicuous. COVID's infection fatality rate for certain cohorts is low enough that vaccination isn't strictly needed, and arguably taking a different tack on this could potentially have saved far more lives.

For instance, consider if we had only isolated and vaccinated those at greatest risk of death and complications from COVID (40 and older, immunocompromised, comorbidities), and then shipped the remaining vaccine supply to the third world to suppress the emergence of variants. We might not have had Delta or Omicron at all. It's not at all clear that this would not have saved more people in the long run.

Beating this vaccine mandate drum is blinding people to other rational solutions. It's not going to end well. This convoy is probably only the beginning.

It's not overblown all across America where the omicron wave did once again force ICU to capacity and cause the cancellation of non-emergency care across the country.

Herd immunity by vaccination is the only way to protect society without requiring infection, which fills hospitals and leads to deaths. Vaccination means you're about 40x less likely to be hospitalized or die, which saves our health system. Do you honestly believe there should be more discussion of infection immunity as a solution, when it results in 40X more hospitalization and death? I've seen anti-vaxxers call public health officials "genociders" for decisions far less death-causing than that.

If you think the vaccine mandate is why this convoy happened, instead of conservative fake news creating vast conspiracy theories from the "NWO" to "Q-ANON", funded by conservatives billionaires and the governments of multiple countries, to help destabilize and bring down the west, then to each their own. But how many Americans are among them? How many fans do they have abroad? It's not about Canadian mandates, it's about the global right wing conspiracy movement.

But I do not believe that the vaccine anti-mandate stuff is anything more than todays convenient whip for the very powerful forces of conservative media control to use to continue their war after Trump lost. Just another issue politicized for convenience, as until conservative media flipped the switch, vaccine hesitancy was almost entirely left-wing. Even in America anti-vaccination attitudes on the right did not start until post-election and post-vaccine rollout, and there's a large group of vaccinated conservatives who regret it because now it's seen as a mistake in that ideology.

As someone who works in a healthcare type field and with a nurse in the family... No, it's not overblown.

Availability of ICU beds here in Ontario has basically been flat since September, with a slight reduction recently due to Omicron:

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations

Furthermore, unvaccinated people are occupying fewer beds than vaccinated people in terms of numbers. Even if they all got vaccinated, we'd be basically in exactly the same place, so how do you expect vaccine mandates to help here?

The reason Ontario (and Canada in general) is doing well is because they have a much higher vaccination rate and a healthier population in general. In the US, the high numbers of hospitalization and death are overwhelmingly unvaccinated and/or extremely unhealthy individuals. Also, comparing absolute numbers is disingenuous when the vaccination rate is so high.

Yes, Canada does have a higher vaccination rate, but Canada and Ontario in particular has a very low number of ICU beds per capita compared to other nations in the developed world, so the picture presented by those numbers is actually pessimistic. That's also why we've had far more lockdowns here than the US, because our underinvestment in healthcare has come back to bite us.

In any case, I think it's clear that the claim I responded to that "hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't" is overblown regardless of these numbers. The people dying are mostly the elderly and the sickly, which are exactly the people who we would in fact expect to die suddenly, and healthy people would not be dropping dead in those numbers even if the ICUs were overflowing.

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