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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

> No amount of covid is safe, and no number of shots can protect you: “We want to say plainly that you can have a mild infection and still get Long COVID,” the organization wrote, in a Weather Report in June. “Vaccinated people can also get Long COVID.”

And every reinfection makes it worse, it s cumulative damage. There are now multiple studies corroborating these

Where is the evidence that we should treat covid as a normal 'endemic' virus that we can ignore?

I 'm all for masks , at least for a period of time in schools etc, to reduce the waves of infection. This is something we should be doing about all seasonal diseases btw. It is not normal for millions of parents to get infected with multiple viruses every year

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Is that different from other diseases? It sounds similar to flus, colds, etc. A flu shot can improve the odds but they're never perfect. No amount of flu is safe, and the more times you get the flu the more likely you are to die.

No it has very different outcomes

The risk of complications increases in every new infection

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Elevated memory problems, stroke, seizure

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02001-z

immunological dysfunction

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x

https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/international-stud...

Isn't that the case with the flu? It's fairly rare to get serious damage from the flu the first handful of times you get it. Most people don't die from the flu until they've caught it 5+ times (in large part because getting the disease multiple times is correlated with aging)

>No amount of covid is safe, and no number of shots can protect you

The irrational, terrified logic of this could also be applied to so many other things that inevitably carry some risk. Take it to the point where you futilely try yo stamp all types of activities and habits out of existence based on a silly notion that nothing can be 100% guaranteed to work and "even one death is too much". Again, absurd and suffocating logic.

It is very much normal for millions of people to get infected with all kinds of mild to moderate illnesses each year. What bubble of cleanliness and isolation to you think most people should live in? During a pandemic, I can see the need for certain carefully considered (major emphasis on carefully) protective measures being applied. Outside of said pandemic, I can't, for practical and moral reasons of basic freedoms, government authority and absurd paranoias about something that's clearly not going away, not controllable through masks or quarantines and for which many remedies now exist.

This article is absurd hyperbole trying to reclaim a bit of flagging COVID hysteria for the sake of clicks and attention, and it uses arguments that are less valid than ever to do so..

I don't think the article is hyperbole. You can search covid studies by yourself to see that there is ample evidence about the long term burden of covid, and that it's cumulative every time people get reinfected.

We don't need to force people to wear masks, but we can warn them about the dangers of the virus, which is unlike the other seasonal viruses. It seems the pendulum has away from covid fearmongering completely towards other side , pretending that it's OK for millions to be infected with a virus that is not benign. The results and burden on healthcare systems will become more obvious the coming years.

Not only is it okay, it's life.

Yes , disease is part of life and so is death but that is a trivial statement

No, it's reality. We had to suffer through three years of attacks from people trying to deny reality. It needs to be spelled out and accepted

Is "controllable" the only decision point?

Measures that aren't 100% effective (and thus fail the "controllable" standard) can still have lots of impact.

We could do a lot at the margins to reduce respiratory infections if people just made better decisions (and had a little more support to make better decisions).

Nope. Not gonna give up another second of my life or ounce of my freedom. Thankfully virtually everyone has woken up and agrees with this sanity

> Thankfully virtually everyone has woken

That is not my impression on HN. Anytime I comment that Sweden did better than most countries by not following WHO lockdown orders I get downvotes. When you look at excessive deaths, you see there is small bump in 2020 and nothing else. Lockdowns didn't help at all, people died anyway.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

Most people still commenting on it in forums disagree, but that's because the chilling effect is still in full force. Voices in favor of freedom and reality were censored for years

If you don't see my upvotes, it only means I am shadow-banned on HN. When I upvote or downvote, person's counter doesn't change.

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