Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

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There are too many unknowns to say for sure. If we put aside technical definitions of pandemic vs endemic and focus on the practical matters of daily life, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to life as it was in 2019. Covid is here to stay and that means adapting to that. The types of adaption will probably change over time.

I have two goals: avoid any long term effects from getting Covid myself, and avoiding giving Covid to my immune compromised spouse. At the moment, the only way to achieve either of those things is to avoid getting Covid at all. With better treatments to either prevent contracting Covid after an exposure, or better treatments to reduce the risk of long Covid, I’d start to consider my risk budget. For now it’s “as close to no risk of contracting Covid as possible”. With better prevention and treatment strategies I’ll probably consider some things that I won’t do now, but I don’t see a realistic scenario where I ever return to conferences, and I imagine I’ll probably continue masking in public essentially forever.

In a lot of ways, the situation today is harder than it was a couple of years ago. Vaccines help prevent infection but not to a degree where you can really rely on that as a first line of defense, and they barely reduce the risk of long Covid, if at all. On top of that, masking is rare, people no longer test, and if they do they no longer avoid going out into public with an active infection. In any reasonably sized office there’s basically no chance you won’t be exposed to Covid at least several times per year now.

> Covid is here to stay and that means adapting to that.

Thanks for the response.

Respectfully, it sounds like you'll never return to public life with this perspective. (Big assumption: assuming you don't have any major commodities), the reason most people aren't taking Covid as seriously anymore is that they are comfortable with their current risk assessment. It seems this is paying off for many, at least in my anecdotal experience.

Again, I'm kind of just musing here, absolutely not telling you how to live your life. I'm just interested because I don't know anyone in my personal network who takes this perspective of yours.

I get that perspective. There aren't a lot of people who agree with my risk assessment. I'm _mostly_ not going to tell other people what they should or shouldn't do (I do wish we'd go back to universal masking in a few locations, like doctors offices and government buildings. Higher risk and more cautious people can avoid restaurants and bars, but you can't just not show up if you get summoned for jury duty, or need to get treated for cancer).

Ultimately, either I'm wrong and the opportunity cost is the extra years of quality I'm losing to continued caution, or other people are wrong and the cumulative effects of infections are going to greatly impact their quality and quantity of life. If everyone chose to take some extra precautions, like masking, better ventilation, and staying home when they were sick then I'd have to give up less, and other people might not be risking so much, but I know that's just not going to happen, and I'm going to deal with the world as it is rather than as I think it ought to be.

My guess is that, although covid isn't going away, in a few years I think things will improve. Long covid is real, and it's having a real economic impact already. It's going to have a bigger impact in the coming years, and there's going to be real incentive to do something about it when it becomes clear that it's a huge drag on productivity. Prophylactic nasal sprays, better post-exposure protocols, next generation vaccines, faster and more reliable testing (preferably something that detects covid in the air rather than relying on individual testing), improved ventilation- all of that is being worked on, and I think eventually a lot of things will be low enough risk that I'll resume some activities.

In the mean time, I'm lucky to be far enough in my career that the impact of a harder line stance on this isn't too bad. Technical collaboration has always been largely remote for me, and there are ways I'm able to maintain connections with friends and family even though we rarely see each other in person.

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