Hacker News Reader

Comment by bfdm | Hacker News Reader

This is a whole lot of wrong information and eugenicist thinking, yikes.

1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years

I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.

View on HN

Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then. In the Bay Area, anyone who had children in daycare had already gotten Covid and recovered from it before the lockdowns began. A rational policy needed to recognize natural immunity.

That is impossible, their lives depend on complex care networks of family and staff that would also need to isolate, but cannot for need to interact with other parts of the world.

It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone.

If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others.

I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely.

Anyways, bring on the downvotes.

If you lock down everyone, or just lock down the elderly, what is the difference to the elderly person locked down? Either way they are isolated.

I'm not suggesting "lockdowns" here. I'm advocating for indoor air quality regulation: maximum CO2, minimum fresh air ACH, deploying upper room UVGI ~everywhere. Universal masking (N95+) in healthcare settings.

Acute and specific things we could do to mitigate H5N1 right now, in particular, are deploying the vaccine we have to all poultry and dairy workers to reduce animal to human crossovers.

You literally said "isolate". Now you have retreated to the motte of common sense hygiene that nobody ever objected to.

I was responding to your flippant suggestion to "Quarantine, voluntary or otherwise, the elderly and at-risk then."

Which I pointed out is not possible, because those people depend on many other healthy people to care for them. Either those people also need to join the "at risk" bubble (not feasible since they have jobs, school etc) or you don't really have the at risk population isolated as you suggest.

If you don't understand this then you have no idea how care networks function, with duties spread across facility staff, families, volunteers, visiting caregivers etc.

Suggesting you cut off one or more legs of those support networks isn't practical or humane. It would mean people without adequate support for basic needs like feeding, toileting & bathing, leaving aside mental/physical exercise and socialization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com