A great deal of burden on the health care system -- perhaps even more than completely eliminating COVID -- could be alleviated by people dedicating themselves to better diet and exercise. Why not mandate that?
Poor diet and exercise produce a fairly steady burden on the health care system. We need to provide more health care than we would if people ate better and exercised more, but as diet and exercise deteriorated over the decades there was plenty of time to slowly expand the health care system to meet the increased need.
COVID places a much more dynamic burden on the health care system.
It's similar to the way there are many people could manage to afford a $10/month expense for the next 10 years ($1200 total) but would have a very hard time dealing with am extra one-time $200 expense.
OK that argument has been debunked a million times but here we go:
1. No one is talking about mandates
2. Yes living unhealthy is a burden on the health care system. But I am fine with that as long as your actions only have consequences in your own life. With an infectious disease that's different because you suddenly have a multiplier. I didn't hear about any ICU capacity issues because of obese people.
3. We (at least most countries) already have measures to increase the overall health of our society (smoking bans in certain places, age limits on alcohol consumptions, programs in schools to provide healthier food in cafeterias, you name it).
2. I didn't say anything about ICUs, or about obesity spreading to other people. Across the entire healthcare system, there could be much alleviation of burden if people took dietary and activity-based steps toward being healthier.
3. Banning smoking in public places doesn't stop smoking altogether. If the government wanted to end smoking, they could "mandate" the complete shutdown of tobacco companies. Or the tobacco companies themselves could shut down of their own accord. But folks involved care more about their business than about the health of their "customers". Healthier food in school cafeterias is great, but clearly not enough. People are being hammered with anti-COVID material left and right; nothing even close to that is being done toward pressuring people into taking better care of themselves through diet and exercise.
Poor phrasing on my side, I apologize. Your argument has not been debunked, it's still a bad one.
1. You are responding to a comment that didn't talk about mandates under an article that says nothing about mandates. You are the one who brought it up.
2 and 3: In isolation you are right, we should probably take more measurements towards healthy living. But if you only bring that up as a counter point to COVID measures, you are at very best making a flawed analogy.
My point is: if there is anything feasible measures we can take for healthier living, great we should do that. But we should ALSO do something about COVID.
Perhaps I also had poor phrasing. Let me try again:
We should strive to reduce the COVID burden on the emergency / ICU segment of the healthcare system. But I believe we could alleviate burden across the entire healthcare system if more people ate healthier diets and exercised better. Perhaps we could even alleviate more burden than what could be alleviated by way of completely eliminating COVID.
A lot of people are talking about mandating vaccines, and there is constant awareness of anti-COVID precautions everywhere you look. I think that if the same sort of intense campaign was rallied regarding better eating and exercise -- basically pressuring people, even borderline forcing them -- then we would see better progress in this area.
It is unfortunate, I think, that so many resources are being put into pressuring people to take the vaccine while comparatively little is being put into pressuring people to just be healthier overall. Which might in fact also help in the face of any virus!
Once all who want it are vaccinated, and further 80-95%-plus of the population is either vax- or post-infection- immune, the alleged 'multiplier' of danger-to-others is negligible. The protected are protected; those who want to take thir chances will hurt themselves, & get the painful immunity upgrade, soon enough.
Even with today's HIV treatments, its fatality rate is in the range of COVID. (And: living with it is no cakewalk.) But we haven't outlawed risky sex. People self-sort into compatible risk groupings.
Also, people are most certainly "talking about mandates" when they're discussing whether natural immunity should grant people the same rights to engage in normal activities as vaccination.
