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this isn't about your grandma (may she live many more years), but the sanctimoniousness (and misguidedness) of your comments.

your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%, an average that's disproportionately (and unfortunately) inflated by the elderly and unhealthy. the elderly and unhealthy are the folks who we should encourage (but not force) to get vaccinated because of the elevated risk. everyone else can, and should be allowed to, make their own risk-aware decision.

> "and I do wear a mask indoors or when mandated..."

and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions. if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family (i.e., social situations where you're spitting at each other in close proximity), you're just performing safety theater. and factory workers don't need your sympathy or your mask mandate, since most are distanced enough from each other that a mask literally does nothing more for their safety.

the disinformation you seem to have internalized is why this is all so frustrating, and why we need to route around the mediopolitical gatekeepers trying to drown out the 'hard truths' with their relentless deluge of crafted messaging.



It's crazy how you brush aside the elderly and "unhealthy" as people who can die without your consideration and you think their deaths only 'mess up' the numbers. They are treated like an undesirable population whose deaths shouldn't be taken into account.

Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?


> ‘Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?’

you’re nakedly appealing to emotion here, and baiting for an inflexible, naïve answer. that’s a despicable kind of rhetorical move that doesn’t serve to push our collective understanding forward, but rather attempts to coerce and strives for conformity. it’s diametrically opposed to the point made by the linked nature article.

if the question was, “should we take measures to protect the elderly and unhealthy, who are at elevated risk?”, then ‘yes’ is an easy response (and embedded in my previous comment), because that both invites collaboration and admits a variety of potential measures, without ego or mediopolitical posturing. more importantly, it doesn’t presuppose that everyone must be coerced to vaccinate, to wear masks illogically, and to lock down randomly to achieve that objective.


You can't think of a non-emotional, logical objection to millions of people dying pointlessly? Do we need to say something like "the economy will go down" to get you on board?


The virus isn't going away. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but it only has a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

You can't seriously expect people to continue wearing masks and social distancing forever. That would be absurd.


> your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%

EDIT: I had to address this, too, but even if I assume that figure we get 15.6M dead people once the world is infected. I agree that I have a low personal risk, it's not making grandma die of not breathing--something we know painfully well because of how grandpa died grasping for every breath--that I'd like to avoid. Yeah, there's a DNR order, but I don't wish that misery on anyone.

> and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions.

See, this is an unwarranted assumption on your part. I wear them as mandated because, well, it costs me nothing in general to wear a mask when unneeded. I already mentioned that I don't have to deal with, say, 12 hour factory shifts.

> if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family

I do wear masks when it makes more scientific sense and I haven't been visiting friends & family in the first place. The few times we did, we did wear masks.

So your criticism is just really off base here. You don't know me, you don't know what I do, and you seem to be reaching to find any criticism despite not being in any position to know anything about me.

Why?


my apologies for being overly critical of you particularly, because that’s not the strict intent, as there is a larger audience to consider. it’s hard to thread the needle between the personal and the general on an open forum like this.

i do stand by what i said in general however. masks are an insignificant mitigation in most situations (but not for grandma). we can reduce deaths at the margin (like vaccinating the elderly and unhealthy), but without a sterilizing vaccine, many were very likely going to die no matter what else we do/did. it’s ok (better, even) that we don’t all think the exact same things and do the exact same things, since that more completely explores the solution space. in that vein, share information, rather than trying to ‘help’ or convince.


Apology accepted. And on the point of sharing information, I can agree with you. I do want to see more of that because I doubt that any of us knows everything about this. Please continue to share whatever information you find and how you came to know it.




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