Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
I live in a pretty liberal area, so I assume we are taking stronger measures than your average area, and I have to say that nothing surrounding any covid precautions even approaches what it takes to get on a flight. Wear a mask indoors? Get the jab that most people wanted anyway? I'm just not seeing this Orwellian oppression that some people seem to be suffering under right now.
NYC is the most strict, but they are also the most densely populated. Beyond that, I just don't feel like I've given up any rights.
Can't say the same about a shoeless, invasive patdown where a stranger runs their hand down your butt crack after having waited in line for an hour and gone through a nude scanner.
your comment sounds like what someone who doesnt fly might have said after 9/11. its not hard to think of some examples that apply to the covid security theatre. for example, there are fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of movement, that turn out not to be so fundamental after all. safety first.
I live in Moscow, Russia, and there was a brief time when I was stripped of rights to enter a restaurant, cafe, gym, theater, concert or sports venue. There was talking about requirement of vaccination to use public transit and even a taxi.
Fortunately, those restrictions were cancelled after 3 weeks, because you know, voting day is coming and we don't need angry citizens to vote against ruling party. But the infrastructure is there and it may be used again any time now.
It's not the same. Covid is clearly causing a significant increase in mortality. Even if you don't believe the covid-reporting numbers, you can simply look at excess deaths.
It's very difficult to falsify death stats on a mass-scale especially in a country like the US.
the threats are legitimate and every death counts but it also makes sense to prioritize and focus our limited attention to areas where it has the most impact.
Terrorism kills something like 28k/year whereas Covid has killed 5 million.
The majority of the ~5 million that covid killed would have been dead of old age, heart disease, etc. in 5-10 years anyway. Covid just shaved off a few years of life expectancy; the same people would have shown up in CDC death counts as heart disease or natural causes statistics a few years later. With the 28k killed by terrorism, not so much. You have a lot more young and healthy dying with decades of life expectancy remaining.
Same with comparing covid deaths to WWI deaths. On the one hand you have thousands of healthy 18-year-olds dying, and on the other you have thousands of elderly, obese, and sickly people dying. Not quite a fair comparison.
> No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer.
Isn’t this economic policy, not lockdown policy? Any government could decide to pay laborers 100% of their salary to stay out of work. They could decide “essential workers” would be paid on top of their salary as compensation for the risk and danger. They could deice that corporate profit during a shutdown would go to support laborers. Lockdowns only hurt the middle class and help the rich because the government chooses to force the middle class to stay home while not forcing the rich to stop profiteering off it.
The lockdowns didn't work because people pushed back against them causing the measures to be half-assed as a way to appease those people.
This happens all the time in politics and it's infuriating.
You can't judge the effectiveness of a plan if the plan is modified as a shitty compromise or just plain ignored. But people do judge them, which makes those compromises an effective form of sabotage.
The last state lockdown orders expired in June 2020. Most lasted on the order of a few weeks.
The economy is not destroyed. Assets are appreciating, GDP is growing faster than it has in a decade and employers are desperate to find workers. The unemployment rate is near 5%.
If there is a weak spot in the economy, it is that rising case numbers of the Delta variant are causing people to voluntarily limit their in-person activities. When you ask business leaders what can help the economy, they say “more people getting vaccinated” because it’s the fastest way to reduce new COVID cases.
In my neighborhood several small businesses are still intact. The businesses that relied primarily on commuters are gone, but the staples catering to the people who live here are still intact. My favorite local bar, coffee shop, drycleaner, and bookstores are still going. I'm a bit sad about my pho place closing down, but they're a small chain, and they have another one a bit further away from me that I can still go to.
Talk to your local lockdown provider if you are not happy with the results.
Done properly, of course a lockdown would be effective. Why? Because of the Germ theory. The viruses exist and they don't teleport.
If anything, I would have much preferred if we had a month of global lockdown instead of years of slow burn battle. We wouldn't have had to convince people for vaccination too. It worked for Wuhan.
I am all in for spreading the population sparsely under the sun for a month(I'll take the Greece beaches or the French Riviera). We can make the immunes ones prepare the food and bring the beer.
Well that's a large swing in the other direction, but I enjoy the hyperbole. You do realize lockdowns are the far other direction though? Do you see my point why lockdowns were bad?
Allowing and encouraging people to go outside is the happy medium.
The idea is to separate people from each other for long enough for the virus to die off. Could be done in many ways. Accommodating people in small separate groups for a month under the sun has it's practicality issues but if someone can pull it off the results would be exactly the same.
do you know what would happen if everybody on earth gave themselves 6 feet of space from each other for 14 days? the same thing that would happen if you teleported the virus to the moon. why didnt anyone think of that!
Both have theater aspects and let me propose something: that's good.
When you approach airport security (theater) you wonder what their capabilities are _today_. Are they sniffing the air at large with their GCMS? Is there going to be a dog today? Its intimidating to think of it as a theoretical attacker because of its large and multifaceted apparatus, which is part of its deterrent power.
Masks are somewhat similar, they have a vanishingly small chance of actually intercepting a virus particle/droplet that was going to infect you on a case by case basis BUT they make people approach you differently. They say "stand back".
No actually required :-). I didn't say masks were not effective, I said part of their effectiveness is the making-conscious of transmission vectors. E.g. when you wear a mask and see others do it you are more likely to wash your hands or stand back.
When you wear a mask (as I do) in addition to blocking some particles you signal to others "lets play the not kill eachother game by limiting virus vectors!"
When you approaching airport or train station security theater, you slowing down due to limited throughput. And then bang! - a terrorist blows up in the crowd right in front of security gate.
> Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
There absolutely are red-team exercises against airport security. Sometimes the TSA has fared very poorly[0]. In the face of decreased air travel during this pandemic their "catch rate" has gotten better[1].
Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
Edit: Since some HN commenters want to play disingenuous games and insert words into my mouth, I’ll clarify my specific problem is with these apps having zero standards. If my state makes its own app or devises a law to prosecute this kind of use of private data, I would have less of a problem with it as a temporary measure.
when I got my first vaccine, they gave me a paper card, and they put stickers on it to record which vaccines I got, and I put it in my wallet where it's been ever since. I haven't (yet, I guess) had to show a "digital vaccine record", I just show my paper card and they stare at it for a bit and then wave me through.
if you did not get that option, that sucks, and it sounds a bit inconvenient, but, uh, yeah, over 600,000 people in the US have died so far, i don't think that's a "scare", that sounds like a valid concern to me.
also your data is almost assuredly at 20 different marketing analytics firms already, regardless of how secure or open-source the digital vaccine record is.
You don’t know where my data is. And regardless, that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be okay with another vector that I cannot opt out of for potentially selling my data.
> Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
If you think vaccine passports are bad just wait until you hear about all phones...
Sorry bud, I can turn off my phone. I can leave my phone at home. My phone carrier doesn’t sell my location, they just give it to the police if I commit a murder.
I don’t really see what this has to do with vaccine passports (Louisana has a nice app for it, digital drivers license, proof of vaccination checked against a state database) but phone carriers do sell real-time location data to third parties. They were fined a pittance for it: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...
> when discussing homeless people being told to move somewhere cheaper.
What an absolutely insane whataboutism. This has nothing to do with what we're discussing and you look like a joke. You're asserting that vaccine passports infringe upon your freedoms. Just don't go to those bars. Jesus.
What rights? Businesses have the right to refuse service. Governments have always required vaccine verification. This is just whining. There are no rights implications here.
Also calling me a nazi isn't really appropriate, I don't think.
> If you're okay with forcing people to show their medical history to drink,
This is the obvious troll. You're not forced to show anything _to drink_. You're forced to comply with a business's requirements as per their rights, to be allowed to drink _in their establishment_.
Also please go back to reddit if you cannot resist the urge to call names.
I'm fully vaccinated, but that was a choice I made. It was a risk assessment. "How likely am I to get covid and have a bad go of it?" vs "How likely am I to have a bad reaction from the vaccine?" That's a risk assessment that varies from person to person based on where they live, what medical conditions they might have, their age, and other things.
The mRNA vaccines are especially worrisome to some because they are relatively new and aren't fully approved in the US (where I live).
I have a co-morbidity and by the time I was eligible to get vaccinated it looked obvious to me that I'd be better off getting it based on how well they were performing and how low the risk appeared. Things could have turned out wildly different with vaccines that turned out to be both mostly ineffective and potentially dangerous, causing me to assess things differently.
I encourage my friends who aren't vaccinated to get jabbed, but I have no wish to have the government force them to get a medical procedure they specifically don't want.
The reason is to help protect and care for your fellow human beings.
"It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk. Forgoing the vaccine without a solid medical reason is putting others at risk.
By your logic, you should be able to punch anyone in the face at any time, because your fist is part of your body, and "it's your body".
> "It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk.
Not according to pro-abortion stances.
If you want to get the vaccine, it should protect you. If you can't there are therapeutics. You don't need to force others to inject mRNA shots into them.
Your analogy was awful. Such a false equivalency, there's nothing even remotely the same about that example.
The point of vaccines is to help protect society at large, not so much you specifically. Failing to take reasonable steps that help keep your friends and neighbors safe is simply reprehensible.
I don't understand "natural immunity" as a reason. I think I don't know what it actually means.
As far as I know, natural immunity is conferred if and only if you've recovered from the virus. And one of the goals of the vaccine is to avoid getting it in the first place. But to get natural immunity, you have to be infected first. It seems a bit like burning down your house to prevent arson from a stranger. Have I misunderstood "natural immunity"?
Likewise, yelling at people to get the vaccine makes no sense.
If you don't want to catch the virus, get the vaccine. Don't worry about others.
They will get the virus and then get natural immunity. People will have adverse reactions to both covid and the vaccine. Let them weigh the risk to which one.
> They will get the virus and then get natural immunity
Only if they, y'know, survive, and only after being a nuisance to the healthcare system that the rest of rely on
You've got a point that verifiable natural immunity as of _now_ should probably be acceptable in lieu of vaccination (though efficacy against variants is worth considering) for mandates.
Offering 'natural immunity' as an option to the currently un-vaccinated un-infected population is just crazy. People will assume the risk, get sick, got to hospital, and die. Just ignoring those 'others' isn't an option for public-health since the downside costs of the risk they assume are borne by everyone in the form of healthcare burden. 'They' still expect to be a priority when they get sick...
You're talking about "aren't thinking" but most of your posts just involve nebulous throw away phrases like "People have immunity"... clearly you know that phrase doesn't mean anything right?
In the meantime we can all see for ourselves actual impact, real things, in areas where vaccination rates are low. These aren't nebulous concepts like your phrases, they're real.
Can you just go to r/nursing and read the 100x stories of nurses saying "I'm actually not an ICU nurse but my floor has been converted to an ICU floor" or "We have 4 nurses for 30 covid patients and I want to scream"?
Maybe go to your local hospital and ask then among their own nursing social circles? They're the people who would have first-hand understanding of how full the ICUs are.
I'm not saying I believe everything I read on Reddit, but I know r/nursing is a longtime subreddit of mostly medical people and has a history of being as such for a long time. If I wanted to know what the actual medical field is dealing with day to day, I think a community with a history of being where healthcare people talk about what they're dealing with day to day is a pretty good bet.
> The curve is flattened, the goal posts have been moved out of the stadium.
How are you quantifying that? The original intent of flattening the curve was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system and here we are... overwhelming the healthcare system(s) again. A quick check of capacity of ICU beds in the SE USA shows that on average, hospitals are running 92% capacity(1). Obviously you want right-sized ICU capacity, but I doubt 92% is a comfortable margin.
I got vaccinated to protect myself, not fan of natural immunity through suffocating. 2 days pain in the shoulder, 1 day of a mild fever and affectionate feelings towards Bill Gates is a great bargain.
I wouldn't know why those who already have immunity would get the vaccine. There are studies showing that a shot post Covid-19 greatly increases the immune response agains variants, so there could be reasons.
In Europe getting the decease and beating it is considered good enough for immunity. Talk to your local authorities if you are not happy with your local practices.
You can always chase people who sneeze on the streets(hang around a hospital maybe?), get your covid, test positive, quarantine yourself for 2 weeks and hope for the best as an immuniser or a natural booster.
The vaccines on the other hand are much more practical and safer. They seem to lose some efficacy over time against getting covid but the results against getting seriously ill are very promising. Which probably means, if you get Covid-19 naturally later on, it would be a natural booster with much lower risk compared to a non-vaxxed person.
You've already posted 22 times in this discussion, including COVID denial and downplaying, hyperbole about "freedom loss", labeling someone a Nazi, sea-lioning for hospital stats, and spreading vaccine FUD. What are you trying to accomplish? Have you ever stepped back from the keyboard for a brief moment, reflected on why everything you post is grayed out, and come to a conclusion that doesn't involve groupthink and a massive conspiratorial campaign against "the truth"?
