Are you really puzzled why acute changes to people's lives get attention and response, in some cases more than arguably deeper problems that they've lived with for much longer and are harder to notice the impact of?

I see this kind of alleged puzzlement a lot here and on the internet in general. I'm not puzzled by it though, I think it's usually insincere and simply used as a cheap rhetorical device to dismiss people's feelings and reactions without actually making an argument.

For the very few people who genuinely don't understand: this is part of the human condition. People aren't "rational" according to a text book. People's happiness and feelings depend hugely on contrasting situations. Whether it is your situation now compared to your situation before, or your situation compared to your neighbor's situation. In many cases this has a bigger impact than the "absolute" situation. And the misunderstanding or disregarding of other people's feelings does not invalidate them.

I agree with this.

I think we also need to examine the notion of what is "rational".

Even if we were truly rational beings (in the sense of being something like utilitarian happiness maximisers with an omniscient view and amazing central planning), we have value functions that don't solely revolve around "be alive and make more life".

My grandmother's response to coronavirus was to continue and crack on with her life as usual. Some of her friends did the same and died. Was this irrational? Her reasoning: we weren't put on this earth to sit indoors staring at the TV.

She's still out there rolling the dice every day, it's not like this is a one-and-done. What is the value of a few months of freedom to an 80-year-old?

If you are 80 years old and vaccinated against COVID, there are a lot of other things that are more likely to kill you. So she should be out living her life.

At the outset of the pandemic it sounds like irrational behavior, knowing what I did at the time. After vaccination though and assuming she's wearing a mask in crowded areas its a pretty calculated risk and one she should be comfortable with.

> I see this kind of alleged puzzlement a lot here and on the internet in general.

Same. Easiest way to fish for upvotes.

Yeah, this is a kind of trolling/flamebaiting behavior. Even if we assume good faith, ilitirit is at best bragging that they are so galaxy-brained that they can't understand why everyone isn't making a bigger deal about Real Issues. It's not cute and it's not interesting.

It's more than that I think. It's boasting about selfishness and a lack of empathy in a way.

I also have a "side" in the general covid individualism vs collectivism debate, but I can absolutely see the issues people on the other side have. Even the ones I don't think are all that reasonable or valid, I can empathize with how others feel and understand how they could feel that way without being "bad people".

Unfortunately I see a lot of this selfish rhetoric from both sides but particularly from the collectivist side, the ones who have said we're all in this together and have asked others to make sacrifices, to summarily dismiss the concerns of others, remain totally closed to any of their opinions or concerns, and even outright making fun of them and bullying them ("poor baby"). It's really quite an astounding about face and I can't quite fathom the blatant hypocrisy and hatefulness of it.

I'd offer that many in the more collectivist mindset were shocked by the response to: incoming scientific data and recommendations, vaccinations, and vilification of certain leaders in science. So you have an escalation of rhetoric to balance that, to the point where it starts to drown out real, debatable concerns from the other side.

I know there's a bit of a chicken/egg problem here in who to point fingers at on who started what rhetoric, but I do feel strongly that the individualist response that came out of the gate was very naive and often continues to be. If people are still bringing up the initial guidance on mask wearing from early 2020, it tells me they had zero empathy or understanding of what the situation was at the time.

Sure, and the other mindset was shocked by the response to the incoming scientific data as well. Can you not empathize with that or understand it? You don't have to agree with it, but if you believe they must be "bad people" or have zero empathy to hold those views, then it may not be them who have the empathy deficiency.

The policies and government responses to the pandemic is not "science". They say it's science or evidence based, which is fine it takes that into account. But the actual policies and tradeoffs themselves are not. You could say that some restrictions and medical coercion placed on people would prevent 10,000 deaths. But even if that was true, the tradeoff is not "science". Somebody else could call you a hateful grandma killing science denier for your preference and say they would rather forcefully isolate every person and prevent all movement or travel and save 20,000 because health systems are still collapsing under your scheme.

Because those other things haven't been dealt with via massive overbearing state intrusions.

Climate change is a far far graver threat than coronavirus.

But we're not really doing anything about that. By contrast, it was illegal for people in the UK to visit their friends and family for six months and an enormous propaganda campaign was launched which ensured that even without policing this people were convinced into dismantling society.

That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

If we banned fast food it'd be annoying and I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't think we should do it, but it would have a massive impact on obesity rates and add a bunch of quality adjusted life years to the country.

But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

I often wonder if people have already forgotten just how hilariously ridiculous 2020 was.

Not downplaying covid, but diarrhea kills 10M+ people globally. I also find turning a blind eye to other important topics and media laser-focus on covid a bit upsetting. But also understanding how media is profiting from it. Further on that, big pharma lobby is huge on boosters for young people. There is very little benefits for boosters for under 40's. You are talking a 0.1% decrease of hospitalization (from 0.2%). Countries like Spain didn't even roll them out until very recently for this reason (although last October they said they will not roll it out at all for under 30s).

I figure it's a loss aversion thing.

Coronavirus is new and therefore feels like a loss we can revert, whereas solving diarrhea or other issues would feel like a gain.

It's irrational but then, we be meat bags innit.

> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

This idea that young people are at near zero risk is not true. Pro athletes in their prime have gotten covid and suffered terrible side effects. Jayson Tatum is 23 and needed an inhaler after getting covid because he couldn't keep his wind. Tom Sweeney got myocarditis and had to end his football season early. Several young MMA fighters and pro wrestlers have nearly died. These are all people in their fitness prime.

More young people die or are horribly injured in the years of "normal" living than would have died or suffered long term consequences from covid. Indeed the typical death spike in young people from normal risk taking was essentially removed by keeping them locked away.

Covid can and does have consequences for everyone. Look at the charts for actual rates and tell me with a straight face any healthy 20 year old needed to have their freedoms removed for that level of risk.

Given that we all live together and can be carriers and spreaders even if we are not ourselves individually impacted, it should be acceptable that regardless of age a person/family stay isolated or take measures to distance themselves and reduce the chances of inhaling or exhaling a virus. Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

> Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

It absolutely is taking away freedom. It is also taking away opportunity, damaging mental health, and stunting progression.

The trade off being made is that young people suffered so the old would die slightly later. I was fine, I had it easy, I am not young. The pretence that we are all doing this for the "greater good" is wild. The Quality Adjusted Life Year outcome from most lockdowns was negative imo. It is just coincidence that the active voting population was the segment of society being prioritised eh?

Ah, I should have pointed out that I’m neither a US citizen nor a current resident. In many other parts of the world, we tend to have a different view of collaboration.

I am also not from the US, my views are not merely a representation of a weird pocket of the world you can just dismiss with a smug self satisfaction...

Well, in many parts of the world, we have followed safe distancing and other protocols without complaints about freedoms being taken away.

Near zero is not zero, I agree.

> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

How is Covid-19 minor?

"In the grand scheme of things" contains things like 3C above pre-industrial if we keep burning shit.

I wouldn’t call losing close to 1% of the population (or more if fully unchecked and without health care capacity) minor. That’s pretty damn major.

Multiple things can be bad all at the same time and at different scales without making one of them minor.

Here in my region of Spain overall deaths were lower than in a normal year. Media attention is so skewed towards covid it's almost impossible to even think of anything else. Heck, even googling 'list of cases of deaths globally' directly redirects to covid-related hits. On the first two pages there isn't anything that's not covid. I think this has to stop.

So far we've lost about 0.3% of the US population. That's a major public health crisis but nowhere near 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Nice link. I appreciate that page, actually. Hadn't seen it.

However, this is with all of the interventions, plus vaccines in. It's with the curve flattened as much as all of the interventions allowed.

What you don't have is the counterfactual of what would have happened with no intervention of a highly contagious air-borne virus, and a matching health care collapse. In the beginning we were closer to 1% and higher in some places. This is US stats, where people have access to higher quality healthcare than much of the world (and vaccines), plus mixed interventions (since local/state dictated much of that).

We were never higher than a 1% fatality rate in any place. The high rates that some people estimated early in the pandemic were due to garbage data from very limited testing of asymptomatic cases. The CDC did a more thorough analysis and estimated a 0.6% infection fatality rate back when no one was vaccinated.

Wasn’t that before Delta and Onicron?

Also before vaccination and prior infection. Either or both of those mean that the risk involved with catching Delta or Omicron is generally far lower than it would have been had they just "appeared" in March 2020.

Please tell me the way in which a virus that swept the globe and killed nearly 6 million people (and those are just the deaths we counted) in 2 years is ‘minor in the scheme of things.’

<0.1% of the population in 2 years is quite minor in the context of the response in my view.

It justifies things like washing your hands and getting vaccinated.

It doesn't justify lockdowns and things like making it illegal for family members to visit each other. That's a net loss on all of society.

So what's the line?? Is it 10 million? 1% of the human population? If so, why should it be 1% and not 0.1%? Because it seems more significant?

Depends on the situation.

If we're faced with a situation in which we can collectively give up 1% of our lives to save 5%, I'd say that's worth mandating.

1% for 2%, I'd grit my teeth and say we need pretty solid data on that 2%.

1% for 1%, nah.

I don't think coronavirus was even close to that, if you just look at the full lockdown and the reduced ones (e.in the UK and ignore all of the associated mitigations, that was ~1% of our collective lifespan given up. Did it save 1% of people?

I don't think it was even close. And that's not even taking into account opportunity cost. Most of the 'savings' here comes from the fact that by locking down you're also barricading the vulnerable away.

On the outset I think the ability for it to spread and cause general mayhem in the population was good enough reason to shut things down. The main cause for concern was overwhelming emergency systems. We need to remember that death is only one statistic. You would still visit the hospital as an alive, infected individual and put a strain on that system even when you fully recover and go home.

Or to put it another way, even if the virus was not deadly at all, but it could take people out for a few weeks at a time, that would be reason enough to impose mask mandates, get a vaccine rolled out, tell people to work from home for awhile. Especially if people needed hospital services.

One of those things is not like the others.

Offering people a vaccine is an obvious win. The only way in which it could not be is if the virus were so mild that the R&D and distribution cost weren't worth it. That's obviously not the case for coronavirus.

The other things are just authoritarian desires that you're not able to even quantify.

The fact that you'd delete my career and social bonds for the sake of a theoretical virus that might just put people in bed for a while means this discussion is over, I don't engage with terrorists, good luck.

Overreaction there for sure

This is the main issue I have had with the response to the pandemic. Covid is not the first time in modern history we have had a contagious virus that kills people regularly (see: flu). So pre-Covid, everyone was gambling that their non-social distancing behaviors would kill someone through spreading a contagious disease. The risk was very small but clearly non-zero, and members of the public clearly decided en masse that going about their normal lives was more valuable than that increased risk of killing someone with the flu.

Now comes covid and people who happily accepted the risk of flu exposure/spread pretend that value judgement has never been made before and it is gauche to even talk about it. At some point it is a reasonable possibility that the threat of covid in terms of death and disease will be equal to or less than the threat of flu. It's difficult to predict exactly what that number is but it is at least theoretically quantifiable number. What's the point of maintaining restrictions at that point when the known value system of the public accepts that level of risk?

That number should be talked about, and people should stop pretending that weighting convenience and other factors against numbers of deaths is a sociopathic thing to do. Everyone has been doing it long before covid.

It goes beyond that.

We are constantly gambling all of the time that we might have some external effect on the world, it's the human condition.

Generally we distinguish between overtly dangerous behaviours that could have easily been mitigated (e.g. drinking ten pints and going out for a drive), and behaviours that happen to be kind of a little bit dangerous but aren't explicitly malicious (e.g. just driving under normal circumstances).

The difference here with coronavirus is that for whatever reason, some people decided to apply a completely unreasonable standard of assuming that anything anyone did ever was a malicious act, which is completely incompatible with civilization. If we didn't have all of the exceptions for the proles (sorry, "essential workers"), society would have completely fallen apart.

The arbitrary exceptions are pretty nice. In an industry I am aware of, people absolutely have to be onsite and also need to eat lunch. When lunch is being eaten in the cafeteria, you got a bunch of maskless people in the same room spread out at least six feet. It's been long established that the virus, particularly the omicron variant, easily spreads at distance.

But those six feet, when blessed by corporate, make all the difference.

ETA

I do take the virus seriously, am vaxxed, and actually do a good job of social distancing, unlike many of my peers who preach the seriousness of the disease and yet engage in behaviors that are high risk in terms of transmission. Level of concern about the virus and belief in public health authority narrative are orthogonal dimensions.

If you're sitting down you can't get coronavirus though. It only travels above 4ft.

Unless you're on a plane. Something to do with the low ceilings I guess.

Personally I'm warming up to where we assume COVID is endemic and we resume most of our older tendencies. Face masks probably become more normal on public transit. But I do agree there's a number where the virus remains but we're comfortable with it.

The whole idea originally was that the virus could be more or less deadly than we knew and would lock up hospital services. Even with this less deadly variant, the hospital bed shortage is a reality for many communities, which has downstream effects.

Re: prepping for known unknowns.

That valuation framework has also existed historically in terms of the periodic low-key freakouts about bird flu, swine flu, etc. Also the periodic filling of hospitals during flu season (though, it has been stated here and elsewhere that hospitals filling up is frequently just a feature of how the healthcare system is run).

I think there would be a lot more useful debate if 1) people admitted that there is nothing truly unique in kind about the current situation (just degree) and 2) the "return to normal number," however that number is defined, is a real thing. The folks more concerned about the virus could advocate for more stringent constraints on reopening and vice versa. But people would at least be using a common framework that's grounded in the reality that people are willing to live with a certain amount of risk without doing much about it.

I think we'd have a lot more rationality in politics if we didn't have this "fear" that basically some people just want to see the world change forever.

I'm forced to push harder than I actually want to in order to counteract the contingent of oddball "but 2019 was bad, I had to go outside, never go back pls" people.

no idea what you're even talking about anymore

I have heard this argument so many times now. It’s so easy for someone to say stuff like this in hindsight.

But on day zero, no one knew what this “flu” really was and what it was capable of. What we knew at the time was the infection rate was accelerating globally.

You didn’t have any evidence to weight until now. The response that we took was right given limited information.

> Yes, washing hands help against bacteria and other some types of viral infection including COVID19.

This is pure conjecture, at least when you try to apply it to covid. There is no evidence that has linked hand-washing to a lesser incidence of sars-cov-2 infection. There isn't even a single case definitvely linked to a fomite even 2 years later, afaik. From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air.

In the context of covid, hand washing is just a ritual that lowers your anxiety and gives you a sense of control over the randomness of the world, much like rain dances or haruspicy were for ancient people.

> From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air.

SARS is airborne, not just droplet-borne. https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/indoor-air-and-coronavirus-c...

> What am I missing? What is it that people don't understand about the situation? Why are people so upset about this, but not upset about things that are arguably more detrimental to the livelihood of the entire human race?

Even though the facts are mostly true and "known", most people are not fully aware of them. As of today, people are still trying to push mandates (and passports), even though it is clear that vaccines will not end the pandemic. The media and politicians have done A LOT to ideologize the vaccines, instead of decribing them as what they are: a tool for mitigating personal risk. The virus itself never had any ideology at all.

Inaccurate preconceptions stick in people's minds and it will take a while until public opinion will reasonably will be in line with science again. They need to peel off all that ideology first.

So… there was hope vaccines could stop the pandemic, but they only help a lot to reduce number of hospitalizations and deaths, so now you’re anti vaccines. And people won’t trust science ever again?

I’m sorry but that doesn’t make any sense. All I’m hearing is some people trying to argue their ways into being irresponsible and selfish. Should governments let hospitals get overrun without even trying to take any measures? Ok we get it, your freedom is more important than other people’s health. But freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want. If your "freedom" threatens the lives of other people, I’d say it’s egoistic behaviors disguised as freedom.

> If your "freedom" threatens the lives of other people, I’d say it’s egoistic behaviors disguised as freedom.

This has been debunked a long time ago. As I said: SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a tool for mitigating personal risk, but not against the spread of the virus in the society. This is clearly shown by the Covid-rates in tripple-vaccinated people. Not taking the vaccine isn't any more egoistic than smoking, being obese, driving a motorbike, eating unhealthy, not supplementing vitamin D or anything else that increases your risk of illness. Not taking the vaccine also does not automatically translate into becoming hospitalized with severe Covid. A healhy young person with a functioning immune system has a very low risk of getting hospitalized because of Covid.

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine mandates are intellectually and morally dead. This is also evidenced by my own and my wife's case: Two doses of pfizer, then infected by a person who was tripple-vaccinated and we both had symptomatic Covid that wasn't mild by any means.

"Not taking the vaccine isn't any more egoistic than smoking, being obese, driving a motorbike, eating unhealthy, not supplementing vitamin D or anything else that increases your risk of illness"

I'm sorry but once again, hospitals aren't currently overrun by illnesses due to smokers, obese, etc. They are overrun by people with severe Covid cases, with significantly more unvaccinated people than vaccinated people.

"Not taking the vaccine also does not automatically translate into becoming hospitalized with severe Covid" Of course, it just tends to reduce the severity of covid cases. Which is the point, because, you remember, it reduces hospitalizations so that health services can remain functional?

"This is also evidenced by my own and my wife's case: Two doses of pfizer, then infected by a person who was tripple-vaccinated and we both had symptomatic Covid that wasn't mild by any means." Why aren't you considering the possibility that your not-mild covid could have been worse if you weren't vaccinated? I don't see your case as an evidence for anything, really. [Edit: Apart from the fact that covid vaccines don't make one immune, especially with variants. The point was that they still help significantly with case severity]

> I'm sorry but once again, hospitals aren't currently overrun by illnesses due to smokers, obese, etc. They are overrun by people with severe Covid cases, with significantly more unvaccinated people than vaccinated people.

In my country, Germany, the hospitals are not overrun because of Covid. The Covid share of patients at the top of the most deadly wave was 5%. What actually happens in the health care sector is massive mismanagement. Not a good reason to mandate vaccines, I think. Instead invest in the healthcare sector and pay the workers appropriately.

> Why aren't you considering the possibility that your not-mild covid could have been worse if you weren't vaccinated?

Why aren't you considering that I did consider that and came to the conclusion that there is no way in the world to tell if that is true. Omicron was said to be generally milder after all.

What did intensely lower the severity of the disease without the slightest doubt from my side was a massive vitamin and minerals booster package that we started a few days in. I know, n=2, so nobody will believe me, but for those who are interested and are in a similar situation:

Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, also melatonine for sleeping and R-alpha-lipoic acid and Q10 against brain fog and neurologic symptoms, as well as probiotics for general vitality and against the Omicron constipation.

"What did intensely lower the severity of the disease without the slightest doubt from my side". Hmmm I don't see how you can be so sure that something you took is the cause for getting better. You can get better for a lot of reasons, one being your immune system winning the battle on its own. It's a common misconception that getting better after taking some medicine proves it works. To prove a medicine works, we have to go through those double-blind clinical trials.

Anyway, you're suggesting that instead of vaccines, omicron could be dealt with with Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, melatonine, R-alpha-lipoic acid, Q10, and probiotics. That sounds a lot of things compared to 1 or 2 vaccine shots per years. So you say you prefer a combination of lots of medicines with potential side effects, plus it's hard to know how they could interfere. Sounds weird if your reason for not wanting vaccine is the side effects, as there is a lot of data for the vaccine thanks to clinical trials, as opposed to custom combinations of vitamines, minerals, probiotics, and Q10? what's that?

Sounds like you see anything coming "from the elites" as dangerous and dishonest, whereas anything coming from "the people", the "common sense" is reliable and safe. I guess these discussions are deeply about "trusting official institutions" vs "trusting random people claims". There's no convincing anyone if the premises are that the goal of official institutions is to conspire against the people for the benefit of the powerful. And even if it was true, 1) I'm not sure how getting people vaccinated benefits the powerful vs other medicines, 2) it doesn't mean random people claims are correct. It seems you'd believe anything as long as it's opposed to official claims about vaccines. It's a binary view: either one trusts official institutions and everything he say is wrong, either one is against official institutions claims and everything he say is right.

I tend to trust official institutions more than random people, as it's easier to lie/be wrong when you're not accountable for anything.

> Anyway, you're suggesting that instead of vaccines, omicron could be dealt with with Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, melatonine, R-alpha-lipoic acid, Q10, and probiotics. That sounds a lot of things compared to 1 or 2 vaccine shots per years.

This is a false dichotomy, because you can be vaccinated and still get symptomatic or even severe Covid. Didn't I mention that I was vaccinated? Get vaccinated, I recommend it. Just don't force anyone else to get vaccinated.

What I am suggesting is that you can be vaccinated and still need something else on top of that in order to recover. Pfizer has a new pill, maybe you'd prefer that.

I also would not call my assortment random or "medicine". I am not advising you to take it against Covid, but I am sharing my experience with it. All substances that I mention are part of a healthy human body and there is a ton of science that backs up their critical roles in bodily functions and the immune system. There just haven't been huge clinical trials that prove that they can cUrE COvId.

I don't think any clinical trials claimed they would "cUrE COvId" for sure. IIRC they showed more than 70+% efficiency in preventing infections, so it seemed like our best weapon against covid. People then hoped it could end the pandemic, and exaggerated claims have been made by a lot of people, I guess, and maybe some governments. The clinical trials didn't claimed that.

While the scientific data has been clear (absolute risk reduction of vaccines about 1% for the early strains of the virus) the public discourse seems totally detached from the science. People are still saying things like "I'd rather get the jab instead of Covid.", which shows that they are not aware of the possibility that they can still get Covid. I think this is the result of a massive bias in the media that did not allow even mentioning the slightest fact that makes the vaccines seem not so awesome.

And we haven't even started to talk about the myocarditis risk for young males.

78% of people dying from COVID have at least 4 pre-existing conditions and one of those is almost always obesity.

The people supposedly being blocked by COVID patients are largely people who have pre-existing conditions from smoking, eating unhealthily, not exercising, being obese, taking stupid risks, etc

At best you have one stupid group blocking another stupid group.

Passing new laws to forbid smoking, eating too much, not doing enough exercised, etc. would be so much more restrictive, compared to taking few vaccine shots and wearing a mask in some places. Vaccines help reducing hospitalizations for all these groups at once, right?

If a person chooses not to be vaccinated, they have a tiny chance to go to the hospital (polls show that almost HALF of democrats believe 50% of covid patients are hospitalized when it's actually 1-5%). If a person is fat, there's a 100% guarantee that it will land them at the doctor for any number of complications.

Furthermore, once COVID is dealt with, that person isn't going back to the hospital while the fat person will be going back over and over again. The tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars this costs are all foisted onto healthy people. Why should healthy people who worked hard to keep healthy be forced to pay for unhealthy people who lived a life of gluttony and sloth?

Perhaps more directly to the point, all the food driving fatness could be going to kids dying of malnutrition in other parts of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend those hundreds of thousands of dollars to send that food overseas to keep kids from starving rather than paying for someone's eating addiction.

I don't know how to solve obesity, I'm not trying to. But back to the current situation, vaccines are a practical way to help keeping health services functional. It doesn't solve other health issues, and is much less restrictive that going after smoking, eating, alcohol, under-exercised people, etc.

I'm not sure what are you suggesting. Applying all those restrictions? People are already barely accepting current restrictions. Or do you mean since we can't have all those restrictions, we must have none?

Attempts to solve obesity are met with the same objections around freedom of choice. And honestly any attempt to do anything about it would be so much more complicated than saying "get this shot", which is already fairly complicated to begin with.

So a vaccinated, fat, smoking and drinking motorcyclist does more for the health sector than a slim yoga practitioner and health food enthusiast who decides against vaccination? What could go wrong?

So... I don't understand if you think there are too much restrictions due to covid, or not enough?

what are you suggesting? Restrict eating, smoking, drinking, motorcycling, force people to exercise?

Or are you suggesting that since we can't restrict all these things, we should restrict nothing?

I still fail to see how 2 vaccine shots a year compares to restricting what you're allowed to eat, smoke, drink, drive, and force exercise.

Depends. If you want a social-credit-score-like system like in China, then more restrictions are great, because obviously once you implement restrictions, you also need to document them and make sure that everyone complies. If such a dystopia does not sound good, keep them to an absolute minimum.

Why do seat belt laws exist?

Seat belts != vaccines.

Seat belts can be taken off after use.

Vaccines cannot be scraped out of the body again.

Masks vs. seat belts is a better comparison.

Why would you make someone do something that doesn't impact others?

Just wait until the general public finds out about the evolutionary/ selective pressures caused by a severity-reducing but non-sterilizing vaccine.

The general public won't "trust the science" ever again.

> The general public won't "trust the science" ever again.

What does "trust the science" even mean? For many people it seems to mean, trusting what one selected scientist says. For others what the news have to say about science and for others it means analyzing the data themselves.

I think that science generally benefits from critical thinking. Suppressing critical thinking seemed to be a recurring scheme of this pandemic.

If critical thinking here is a euphemism for loudly objecting to published scientific findings, which I suspect it is, then I disagree.

What about when the CDC publishes an article with a title like this? https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

Critical thinking would mean asking how could a vaccine that simulates part of the virus provide better immunity than recovering from the real thing?

Turns out, it doesn't. But the latest release doesn't have a catchy sound bite for a title. The results are buried in the summary: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

The same goes with masks back in 2020. While officials were announcing that masks may actually be detrimental for the average person, hospitals were screaming for more PPE. Clearly, something wasn't adding up. As it turns out, that was a lie.

I'm vaccinated, I was a big supporter of lockdowns at the beginning of all of this, but "trust the science" is, ironically, becoming its own religion to some people and I find it repulsive. Especially when it has been shown time and again that science can be wrong and that scientists have no problems with telling noble lies.

What about lougly objecting to a biased interpretation of published scientific findings? Of course that requires critical thinking.

Trusting the science just means trusting the government's and Big Pharma's accepted interpretation.

For some reason this has become a political issue rather than a health issue. At the moment Americans are living in an extremely toxic environment where everything is either right or left. Not right or wrong.

I don't think it's about education specifically on vaccines on the immune system. I've never been interested in biology. Nor in elementary neither in high school. Actually I pretty much disliked the topic. It was boring, so the information didn't stick and I never liked the process of learning. (Nor did I have to learn anything I was really interested in before going to university. Maybe except for history.)

However, since I did learn how science and discovery worked and I always loved systems and understanding how they work, once it became an important topic, I couldn't stop reading up on it and had a lot of a-ha! moments. (Partly because of not learning this in high school, I have to admit.)

So not knowing is not the problem. Actually no person on Earth knows everything. Not even the basics. And sometimes, when you listen to people who are in denial, some of them actually do know the basics. (Just think of the antivaxxer doctors...) It's more about not willing to admit the situation. It's also about not knowing what they don't know. Now that's one heck of an important lesson I was taught by my excellent physics teacher in high school. He had this saying "knowledge begins with knowing what you don't know" (or knowing/being aware of your lack of knowledge). Which is likely a way of paraphrasing Socrates.

And I see a lot of people are just unaware of this. (Yes, Dunning-Kruger.) More educated and more intelligent people fall for this less often probably, but still some of them do, big time. They'll think that they cannot be wrong exactly because they are smart and are usually right. Or, at least this is how they seem to explain it to themselves. But it's simply a lack of self-reflection and humility and a willingness to accept inconvenient consequences.

I'm not doubting this statement, but just am curious about the physiological machinations of it, how does a vaccine (especially one designed for a different mutation) help prevent the severe symptoms of the disease? Like whats going on in the body to make that happen?

Vaccine strengthens your immune response.

You get infected.

Your body is better able to slow the rapid multiplication of the virus in your body.

You have less virus fucking up your insides and thus are less sick.

Quick answer is the last 3 paragraphs.

When your body responds to a virus, it creates many kinds of antibodies against its many constituent components. This is why new CDC studies show that natural immunity is far better than the vaccine which creates ONE antibody against one part of the virus (the spike protein).

A virus can mutate in a lot of ways, but usually not at the same time. If your body has 50 different antibodies against different parts of Delta, when Omicron comes along with a bunch of changes, you'll get sick while your body develops additional antibodies, but your body will still keep the disease from multiplying too quickly with the antibodies that still work (or partially work).

The vaccines force the creation of a specific spike protein either through messenger RNA (pfizer/moderna) or through infection with a different virus (Johnson & Johnson -- for the record, the only two other vaccines like this were emergency vaccines approved for ebola in 2016 and 2019) or a more recent one that delivers attenuated virus (but was denied by the FDA because they "had enough vaccines").

Your body sees a massive jump in these spike proteins and marshals a big immune response that floods your system with antibodies against this protein (myocarditis and some other symptoms are believed to be caused by these antibodies attacking your body's very similar ACE2 receptors). When you catch the disease with all these antibodies flooding your system, they can slow the disease down while your body creates the rest of the antibodies to finish the disease off.

Delta had a moderately different spike protein, but the antibodies against the original spike still seem to work at reduced effectiveness which is why so many vaccinated people caught delta. Omicron has an even more different protein that almost completely evades the antibodies which is why everyone is catching it.

So why does the vaccine reduce death?

I'll say that "with covid" and "from covid" are a real thing (even the great Dr. Fauci has said this on national TV). Not being boosted is also sufficient to get you on the unvaxxed list (among other things). Politics and political pressure on places like the CDC further muddy the waters.

That aside, exponential growth is important here. If you are unvaccinated (and aren't one of the 10-15% of people who somehow already have partial immunity), the virus enters your body and begins multiplying. If you have 1,000 viruses in the droplet, they invade cells and become (for example), 10,000 and then 100,000 and then 1M within just three doublings.

Now, let's say that the antibodies are just 20% effective. Only 800 viruses can invade creating 8,000 copies. Of those, only 6,400 survive creating 64,000 viruses. On our third round, only 51,200 are left creating 512,000 viruses.

After 3 rounds, the vaccinated person has HALF the viruses in their system. They'll still have symptoms, but they will be nowhere as severe. This gives your body a lot more time to create the rest of the necessary antibodies and fight off the disease and prevent severe reactions or death.

People get up in ARMS about banning peanuts. This is the world.

Just mass hysteria, encouraged by those that feel they can derive by benefit from it, be it increased attention or more political power, anything really. Fairly typical situation actually, maybe even the default state of the human race.

What are the more detrimental things you had in mind?

I’d suggest you’ve also overstepped re “health care systems have collapsed”, especially as it pertains to the pandemic.

Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions. Western Australia has had almost negligible covid-related illness and yet it’s healthcare system is still in a precarious state re load. Victoria only announced a code brown and cancelling/rescheduling of elective surgeries a month ago. Meanwhile over the larger two year time horizon our system has apparently collapsed I’ve had a shoulder reconstruction and my wife has two separate surgeries on each of her hands.

Our healthcare system is just a mess with unfortunate incentives around what is given priority. The pandemic is just a convenient cover for what is an extended period of under investment and a lack of resources. The same stories about delays in elective surgeries and people waiting years for hip replacements have themselves been central to the narrative even before the pandemic.

> Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions.

You make that sound like a good idea. Shouldn't there be a buffer in the first place? How can a healthcare system cope with other cases of sudden influx of patients when there was no way to vaccinate against that, such as natural disasters?

US has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people. Cuba has almost 6 doctors per 1,000 people (more than almost any 1st world country).

These doctors are completely strapped for advanced medical equipment, but they have sufficient resources for preventative care. If Cuba's doctors saw 12 patients per day, they would see every person in the country every 2 weeks.

This (plus reducing obesity) goes a long way toward solving the problem. Cuba has problems where advanced treatment is needed, but succeeds at catching disease early and encouraging people to solve lifestyle problems before they cause damage.

The US needs to DOUBLE its medical doctor graduation rates just to keep up with countries like Austria.

How does this happen? In the 50's, your doctor spent 1-2 years doing prerequisites then 4 years in medical school and 1 year of internship before setting up a general practice. Today, they need 4-5 years for their BS degree then 4 years of med school, then 1 year of internship, then 3 more years of family medicine residency.

It takes 13 years just to be able to diagnose the sniffles or send you on to a specialist. Even a nurse practitioner takes 4-5 years for their BSN then another 3-4 years for their MSN which is still longer than the doctors people saw in times past. Despite this, patient outcome is virtually unchanged.

This credential inflation costs valuable years that could be spent treating patients and accrues debt that is then passed along to patients as higher costs. Because insurance companies profit on a percentage of income, the magnify those costs even more.

What happens if you change this back to how it was?

Loads of doctors get mad because all their schooling becomes pointless. When supply doubles, their wages go down too. What do you do with all the nurse practitioners who have more education and experience than the doctors?

The rest of the country would benefit, but the people most involved have more to lose and a much stronger reason to push for the status quo (not to mention much more money to spend in lobbying).

That's hardly a contradiction. The vaccine may help prevent overwhelming health services (prolong the time until collapse, decrease the overall intensity of the collapse) but not be successful at it. Whether any given health care system collapses depends on the quality of the system itself, your definition of collapse, the vaccination rate, the makeup of the population, non pharmaceutical interventions in place, the season, and so on and and so on.

GP never said vaccines prevent the collapse, they said they help, i.e. reduce deaths and the pressure on the health care system. Unfortunately they can't reduce it enough to prevent an overload.

Yes, elective (i.e. 'optional') procedures have been postponed all around the world. Due to COVID putting an extra burden on the health care system. That's what you can decrease with vaccines... And if you want to figure out (i.e. measure) if vaccines help with this, or work in general, then it's not enough to look at just a binary endpoint: "did it collapse or not". But we have very detailed and very good quality data. We do know how much vaccines reduce the hospitalization rates. There's no need and no point arguing against it. Especially not in superficial comments. (Of course, everybody is welcome to publish their own data analysis if they think they can disprove what has been published before, but whoever doesn't do the said analysis should just stick with what has been published and listen to those who actually read those publications.)

Israel does not have anywhere close to 90%+ vaccination rate. They have a large subpopulation of refuseniks.

No, I mean that even in the above 60 cohort, Israel is not above 90% vaccinated. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-omicron-in-isra...

Just over 58% of those eligible to be vaccinated in Israel are fully vaccinated by the Israeli definition, and 67% of those eligible to be vaccinated have received at least two doses. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/once-a-world-leader-isra...

> I'll hold my breath for someone to flag out right lies on here.

Feel free to flag your own comment if that's what you really want.

The meaning of "two doses" hasn't changed.

Israel is only about 60% fully vaccinated.

This is misinformation.

Of the population that's eligible for vaccination 95% have had two shots.