And? Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore?
If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative.
We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.
Sure if you got sick and crawled into a ditch and died then more power to you.
Instead you would end up going to a hospital and wasting a bunch of peoples time, and in the event your dumbass dies from it - some poor man/woman has to hold your hand while you gurgle out your deathrattle.
Being selfish with your own life in a society never just affects you. That's why it's a society. Someone will always have to clean up your shit when you make poor decisions with your life.
So are we going to outlaw being selfish? People waste hospital time and resources all the time with a plethora of things other than covid. Should we take away their agency so they can't do that anymore?
There are not many comparable cases, where the selfish behavior gives a very measurable reinvigoration to a global pandemic for which the longer it persists the greater the risk that it will spawn a variant that puts us back to step 1 - or worse.
No we will not. But if you get close to my family that is fragile and may dire if they catch the virus then I will respond with the same selfish force as you.
That is physically harm you to make sure you die in a safe place, not in my yard
Sounds fair.
("you" of course means "the unvaccinated who use their freedom to hurt others")
Someone driving under influence who has an accident is committing an attempt of a murder, or a murder if there are victims.
There are all kind of possible accidents, DUI is the kind where someone decides that they take the risk of other lives. Similar to the recent accident in Italy where a ski lift was purposely not maintained to avoid stopping it. They knew that they are risking someone's life.
With this said there are two cases:
- the one when someone drives under DUI and I have to kill him to avoid a possible direct accident towards me or my family (by pushing his car from a cliff or something). I would nit hesitate.
- after the accident. I am for a death sentence for specific cases where it is a matter of getting rid of human trash (rapes, murders with premeditation, paedophilia, ...). In that case it is a matter of social hygiene. In the case of DUI I am at the edge, with the possibility of someone to spend years helping the society to try to redeem
Because your risk becomes everyones risk. The vaccine is becoming less and less effective against variants and people talk as if dying or hospitalizations is the only bad outcome. Long term health problems from even 'mild' COVID infections is a thing and the efficacy of vaccines at preventing that is not clear.
So getting a vaccine does not make the vaccinated isolated from the risks the unvaccinated choose. Your choices affect what I can do and the risks to my health.
> Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore?
What do you mean "anymore"? Collective rule to fight contagious disease is literally as old as civilization. There are rules for it in the Old Testament.
Does this also imply that you will be responsible for the cost of your own choices, and that you will not infect anyone else and not interact with the public?
If I infect another unvaccinated person... so what? They made their choice as well. The vaccine is widely available enough now that anyone that doesn't have it chose not to get it (or they have an exceedingly rare medical reason)
The vast majority of the world does not have effective mRNA-type vaccines, and have outbreaks following mass vaccination of ineffective ones (and in some cases, fraudulent locals use saline). Kids cannot receive it yet, as much as they want to, and there are numerous parents explicitly refusing their kids the consent to be vaccinated. The more spread, the more dice get rolled on creating further deficiencies in vaccination success.
Honestly, my opinion - if everyone could be vaccinated and the vaccine was always 100% effective 100% of the time without exception, I would not care at all about "individual choice" or "I don't want to take it", I would not care about the extra mutations being created, I would not care about being next to an unvaccinated individual at all.
They were relatively rare, until Delta. Kids are also germ factories that will wipe it on everything and anything.
I'll point out that when we talk about how "oh it'll only be bad if you have comorbidities too", I'm pretty sure more than 75% of the US qualifies as having those. I'm not paranoid by any means, and I don't want vaccine apps or centralised databases to exist (anonymously signed timestamped attestations maybe), but the vaccines are not 100%, and my risk model dislikes being stuck next to someone dumping out virions for over 8 hours a day with recirculating air.
[side note: I've also worked retail in the past and that taught me to never trust the general public, and that some idiot parent absolutely will bring a kid in with measles, norovirus, and smallpox in at the same time while lying about how they're healthy so they don't get charged a $10 cancellation fee.]
> Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore?
Because we're going to run out of room in the hospitals and we all carry the cost of treating the problem. And the doctors and nurses that we have are going to be pushed to the breaking point.
In other words because "we live in a society".
Your right to do whatever the hell you want with your life, no matter how stupid, ends once the health care system starts to fall over (again).
You aren't going to run out of room in hospitals, for goodness sake. That was debunked last year. Countries that didn't panic, don't have dysfunctional healthcare systems, and didn't make lots of healthcare workers stay away from work, were fine.
You get headlines like that in many years, newspapers love "hospital at brink of collapse" stories. Look at the archives of the last 10 years and you'll find it's a common theme. There are several tricks that can be used to generate them, for example in most hospitals ICU is a flexible designation and ICU capacity can be increased or lowered. It's inefficient to have empty ICU beds, so those units are very often "full" but it doesn't mean much.
Look at places like Sweden (fewest ICU beds in the EU, not overloaded), or Switzerland (one of the best staffed systems, also not overloaded). There are problems when bad management makes problems, as in any enterprise, which newspapers love to find, and sometimes they invent problems that don't really exist (finding a doctor who will say they're tired/burnt out/need money is the easiest thing in the world).
That's why it's better to look at the stats and dig into the system level causes of load issues, as you would with any IT system.
As for avoided: no, none of the measures implemented have had any impact. You can find proof of this in many forms, but the simplest is to look at places like the UK. They just removed a whole boatload of restrictions in the form of "freedom day" and cases fell off a cliff. Experts were left baffled because they had all been predicting a huge surge, although people who were actually looking at the data weren't baffled at all: the fall was predictable given the shape of the same wave in other countries + the assumption that restrictions were having no effect.
Take a look at the Swiss hospital stats. Many countries don't provide hospitalization stats regularly, keep them secret, or corrupt them in various ways, for example in the UK there was a blowup just a few days ago because it turned out over half of all COVID hospitalizations appeared to be catching COVID in the hospital itself meaning those stats were giving an inflated impression of hospital load. These numbers were leaked despite their importance to understanding the severity of the epidemic. But the Swiss stats are open and public.
As you can see, it never got above ~80% utilization, even though Switzerland's second wave peaked many weeks before restrictions were re-imposed. The Swiss system is well funded, but it's not an alien planet. If they can do it any developed country can. Also remember that lots of places built emergency hospitals. They were invariably never used.
Sweden started the pandemic with the lowest ICU capacity in the EU yet their age adjusted mortality only reached the same level as in 2012 - not even a "once in a decade" level problem.
> "over half of all COVID hospitalizations appeared to be catching COVID in the hospital itself"
That isn't factual.
Half of COVID hospitalizations were diagnosed with COVID after admission.
The shitty newspaper article then spread the impression that people were going into the hospital for a broken leg and contracting COVID and counted as COVID hospitalizations with exactly zero proof.
The alternative explanation is that people show up at the hospital with strokes and heart attacks and are tested and show COVID positive and probably really are COVID hospital admissions due to COVID-caused thrombosis Particularly since thrombosis affects more younger people who are now making up the majority of unvaccinated hospital admissions. 40 year olds who get the sniffles and think its just a cold, then throw a clot and get admitted or just die has been happening from the very start of this.
Not even going to waste my time on your WhatAboutTheSwissHospitalDataism, I have work to do and don't have hours to spend today to figure out why you're wrong.
People are tested before admission and then tested after admission. The figures are to do with the latter. People who turn up at hospital because they're dying of COVID don't get counted in the latter. Regardless, your alternative explanation is no more factually based than the obvious, simple explanation.
Regardless, I can see you already have your conclusion and will stick to it. So be it.
Your risk (really, your blast radius) is coupled with your broader society's risk. This has always been the case; I suspect that with increasing population density, this is unavoidable.
ETA: not all unvaccinated are by choice. This is not now and never has been purely an issue of choice.
> And? Why aren't people allowed to take risks anymore?
Because they are taking risks with other people's lives, if they spread it. I'm not sure why this is so hard to factor in - if you get Covid, you are more likely to give it to someone else.
If people take the risk, they should also be responsible (collectively, since we apparently can't do tracing very well) for the results. That means they cover the financial costs, and (in my more extreme moments), I think they should face charges of negligence where we can directly attribute to a source.
Does this rule also apply to people that drive to work for jobs they can easily perform from home? Aren’t they putting us all at risk by using their dangerous vehicles unnecessarily? How about people that drive to eat at a restaurant which could be easily cooked from home? Or people that fly airplanes or cruise in their yacht billowing unnecessarily dangerous pollution from their vessels? Or people that insist on driving motorcycles, scooters, small vehicles, and bicycles which results in serious injuries and waste of medical resources? Ditto for people that engage in risky behavior like mountain climbing, skateboarding, etc?
Possibly? I think we can probably look at each different case individually, if that is what you really want. I don’t know if there are commonalities that make sense to make a blanket statement across these, but if you do, could you explain what that is?
To me, it’s a pretty clear choice. Making the choice to remain unvaccinated adds to the rest of our risk. Some people cannot be vaccinated safely, but for all others - own, and pay for, the negative consequences.
That’s not how the world works, unfortunately. We can’t buy the lives back for people who died. Even if it was unnecessary.
Except in this case it's not just you. You can pass it on to people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons. Also, COVID has led to large parts of the economy as well as education system shutting down. Letting the virus romp around increases the chance of the disruption continuing indefinitely.
This is basic social contract stuff. It's disappointing to see so many people unwilling to undergo minimal sacrifices to help safeguard the health and welfare of others.
Exactly. This is the only way to retain a free society.
This will never end. The variants are spreading now faster in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. This is not surprising. Virologists have warned us about this. However, they have been censored.
If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative.
We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.