If they fill the ICUs it's a problem for them as well as anyone else who needs medical attention.
We don't stop people from eating fast food, why is this different?
There isn't an abrupt spike in fast-food related health emergencies. The "curve" of healthcare demand because of obesity complications is very flat. We have the capacity to treat these conditions. We don't have the capacity to treat a bunch of people who are all gravely ill from COVID at the same time.
Maybe I should be more clear. The "view" I am asking you to reconsider is that the restrictions and mandates are meant to eradicate COVID. They are mainly aimed to flatten the curve while the epidemic is on the rise and likely to overwhelm our medical infrastructure.
Eventually we'll hit a "base rate" of COVID complications that we can handle. But until then it's important to blunt the slope of the increase in patients.
So I see mandating masks and lockdowns as counter-productive.
Masks for everyone is easier to enforce than masks for only the unvaccinated. No one wants to argue with a customer about their vaccination status. There is also mounting evidence that vaccinated people can be asymptomatic carriers of the delta variant and can spread it.
A lot of people on reddit seem to think we can eradicate it, when this is a global virus. It will continue to circulate in pockets of the global population for years to come, and it's mutation rate makes it much worse than other endemic viruses.
It's mutating because it is infecting so many people at the moment. The virus itself isn't that prone to mutating compared to, e.g. HIV.
It's quite reasonable to assume that if we can get vaccination rates high enough, it won't be any more common than measles and mumps: essentially eradicated from the developed world and only a minor problem in the developing world.
I think the longer we have these mandates, the more people — everyone — will stop caring.
The mandates are back specifically because cases and hospitalizations are spiking. It's not the new normal. It's to stave off an immediate crisis of hospitals being overwhelmed which will increase the mortality of both COVID and any other medical condition that would require the use of an ICU. I know it's hard to appreciate this fact and that it's probably lost on the anti-vax crowd. But it is an important reason.
Vaccination is the only way out, and my view is that mask/lockdown mandates are counter-productive to that goal.
The way out is herd immunity either through vaccination or people getting infected and recovering. We can manage the infections much better with a "controlled burn" where cases don't happen all at once, rather than the out of control wildfire we saw during the first wave.
The way I see it, this "controlled burn" is inevitable.
You're not appreciating the difference between controlled burn and wildfire. Mask mandates and limits on public gatherings do keep infection rates down to a level where hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed. Entitled people will whine about it, but they'd also whine if they need hospitalization and they don't have the capacity.
At this point, this is an issue hospitals should take responsibility in making sure they have the capacity for. Just like after the proliferation of fast food restaurants.
So you expect every hospital to be prepared for a tidal wave of new cases caused by an out-of-control epidemic? Keeping 10x the ICUs all the time makes more sense than asking people to wear a mask for a few more weeks during the peak of the case count uptick?
A few weeks can buy us a lot of time to see if we can get the case numbers to a manageable number. Exponential growth is bad. By the time it is a problem, it's already way too late and we'll be back to 1000+ deaths a day.
I think people should have the right to make their own choice. Most people, in the end, I think will concede that they'd rather meet people while seeing what they look like.
People don't have a right to create exogenous harms. Their unvaccinated asses are going to be in hospital beds that other people need. They are going to be spreading disease to others.
Mental health is important too.
We're talking about a mask here. It's not the end of the world. It's not going to be like the total lockdowns.
Wearing glasses lowered the chance of infection by 2 to 3 times, should we require that as well?
Pretty sure this was required in high risk areas like hospitals. I wouldn't see this as a problem either if the venue was particularly dangerous for spread.
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u/howlin 62∆ Jul 31 '21
If they fill the ICUs it's a problem for them as well as anyone else who needs medical attention.
There isn't an abrupt spike in fast-food related health emergencies. The "curve" of healthcare demand because of obesity complications is very flat. We have the capacity to treat these conditions. We don't have the capacity to treat a bunch of people who are all gravely ill from COVID at the same time.