211–220 of 415 posts
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The flu kills tens of thousands of people a year - disproportionately many of whom are young, unlike SARS-CoV2 - and is a transmissible disease. Driving kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people a year. Where is the line when it’s OK to control peoples lives because you are afraid? This is how authoritarianism starts.
Wear a piece of cloth in front of your fucking face until a global pandemic gets under control != “control people’s lives”
There are “high-risk” people in care homes who want to visit their relatives for the holidays. To call these people selfish is way off the mark. Human beings are more than a simple statistic to optimize for political benefit. Perhaps it’s the politicians and others who are being selfish by imposing their will and desires. Viewpoints on liberty and consent aside, there doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy or timeline…
Couldn't agree more. You're asking 330 million Americans to give up some of their freedoms without any real plan or timeline; of course there is going to opposition.
It also demonstrates why the "personal choice" stuff is BS here. I see a lot of folks going "why are you worried if you're following the rules yourself?", and yet... > None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.
ULTIMATELY the options come down to either we accept citizen's personal choice will guiding individual action, or we accept that said action will be compelled through government use of lethal force.
This has nothing to do with personal choice and everything to do with culture war nonsense being spread at the expense of just about everyone, purely for the political gain of a tiny fraction of a percent.
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> What we need is to survive to have peaches and cream another day, Great news! As a collective we will survive this just fine no matter what happens. Individually some people won't be so lucky. Coronavirus is a tragedy, but it is far from an existential threat.
> And they have spiking case counts just like the US right now. What lead to this recent spike, in your opinion?
The virus is seasonal just like the flu would be my guess.
What are HNers planning to do for the holidays? We’re seriously considering not seeing anyone, not even parents, even though my SO has had COVID already (she works at a hospital and contracted it from COVID patients). Stories like this are the main reason. Even if no one at the party gets very ill, the chance of further spreading it to others seriously scares me.
I lost a family member this week. I did not attend the graveside service even though it was outside, which is anecdotally supposed to be lower risk than something indoors. The issue for me is I'm high risk combined with the fact it's possible someone could show and refuse to wear a mask. Even if everyone socially distanced and wore masks, I believe there's still a non-zero chance of transmission. Couldn't take the ri…
> Unless the disease is eradicated which in the face of antivaxxers seems unlikely, I don't thinks things will ever entirely return to normal.
I think you're way overestimating antivaxxers. They make a lot of noise on the Internet and in some media but they are far from being a majority. I'm confident we will be able to eradicate this virus with vaccines, like we have (mostly) done so in the past with diseases such as polio or tetanus.
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What about non-drunk driving? You still have a non zero risk of killing pedestrians or other drivers/passengers. There's risk in everything we do, including for other people. What amount of risk is acceptable is a subjective choice.
And liability is part of that - that's why auto insurance is mandatory. There's a difference between reckless endangerment/homicide than an accident. Ridiculous false equivalency.
And yet, comparison of catching a virus to homicide by gun is not.
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> Not wearing a seatbelt hurts yourself only. And yet people in many countries reject it. If a significant amount of people already makes a bad choice at this point where it affects themselves we cannot expect these people to make good choices to protect others.
Because the average person has a very bad understanding of risk and consequences? Also, the laws aren't solely about the wearer; not wearing seatbelts at scale has societal costs.
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'fighting the virus harms the economy' Would you believe it if I told you that not fighting the virus has an even bigger toll on the economy? Imagine if we'd aggressively addressed this problem back in March, how much less economic impact would have resulted. But then, as now, we wanted to "protect the economy" and avoid restrictions as long as possible. But this time the strategy will work? I have trouble believing…
Would I believe someone who works at Postmates with over a decade of experience in the software industry bubble when they offer an opinion on the effects of a novel virus pandemic on the overall economy due to high level policy decisions? Absolutely not.
Instead of me, why not listen instead to Dr. Michael Osterholm, PhD MPH, "an American epidemiologist, regents professor, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota."
His podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-osterholm-update-c... give it a listen and let me know what you think!
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Removing personal choice should sound alarm bells for anyone who has read Brave New World, 1984 or the Gulag Archipelago. If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start…
Stopping people from spreading a deadly disease doesn't make us North Korea. Not every slope is slippery. We can move further along a spectrum without being guaranteed to fall off a cliff. I don't have the personal freedom to get drunk and drive my car down the highway because that puts the lives of everyone on the road in jeopardy. Spreading disease is the same thing. Your personal freedoms end when they start invad…
Let me ask you something; Has there been any setting in the past 50 years other than changing sexual mores in which people have gained any personal freedom? And have any of the instances in which people lost bits of their freedoms in that same timeframe ever been reversed (again aside from changing sexual mores)?