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Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

latimes.com

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Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#361

Post by timr »

ceejayoz wrote: post #355
timr wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing that this situation should be an exception to the usual rules of personal liberty that we all take for granted -- I should be able to require you to wear a mask and not meet with family members, because $disease is deadly and transmissable . OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion. Your response was that we make just such an exception for guns and drunk driving. The…

> OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion. I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments. "My body, my choice" doesn't apply in the same fashion when other people's rights are also involved. (And, to head-off the "nuh-uh", pro-choicers tend to fall down on the "no" side of fetal pe…

"I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments."

It's nothing like either of those, let alone "just like" them.

Catching a virus is not, in any way, like pulling the trigger on gun or choosing to drink and drive. The former happens to you. The latter two require personal agency.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#362

Post by dang »

RationalThought wrote: post #147
war1025 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People die. I'm becoming more and more callus about the whole thing and beginning to think we just need to adjust our expectations and accept that people die . I was told recently that my town is in terrible shape and the hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. Listening further, I learned that "nearly overwhelmed" meant we had capacity for two or three people to be really sick with Coronavirus. If we need to decimate our…

I'm becoming more and more callous about people who don't give a shit if their selfishness kills others. Guess what, that goes two ways. If you can't be bothered to wear a mask and socially distance, and you are fine with people dying because they've committed the sin of having asthma. If you're ok with perfectly healthy young adults having heart issues because they survived covid-19, then I'm ok with YOU suffering w…

We've banned this account for breaking HN's guidelines. Can you please not create accounts to do that with? It will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#363

Post by OJFord »

tengbretson wrote: post #44
OJFord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that help? Stay at home for as many events as you want, going to one 'super-spreading wedding' is still no bueno.

But if you had to spend all of your social credits in order to go to the wedding now you will be unable to go anywhere else to further spread it.

Still doesn't work unless people are below some critical level of behaving the same way and knowing the same people that I bet they're not.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#364

Post by dwild »

goalieca wrote: post #54

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…

> To call these people selfish is way off the mark

How so?

self·ish adjective (of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.

> who want to visit their relatives for the holidays.

Thus, being selfish as they got no regards on the impact of others. In Quebec we got some private care home where 80% died of Covid. It only takes one to bring it.

> Perhaps it’s the politicians and others who are being selfish by imposing their will and desires.

Their will and desires of what? Of saving lifes? Sure caring about someone's else life is purely selfish, much more than wanting to spend time with others.

> it’s time we do a cost/benefit analysis that considers all costs and complications beyond covid.

The US is the one that killed the most to avoid theses "costs and complications". Was it worth it? Go see anyone that lost their grand parents because of this, many of them could have spend time with them today if it wasn't because someone else was selfish.

If you got high risk relative that you want to see, buy them a webcam or keep them permanently in your home please. Keep the risk to yourself. If you care about them, please reduce your risk too, they deserve that "cost and complication".

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#365

Post by dwild »

atty wrote: post #20

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 will stay home. I will organize a few events virtually, but that's it.

I'm afraid, quite a bit of people around me said that they will still do the same as usual. People that do care about Covid, that do talk about the risk and want to reduce the amount of propagation, but still won't make the concession of missing holidays. I'm from Quebec so it's probably that mentality that made us have more death per capita than the US.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#366

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

dougmwne wrote: post #265
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can you accept people dying, but not accept the economy not doing well? The economy goes up and down. It's a fact of life. Why worry about it?

I think it is a valid concern. A bad economy kills. The so-called diseases of despair[1] kill more than 150k a year in the US. And much suffering is caused by limited opportunities and limited hope. These limited prospects can and have have taken down many governments in the past. And regime change is rarely a bloodless process. There are no perfect solutions when it comes to governance. We must do our best to promot…

Let's be honest with ourselves. The real reason many are worried about the economy is because of their rich lifestyles and stock portfolios.

If they cared about "diseases of despair" they wouldn't continue to support paltry minimum wages, lack of social safety net, no universal medicine, constant tax breaks at the expense of the budget, etc.

They didn't care about "diseases of despair" in 2008 either. It's simply a bad faith argument.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#367

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

war1025 wrote: post #249
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can you accept people dying, but not accept the economy not doing well? The economy goes up and down. It's a fact of life. Why worry about it?

> Why can you accept people dying, but not accept the economy not doing well? In the grand scheme of "the economy", my portfolio is up something like 8% for the year last time I checked. My job is stable. In the locality of "the economy", I have heard multiple businesses in my area say that they are barely hanging on by a thread and will be forced to close permanently if the state forces them to shut down again. Peop…

> People might not be dying from the shutdowns, but it sure is an uneven load we're asking people to carry. Particularly from this high pulpit of HN, where we nearly all have cushy tech jobs where we don't have to interact with anyone to get paid.

Seems like a perfect opportunity for the government to continue supporting people. Perhaps some taxes on your high pulpit would do some good.

But heaven forbid we do that - because the real answer isn't "oh people die in a bad economy." It's "I'm unwilling to support my fellow americans in a proper way, I'd rather them risk their lives instead of providing some support during difficult times."

e.g. "my taxes!". It's a bad faith argument. The economy has been bad before and we never cared about the poor then.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#368

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

wins32767 wrote: post #178
ceejayoz wrote: post #5

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.

I hope some enterprising lawyer starts filing wrongful death civil suits for people who do not follow mask and gathering rules. With sequencing of the virus, plus some contact tracing it should be possible to make a preponderance of evidence case for a subset of deaths. That should hopefully provide a stick to get a large number of defectors (in game theory terms) to stop defecting. A political solution would clearly…

The extreme level of litigiousness and authoritarianism you're advocating is perhaps the worst, inhumane impulse that surfaces during a crisis like this.

Imagine, for instance, that we started tracing HIV strains and jailing gay people.

And then arguing that having sex isn't really necessary and abstinence is the only way to prevent transmission.

The implications of what you're saying is appalling.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#369

Post by dwild »

YooLi wrote: post #142

"Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next." "The York County Jail employee showed up for an eight-hour shift despite having COVID-19 symptoms. It was the first of five consecutive days of work for the employee..." I see the main problem not as the wedding, because an infection can frankly happen anywhere, but as a failure to accommodate people who feel they…

There's many symptoms that are hard to spot, and as far as I know, there's asymptomatic spreaders too.

The only person I know that got Covid, his only symptoms was that he was sleepy, he slept for a whole week 14 hours a day. It's quite bad, but I could see many still going with it, sleeping 8 hours and still going to works sleepy. I got plenty of days I felt sleepy in the past and still went to work.

Headache is another symptom, again, never got any yourself? Pop an Advil and go with it? Would you miss work for that reason?... I may miss too many day if I had to consider that one.

I don't know what symptoms he had, but it could be pretty minor... yet we simply can't get a day of for every minor thing. I agree completely with you for major symptoms, but sadly, there's many case where people are asymptomatic or doesn't even know they are symptomatic because of how commons or hard to spot theses symptoms can be.

You know what we can do though easily though, postpone a wedding or have a wedding differently. They were 55 there, were they all required? Why do it inside? Why not refusing people without mask? Why not enforcing more strongly the few basic rules of social distancing?

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#370

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

Have we learned nothing from the AIDS crisis?

It's clear to most people, in that instance, that an ugly side of human thinking emerges around viral outbreaks and it presents itself in how we consider other human beings.

People so readily stigmatize and it's very clearly on display in this thread.

No human being without ill-intent can be blamed for a virus. Tragedy befalls humanity from time to time, this is certain; instead of pointing fingers, we should be more empathetic, not less.

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