Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!
I’ve recently learnt about lifetraps and it’s made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships
Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!
I’ve recently learnt about lifetraps and it’s made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships
And the possible risks are compounded with each infection. People are acting like covid just isn’t a problem anymore, like it’s gone away. Meanwhile, roughly 100 Americans are dying of covid every day - and we’re not even in a surge at the moment.
I’m too lazy to verify your numbers, but realistically, covid nowadays is simply just another life risk. Yes, people are still dying and that’s bad, but most of them are just in the age where people tend to die of such infections.
I’d guess, there are about 4 million deaths a year in a country the size of the US. So having something on the order of 100k per year due to covid isn’t that concerning, if the lifespan isn’t affected that much.
We have vaccinations against covid. If you’re properly vaccinated, you’ll probably be fine and younger children will grow up in a world where you just get covid once in a while and get better immunity than we old folks could ever have.
Get this though: many children still do end up hospitalized. The majority of them have no underlying comorbidities or conditions. Their only reason for ending up in hospital is luck of the draw. That was presented at the CDC meeting where the recent booster was approved. It’s not just the elderly or infirm who end up in the hospital and die from it. It’s still killing, hospitalizing, and making seriously ill way more people than flu.
Yes, but as I said: this is just life now.
You’re getting all raved up about covid, but in reality, this is just a tiny bit more risk. Yes, more risk is bad, but what is the alternative? Continuous shutdown forever?
You have to accept, that there are just some risks that we have to accept. If you’re going out on the street, there’s a chance you’ll be run over, do you stay indoors all the time because of that?
No, we don’t have to just accept continuous illness and death. Why do you think that it’s necessary for people to suffer when there are simple solutions? There are steps between nothing and total shutdown, read above for some of them.
Covid isn’t like people going in the street risking getting hit. Covid is a communicable illness spread by others, not a personal choice someone makes. People can’t just choose to never be exposed even if they wanted, we have to interact with others. Further, people can and do avoid being run over in the street by walking on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in vehicles with protections, with lots of traffic safety rules in place to minimize accidents. Right now our covid elimination strategies are similar to that of traffic safety in the early days of automobiles when there were no safety regulations. Right now we have a bunch of people driving wildly with at best ineffective vaccines, we need a lot more than that if we want to stop repeatedly trying to dodge covid crashes and have any sense of stability in actually living with covid.
There are no simple solutions. Vaccines solve 95% of the problem, but not 100%, and the remaining 5% are what you’re complaining about.
All other solutions can only be temporary, since they require massive changes in pretty much any aspect of our lives, and they will cause massive problems in other areas.
You’re basically proposing suicide for fear of death.
Actually I’m proposing life is valuable and we should protect it.
The vaccines don’t solve the problem and the solutions do not require massive change, but they do require people reflect on what’s important and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think that living a good life is important so I believe we should do things to better those odds, like reducing the amount of damage covid does to the body. Choosing continuous illness and your worse years coming much sooner sounds closer to suicide to me. Masking, improved ventilation and filtration, paid sick leave, and other simple steps are not absurd and shouldn’t be temporary. We know easy ways to reduce massive suffering, it’s ridiculous to me that people oppose it.
You still don’t seem to understand the opportunity costs you’re overlooking here.
Reducing people’s freedom is justifiable to a certain extent, if it saves lives. But that’s a trade off. Currently, the death and illnesses due to covid are very rare, so overall the “sickness load” is rather low. Changing behavior in a way that reduces that load significantly will necessarily cause reduced freedom for huge amounts of people. You’re taking away more than you’re saving.
That’s what I meant by suicide for fear of death. Sacrificing very much to protect very little.
These misunderstandings about covid are what I mentioned in my original post. Covid is currently killing fewer people than it did the first few years, it already burned through the most vulnerable and you can only die once. But illness is not rare at all. Aside from the rampant acute illness, Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” and about 10% of infections results in long covid. We don’t even know what the long term effects are, we do know it’s already having impacts on people’s health and on healthcare services, and that there is no lasting immunity. People used to suffer and die from preventable diseases, a lot. We didn’t say oh well, sucks to suck. We learned and adapted, that’s what we need to do that again.
You mentioned costs and freedom, what does freedom mean to you in this context?
The CDC estimate that 100 people a day die from the regular flu in the USA. Saying Covid is basically another flu at this stage is pretty accurate. The person you replied to tried to prove me wrong when I pointed out that the flu kills that many people per year in the USA by pointing to data that proves him wrong lol.
As you said, COVID is just a thing now that’s never going away. It’s just going to be another flu. People can choose to get a vaccination if they want, but the chances of them dying from either the flu or covid are incredibly slim.
The regular flu kills 100 people every day in America too btw.
The CDC disagrees with you. Do you have a source for your claim?
The CDC themselves, from the very link you just posted…
100 a day is 36 500 deaths per year. Have a look at the deaths per year on your link:
2010-2011: 37 000
2012-2013: 43 000
2013-2014: 38 000
2014-2015: 51 000
2016-2017: 38 000
2017-2018: 52 000
From 2010-2011 to 2018-2019, a 9 year range, 322 000 flu deaths were estimated. That is 35 778 deaths per year from the flu. That’s almost 100 per day.
Covid onward can’t be used because anyone that had covid or covid symptoms just got ruled as a covid death, even if they died with covid but not because of covid. The actual deaths caused by covid are significantly lower than what is reported due to this, and this isn’t some conspiracy theory either. This is just how covid deaths are counted. Died and had covid? Covid death even if they had a heart attack or got hit by a bus. Many of the covid deaths actually would have been flu deaths in reality.
What exactly were you looking at on that page to make you think I was wrong? That’s literally where I got the numbers from in the first place lol
I apologize. For some reason, when I read your comment, my brain said, “100,000 flu deaths a year?! That can’t be right!” So yes, there’s an average of 100 American flu deaths per day. Thank you for the correction, and I apologize again.
No problem :)