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> Exactly. I see no reason why I’d take strong measures to avoid getting exposed to it (now that I and 90% of adults around me are fully vaccinated) when I neve
by zumu 5y ago
> Exactly. I see no reason why I’d take strong measures to avoid getting exposed to it (now that I and 90% of adults around me are fully vaccinated) when I never did the same for the flu.
It should really go without saying COVID-19 is much more transmissible than any recent version of the Flu. Comparisons of symptoms and severity in healthy adults has never been the sticking issue.
I'm disheartened to see people on HN of all places thinking solely as an individuals and not about the management of health care resources at a population level. Health care resources are finite and viruses like COVID can still spread exponentially even with current vaccination rates.
From the beginning, the goal has been to lower transmission, lower cases, and therefore lower the burden on the _world_ health care system to a tenable degree. Yes, there may be _more_ effective measures we can take at this point, such as ramping up vaccination, but at the end of the day, if you don't transmit the disease to others or end up in the hospital yourself, you are helping the cause.
tldr; Whether or not it poses a risk to _you_ is besides the point, in so far as the risk of overburdening the health care system remains.
- spookthesunset 5y agoThe healthcare system also had more than a year and a half to build capacity to deal with this stuff? Why should society be required to bail out hospitals by adhering to arbitrary restrictions on their life?
- darkerside 5y agoI don't disagree with you, but your tone does smack of biting the hand that feeds.
- spookthesunset 5y agoI mean all this “protect the hospital” crap is bailing them out. Might as well be honest about it. People should be pissed that hospitals didn’t build capacity… why they aren’t, beats me.
- objectivetruth 5y agoBecause everyone -- or at least I thought everyone -- understands that there isn't a "trained healthcare provider storage warehouse" that can ship trained healthcare providers into hospitals, which by the way, can't just be 3D-printed into vacant city blocks.
- pixl97 5y agoI completely disagree with them. They seem to think hospitals operate like spinning up extra VMs when extra load is generated. And, in particular areas where there is an outbreak it can work like that. Much like you can spin up another VM when you still have underlying resources to do, you can setup an emergency hospital when you can borrow resources from elsewhere. When everywhere is busy, let's say a major pandemic outbreak, there is no extra capacity, and you tend to lose capacity by attrition of a worn out workforce.
- darkerside 5y agoI think it's fair to say that in the past year and a half, we had time to build capacity slowly and intelligently. OTOH, that's not any individual hospital's job. In our capitalistic society, if OP wanted to go build their own hospital, nobody was stopping them.
- shapefrog 5y agoChange the config file for the hospital from 100 doctors to 200 doctors, and reload the config. You can spin up a new doctor in what 30 seconds? Totally how the world works from the armchair. Not like it takes 6-7 years to get the basics down, weed out the ones who really are not as into it as they thought or just wont make it, or cant keep up. Not to mention the ones that want to go off and do tit jobs for a living rather than feeding experimental medcine to people who are about to die because they excercised their rights to refuse to take tested medcines.
- darkerside 5y ago> I think it's fair to say that in the past year and a half, we had time to build capacity slowly and intelligently > Change the config file for the hospital from 100 doctors to 200 doctors, and reload the config. You can spin up a new doctor in what 30 seconds? ...wtf?
- shapefrog 5y agotbh i am not shocked you cant figure it out.
- native_samples 5y agoAn odd analogy, given that hospital workers don't feed anyone - it's the rest of society that feeds them. By point-blank refusing to even consider increasing capacity, despite being written blank cheques by military engineers and ventilator designers, and insisting instead on lockdowns, it is rather the other way around: society fed the healthcare managers who then turned around and bit that hand. Supermarket staff, truckers, farm workers, meat factory operators and so on cannot lock down or work from home, so they had to keep working throughout. Yet health managers just looked blankly at their shiny new emergency hospitals and acted baffled that they were expected to do things differently to normal. Nobody increased capacity to help ensure care for the essential workers. Eventually the quasi-religious approach to the health system will go away and people will start to wonder why exactly all those newly built beds had to be dismantled instead of being paired with an emergency training programme.
- objectivetruth 5y agoSo in other words, you want to know why a $4T high-tech sector comprising 18% of our economy didn't simply double their capacity during an unprecedented pandemic last year? For your second question - why do you envision "hospitals" as some sort of concrete entity outside of and apart from "society?"
- nickthemagicman 5y ago> I'm disheartened to see people on HN of all places thinking solely as an individuals and not about the management of health care resources at a population level. Individualism vs Collectivism is a debate that goes back a long time. Your 'flattening the curve' argument is fear based. I haven't seen any actual DATA besides media fear mongering that ICUs are 'almost' full for years now.