4 ms·

(USA point of view) I feel like given that vaccines do an acceptable job at reducing risk of hospitalization and death, there is only really a few things worth

(USA point of view) I feel like given that vaccines do an acceptable job at reducing risk of hospitalization and death, there is only really a few things worth discussing, in relevant order: - Are hospitals actually being overloaded by covid cases to the point of being an issue (according to many, yes. but according to [1] Johns Hopkins, no, or only in some cases?). - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes). - Is this localized (state or city specific), or is this a federal issue. - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc) - If the answer to the previous is nothing, then what are we even doing? The focus on just asking "vaccine mandate, yes or no" feels like it's missing most of the discussion. [1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend

throw__away7391 5y ago
Remember when the US invaded Iraq to "find weapons of mass destruction"? Then a year or two later that shifted to "fighting the terrorist there so we don't have to fight them here", then "winning hearts and minds" or something. Once you get a mandate for a large-scale, politically charged activity it will never stop; the goal posts will be moved again and again, as many times as it takes and as often as necessary to put the "other side" on the defensive. We're many weeks past "three weeks to flatten the curve", every week we hear more excuses. My friends pick them up and start parroting them in near perfect unison. I don't actually have any Republican friends, but if I did I'm sure I'd hear something similar from them too. This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was (I also remember the response to AIDS being somewhat less dramatic than to COVID), this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. If it means thousands of your followers are discouraged from taking potentially life saving vaccinations (that you yourself have taken) and die as a result, so be it. If it means subjecting billions of people to years of unnecessary and demonstrably ineffective pandemic theater, crushing the financial future of the next generations, and destroying vast swaths of small businesses people have spent their lives building while realizing unprecedented returns on your own portfolio, so be it. The people running this do not care about any of this in the slightest, it's just an excuse to enrich themselves, and for a certain segment of the upper middle class to feel morally superior to others while they take Zoom calls from home and order dinners from Seamless. I guess this is getting boring for them now, so we're starting to be allowed to hear a trickle of stories like this.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  These restrictions are so classist and so harmful to the underprivileged and working class it amazes me that the party that is championing them is the one who claims to represent said classes. Almost all of what I thought was true about my political allegiance fell completely apart over the last two years.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  > This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was, this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. yeah it's all a big conspiracy to put the bars and restaurants out of business for sinister reasons that are beyond imagination.
  - yanmaani 5y ago
    People stop patronizing bars, restaurants, shops, etc, instead spend their leisure time/money/etc on infinitely more scalable digital services. Beyond imagination?
  - throw__away7391 5y ago
    Don't be daft. This is exactly the kind of parroted narrative I'm talking about. It's obvious to any objective observer how this has played out. Initially, three weeks of shutdown, combined with a stimulus program, was going to be painful but bearable. We laid off a bunch of people, cancelled raises, and prepared for a recession. When the "elite" saw how well their stocks, companies, and real estate holdings were doing, well suddenly this didn't seem so bad--for some folks like me and probably you as well. Then, very quickly, it got politicized and ritualized. I can absolutely guarantee you if home values had cratered, if large businesses were getting their lunch eaten by small businesses, if stocks were on a two year decline and continued to fall, if WFH was only possible for low wage hourly workers, things would look very different and these restrictions would have been lifted a long time ago. Now wearing a mask for 20 seconds while I walk 2 or 3 meters from the door of a restaurant to the table, only to immediately take it off for an hour to eat dinner isn't a practical mater, its symbolic--the mask is the new flag pin. The staff still needs to wear masks for their whole shift of course--all these COVID measures are falling disproportionately on service workers, I am going through life mostly free from any inconvenience while all the hourly worker I interact with wear masks, "sanitize" any surface I come into contact with, and perform all sorts of extra, mostly meaningless precautions to "keep me safe". I've never worked a job like this, but I can't imagine spending 8 hours sweating in a kitchen with a mask on is much fun.
rsynnott 5y ago
> Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). I mean, clearly, yes. Those, in themselves, never (or at least virtually never) cause sudden exhaustion of hospital capacity. Now, many covid cases, particularly unvaccinated cases, have some sort of lifestyle problem as a comorbidity, but that's not really the point.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  It's not obvious to me. As an example, lets say hospitals have a capacity of 100, 40 of the capacity is generally taken up by non-lifestyle factors, 40 is taken up by various lifestyle factors (things that could have reasonably been avoided from a better diet, exercise, or otherwise), and the remainder is left as buffer. Now, lets say covid takes up 25 capacity, which now overflows hospitals by demanding 105 capacity. Why is this new lifestyle factor (not getting a vaccine) obviously worse than the previously accepted and accounted for lifestyle factors? Is it the ease of avoidance? 3 jabs and you're done? If so, what about the injuries we accept that could be avoided entirely through inaction (sports, motorcycles, whatever)? Is it the magnitude? Looking at covid as a single factor, it could be argued that it has far greater impact than any other individual lifestyle factor. but that information sure hasn't come up in any discussion I've seen. It's always left as an exercise for the reader. Is it the suddenness? Covid sure has been a shock to the system that it was unprepared for, but that's only true through the lens of comparing pre-pandemic to current moment. Looking at the current state, it's no longer sudden. The existence of covid is now known, and so is hospitalization needs. Now it's just a question of capacity, not suddenness. I'm not saying the point can't be argued, but it's certainly not obvious to me. And if every discussion is left as "it's obvious, why can't you see it", the discussion won't go anywhere.
  - jasondigitized 5y ago
    It’s a question and a calculation of the CFOs of health care organizations whether or not they want to make major investments and if those investment will provide a high rate of return 5-10 years from now. This is no different than energy companies avoiding build new power plants by giving people rebates and credits for reducing power. Instead, in the short term they are “asking” you to spend more time waiting in the ER or for surgery and asking health care workers to work harder. They were and are really hoping that Covid goes away so they can continue to make astronomical amount of profit and keep there NPS and Glint surveys somewhat above the gutter.
Fernicia 5y ago
> - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes). They needn't be a majority. The mandate acts to reduce strain on the hospital, so ask whether it achieves that (I think the answer is yes) > - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). It is harder to fix these than getting a jab. > - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc) An alternative would be to charge unvaccinated people a premium on hospital costs, as I'm sure health insurance providers would be keen to do.
- dham 5y ago
  I mean fixing this stuff now will help us "flatten the curve" in the next pandemic.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  > > - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes). > They needn't be a majority. The mandate acts to reduce strain on the hospital, so ask whether it achieves that (I think the answer is yes) Majority is very important here. If vaccinated and non-vaccinated people were hospitalized at equal rate (or even at a rate where more vaccinated were hospitalized) a vaccine mandate isn't exactly going to do anything. But I now realize that I gave "vaccine works" as a prerequisite, so this bullet point is redundant. --- > > - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). > It is harder to fix these than getting a jab. Likely, but hard to say definitively without data, and I know I don't have such data on hand. I talk about it a bit more in another reply better, but many things are even easier than getting 3 jabs. They only require inaction. My ultimate question on this point is, why do we accept certain lifestyle injuries but not this? Ease of avoidance is a good reason, but I would like to see it compared to other lifestyle injuries. --- > > - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc) > An alternative would be to charge unvaccinated people a premium on hospital costs, as I'm sure health insurance providers would be keen to do. I'm not against such an idea at all if it would solve the problem. The high-level issue is that the unvaccinated are costing the system more money / capacity than the vaccinated, so they should pay for it. However, there is a lack of capacity, not necessarily a lack of funding. If the unvaccinated are charged more, will they actually have a lesser impact on capacity, or will capacity still be reached just with them paying more money? Which then circles back to needing more capacity. Who pays for the extra capacity is almost a separate discussion in itself.

throw__away7391 5y ago

Remember when the US invaded Iraq to "find weapons of mass destruction"? Then a year or two later that shifted to "fighting the terrorist there so we don't have to fight them here", then "winning hearts and minds" or something. Once you get a mandate for a large-scale, politically charged activity it will never stop; the goal posts will be moved again and again, as many times as it takes and as often as necessary to put the "other side" on the defensive. We're many weeks past "three weeks to flatten the curve", every week we hear more excuses. My friends pick them up and start parroting them in near perfect unison. I don't actually have any Republican friends, but if I did I'm sure I'd hear something similar from them too. This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was (I also remember the response to AIDS being somewhat less dramatic than to COVID), this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. If it means thousands of your followers are discouraged from taking potentially life saving vaccinations (that you yourself have taken) and die as a result, so be it. If it means subjecting billions of people to years of unnecessary and demonstrably ineffective pandemic theater, crushing the financial future of the next generations, and destroying vast swaths of small businesses people have spent their lives building while realizing unprecedented returns on your own portfolio, so be it. The people running this do not care about any of this in the slightest, it's just an excuse to enrich themselves, and for a certain segment of the upper middle class to feel morally superior to others while they take Zoom calls from home and order dinners from Seamless. I guess this is getting boring for them now, so we're starting to be allowed to hear a trickle of stories like this.

spookthesunset 5y ago
These restrictions are so classist and so harmful to the underprivileged and working class it amazes me that the party that is championing them is the one who claims to represent said classes. Almost all of what I thought was true about my political allegiance fell completely apart over the last two years.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
> This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was, this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. yeah it's all a big conspiracy to put the bars and restaurants out of business for sinister reasons that are beyond imagination.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  People stop patronizing bars, restaurants, shops, etc, instead spend their leisure time/money/etc on infinitely more scalable digital services. Beyond imagination?
- throw__away7391 5y ago
  Don't be daft. This is exactly the kind of parroted narrative I'm talking about. It's obvious to any objective observer how this has played out. Initially, three weeks of shutdown, combined with a stimulus program, was going to be painful but bearable. We laid off a bunch of people, cancelled raises, and prepared for a recession. When the "elite" saw how well their stocks, companies, and real estate holdings were doing, well suddenly this didn't seem so bad--for some folks like me and probably you as well. Then, very quickly, it got politicized and ritualized. I can absolutely guarantee you if home values had cratered, if large businesses were getting their lunch eaten by small businesses, if stocks were on a two year decline and continued to fall, if WFH was only possible for low wage hourly workers, things would look very different and these restrictions would have been lifted a long time ago. Now wearing a mask for 20 seconds while I walk 2 or 3 meters from the door of a restaurant to the table, only to immediately take it off for an hour to eat dinner isn't a practical mater, its symbolic--the mask is the new flag pin. The staff still needs to wear masks for their whole shift of course--all these COVID measures are falling disproportionately on service workers, I am going through life mostly free from any inconvenience while all the hourly worker I interact with wear masks, "sanitize" any surface I come into contact with, and perform all sorts of extra, mostly meaningless precautions to "keep me safe". I've never worked a job like this, but I can't imagine spending 8 hours sweating in a kitchen with a mask on is much fun.

rsynnott 5y ago

> Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). I mean, clearly, yes. Those, in themselves, never (or at least virtually never) cause sudden exhaustion of hospital capacity. Now, many covid cases, particularly unvaccinated cases, have some sort of lifestyle problem as a comorbidity, but that's not really the point.

xboxnolifes 5y ago
It's not obvious to me. As an example, lets say hospitals have a capacity of 100, 40 of the capacity is generally taken up by non-lifestyle factors, 40 is taken up by various lifestyle factors (things that could have reasonably been avoided from a better diet, exercise, or otherwise), and the remainder is left as buffer. Now, lets say covid takes up 25 capacity, which now overflows hospitals by demanding 105 capacity. Why is this new lifestyle factor (not getting a vaccine) obviously worse than the previously accepted and accounted for lifestyle factors? Is it the ease of avoidance? 3 jabs and you're done? If so, what about the injuries we accept that could be avoided entirely through inaction (sports, motorcycles, whatever)? Is it the magnitude? Looking at covid as a single factor, it could be argued that it has far greater impact than any other individual lifestyle factor. but that information sure hasn't come up in any discussion I've seen. It's always left as an exercise for the reader. Is it the suddenness? Covid sure has been a shock to the system that it was unprepared for, but that's only true through the lens of comparing pre-pandemic to current moment. Looking at the current state, it's no longer sudden. The existence of covid is now known, and so is hospitalization needs. Now it's just a question of capacity, not suddenness. I'm not saying the point can't be argued, but it's certainly not obvious to me. And if every discussion is left as "it's obvious, why can't you see it", the discussion won't go anywhere.
- jasondigitized 5y ago
  It’s a question and a calculation of the CFOs of health care organizations whether or not they want to make major investments and if those investment will provide a high rate of return 5-10 years from now. This is no different than energy companies avoiding build new power plants by giving people rebates and credits for reducing power. Instead, in the short term they are “asking” you to spend more time waiting in the ER or for surgery and asking health care workers to work harder. They were and are really hoping that Covid goes away so they can continue to make astronomical amount of profit and keep there NPS and Glint surveys somewhat above the gutter.

Fernicia 5y ago

> - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes). They needn't be a majority. The mandate acts to reduce strain on the hospital, so ask whether it achieves that (I think the answer is yes) > - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). It is harder to fix these than getting a jab. > - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc) An alternative would be to charge unvaccinated people a premium on hospital costs, as I'm sure health insurance providers would be keen to do.

dham 5y ago
I mean fixing this stuff now will help us "flatten the curve" in the next pandemic.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
> > - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes). > They needn't be a majority. The mandate acts to reduce strain on the hospital, so ask whether it achieves that (I think the answer is yes) Majority is very important here. If vaccinated and non-vaccinated people were hospitalized at equal rate (or even at a rate where more vaccinated were hospitalized) a vaccine mandate isn't exactly going to do anything. But I now realize that I gave "vaccine works" as a prerequisite, so this bullet point is redundant. --- > > - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies). > It is harder to fix these than getting a jab. Likely, but hard to say definitively without data, and I know I don't have such data on hand. I talk about it a bit more in another reply better, but many things are even easier than getting 3 jabs. They only require inaction. My ultimate question on this point is, why do we accept certain lifestyle injuries but not this? Ease of avoidance is a good reason, but I would like to see it compared to other lifestyle injuries. --- > > - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc) > An alternative would be to charge unvaccinated people a premium on hospital costs, as I'm sure health insurance providers would be keen to do. I'm not against such an idea at all if it would solve the problem. The high-level issue is that the unvaccinated are costing the system more money / capacity than the vaccinated, so they should pay for it. However, there is a lack of capacity, not necessarily a lack of funding. If the unvaccinated are charged more, will they actually have a lesser impact on capacity, or will capacity still be reached just with them paying more money? Which then circles back to needing more capacity. Who pays for the extra capacity is almost a separate discussion in itself.