this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
287 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43138 readers
1630 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?
They don't want to be told they have to wear a mask or that people should stay home from work when they're sick. Anything that would impinge on the rights of businesses to make money is against my freedoms.
It's the climate crisis but for health. Some people just can't bear to give up their treats in order to save lives.