Your choices and decisions are what threatens your life. If you don't want to be exposed to Covid, don't leave your home. I don't see why others shouldn't walk around / party, if they're themselves willing to take on the risk of infection.

Those killed in the story didn’t go to the party. As well as those who died, some number will have long term disability and illness. Many of them won’t have been guests at the wedding.

They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently.

Please, read the article.

Neither the residents of the long-term care facility nor the inmates at the jail are likely to have had any meaningful ability to vet their contacts.

Indeed, in those case the duty of care was explicitly (legally?) delegated to someone else. Someone in the chain of transmission had a duty of care, and failed in that duty.

> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.

It wasn't a partygoer. I'm fine with holding specific people responsible (even legally) if they failed their explicit duty of care, but assigning blame to the whole population just because they don't comply with your narrow moral senses is intellectually dishonest. If we stopped doing that, maybe we could also focus on actually being effective (e.g. specifically protecting the old / vulnerable & their caretakers with specific, targeted and (most importantly) effective measures), not just requiring that everybody abide by arbitrary rules.

That's a bit like saying you should personally vet every automobile driver before they drive close to you to see if they're intoxicated, and if you get injured by a drunk driver, that was your fault for not having vetted them sufficiently.

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party

Some (all?) of the fatalities were rest home patients and many who caught it were prison inmates. They didn’t get to make any choices about who they saw or who cared for them.

Because of... what the top-level comment in the thread you're responding to says?

I waited too long to post my rant and the comment got killed, so you've become my rant-patsy, and I'm pasting it below. Also, yeah, things like choosing to eat, just choose not to go get food and you're good, right?

Jeez, what a short-sighted, selfish, impatient, and entitled point of view. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time living anywhere that's actually dangerous?

A large percentage of people in the world have live their lives cautiously, because where they live is really dangerous. There are places that have to deal with ebola still, there are places where not being deferential to the right person means that you and your family are hunted and killed. Most of these places are what we call third-world countries, and being in danger, having your family in danger, is a staple of living in them. If they've been dangerous for a long time, then ALL of the people living there live cautiously, defensively, because everyone who wasn't genetically predisposed to this behavior was killed by their environment long ago.

In most first world countries, and the USA in particular, a vast majority of the population has no clue what it's like to live under these types of conditions, where you actually have to try to take steps to protect yourself. Until this year, the most danger the average American was in was during our morning commutes, where being actively defensive means "Try not to look at your phone too much while driving". Now we're just experiencing a taste of how it is to live in many of the third world countries.

What is absolutely insane though, is not that we are too stupid to figure out how to live cautiously and defensively (we're not used to having this burden, so it's somewhat understandable that we don't know how to handle it), it's that even when we're told common sense procedures to act defensively, we actively fight against them. Taking precautions that are stupid simple, that are common sense, that are EASY, and that will preserve our lives, the lives of our family and friends, and the lives in our communities, we reject those because we can't get past the delusional narcissism that we should never have to sacrifice anything.

And that's why we've had 240 thousand deaths due to covid since March. Cause we, as a nation, responded as entitled yuppy assholes, instead of taking some basic, easy, mature steps to protect ourselves.

I'm not sure if you meant to write this sarcastically, but it kind-of sounds like you're comparing COVID with third-world countries full of Ebola and tribal killings? You do realize you're the comparison is a bit ridiculous?

Ultimately, it's a question of value. How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life. And then imposing your own value system onto others (or not).

At no point did I compare COVID to a country, so no. Also, you use an awful lot of nasty little rhetorical manipulations in your posts, did you realize that? Actually, that last sentence is an example of one of these tricks you use! Go back and read my post if you're interested in learning something, but do not use faulty summarization to misrepresent what I wrote.

But aside from your creepy and manipulative way of writing, let's get down to the heart of the matter. You wrote: "How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life." This is a stupid and fallacious argument. It presupposes that you cannot take cautious, responsible, defensive measures against being infected without sacrificing "living your life". I'm currently living in a first world country, living happy, content, and healthy, and also only going out in public places when I really need to, and always masking when I do. It's not the SAME as pre-Covid, but it's also not painful, difficult, or boring. So taking some simple, possibly inconvenient precautions means you can still "live your life", it just means that there are some boundaries dictated by your circumstances.

Secondly, let's say for the sake of really destroying your argument that you can't both take these common sense precautions and still "live your life". Fine, COVID 19 is destroying your mojo during 2020. All you have to do is take a year off. It's ridiculously fucking easy. We'll have good enough therapies early next year to make COVID not a huge problem anymore, so when you say "live your life", what you're actually taking about not being able to do is "living your life for a year and maybe a couple months", which is really not a big deal when you consider all the harm you can do to the people around you by being a selfish twat.