are you overweight, elderly or otherwise immunocompromised? if not your risk of hospitalization or death [from covid19] is miniscule.

>it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it.

there are a huge number of diseases you can knowingly spread with far more severe long term consequences while still being 'part of society'. frankly i do not think free and democratic societies can survive while trying to also fulfill the moral compunction not to let anyone die ever from transmittable illness, it is simply at odds with our biology. we, like all mammals are walking bags of filth and disease and no amount of indefinite containment will ever change that reality.

Most of those other diseases aren’t nearly as contagious. Many of those other diseases we don’t have an easy solution for. None of those other diseases were something that we shut down normal operations for months over. Very notably, we don’t have any diseases in recent memory that had a risk at completely overwhelming our hospital system if not dealt with. Small percent chance it may be, but while it is no spanish flu, Corona is still many times more dangerous than the flu, especially on a wide spread level.

For the vaccines we do have, public schools in most states already require vaccination. Almost every state already requires that children in public schools have the DTaP, IPV, MMR, Varicella, and HepB vaccines to enter Kindergarten. And I would personally have no problems spreading those and the flu shot as a requirement in the same vein as I stated above either.

We are indeed mammals that are walking bags of filth, but we also have minds that we can use to help deal with that fact. We can’t indefinitely contain, and we can’t completely stop transmittable illness. But coronavirus is one of the handful of diseases we now have a tool to deal with, and not taking advantage of that tool to stop needless death and waste is a massive dereliction of duty to one’s fellow man. This isn’t about “not letting anyone die ever from transmittable illness,” this is about a specific dangerous disease that we have invented a tool to help stop.

> if not your risk of hospitalization or death [from covid19] is miniscule.

On an individual level, maybe sure, but on a population level, enough people are getting sick to cause medical systems to collapse. I live in a G7 country where people are dying at home since they can't get a hospital bed.

If you're in the western world, catch COVID right now, and aren't vaccinated, even if you aren't immunocompromised, diabetic, elderly, or obese odds are your chances of dying from COVID are higher than any other disease you've caught in your life.

Now it's true that chance is probably somewhere around 0.3% assuming you don't live in an area where hospitals are out of ICU beds and vents. But it's your _life_ at risk.

Is you're above 50, yes. 40-50, odds are about the same as yearly flu. Under 40, you're more at risk from the yearly flu.

(I'm going from memory and may be a little off on the age ranges, but covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly while influenza is not)

Worrying about getting other people sick when you do not reasonable suspicion that you are sick is a moral trap. If something is "everyone's" responsibility, then it really is _no one's_ responsibility, because there is no way to determine who spread the disease to whom. In this case, it's best to simply take the steps you feel necessary to protect yourself and your loved ones.

I personally believe you should also take the steps to decrease the risk of you harming people you don’t know, not just yourself and loved ones. Lowering your own chance of getting sick is part of that. If your habits lead to you getting sick x% of the time, and infecting someone else unknowingly y% of the time, which causes death z% of the time, you can consider your actions to have some statistical likelihood of killing someone. Within reasonable limits, trying to get that xyz lower is part of ones personal responsibility to me. To me it’s not a moral trap to say that people should feel responsibility for their actions beyond their ability to directly trace their actions to a specific harm.

What reasonable limits are, and above that at what point the government should step in and say your actions are too dangerous to your fellow man (or if government should have that power at all) are of course very hard lines to draw.

> I’m very much in support of it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it

Flu vaccine? Smoking cessation? Hand washing? Race/gender/religion sensitivity training?

These seem like pretty basic steps. Should we bar entrance to society based on these?

You are literally not allowed to work in aged care, schools or hospitals without taking a flu vaccine every year. You also can't smoke while in the wards.

It is a firable offense to not wash your hands if you work in a restaurant.

It is a mandate at most companies to take sensitivity training.

Restaurants can reject you for not wearing covered shoes and a suitable jacket.

You replaced "society" with specific and narrow niches of society. That's not the same thing.

You are glossing over what the vaccine mandates actually are. No one has prevented you from existing by not being vaccinated: but across all those areas and others like it, they are requiring you to be vaccinated.

The recent NYC mandate for example is specifically about attending indoor venues on Manhattan island - restaurants and theatres and such.

"Once vaccines are approved for children, I think people's options should be to either vaccinate their child or homeschool them"

Alternative perspective, why should the unvaxed kids be forced into homeschooling? Maybe the parents of vaxed kids should be given the option of putting their vaxed kid in a school that has a mix of vaxed and unvaxed kids, or to homeschool? Given the general demographics of the unvaxed I'd say that's far more likely to happen then a school vax mandate. They would never get away with turning away a bunch of African-American kids going to some of the strapped inner city schools. Food for thought.

An alternative that could happen is vaxed / unvaxed kids in separate classes or schools. Though that wouldn't be possible everywhere.

Some communities will self-organize into highly-vaccinated and scarcely-vaccinated schools. My local schools, for example, will probably be highly vaccinated. A family member of mine is moving to Florida so their children do not have to wear masks in school - theirs will probably have a low vaccination rate.

As for the poor schools, you're right - we have to leave those open.