I won't argue you needn't worry about long term covid effects but I don't think comparison with polio does much to support that. Polio was known to cause paralysis in some patients since antiquity while covid is essentially a completely new disease that we just don't know that much about yet.

When one is uncertain about a situation, is the path forward to be less cautious?

Common sense suggests under high uncertainty, you try to protect yourself from potential disaster.

Nothing in my comment suggests otherwise.

> Brain scans post COVID show brain matter reduction

This is a bullshit publication, not properly designed. Don't trust every paper that goes out there, more than 60% cannot be replicated.

You got a citation for that?

Considering the global reaction to Covid, it is extremely serious. Anymore and we’d all be living under Beijing style lockdown and traffic light system

This is a false dichotomy.

Bars and clubs in many cities are open and basic infection control measures are not being taken or enforced by significant percentages of staff and patrons alike.

We enforce the laws against smoking indoors more diligently and stringently than we do removal of masks in crowded areas.

If you take issue with this generalization, then you should also take issue with the parent comment's note that 'we' aren't taking it seriously enough.

Some people, cities, states, are being extremely cautious. Some are not. I moved from Bay Area California to bum fuck Florida during COVID, and it's like being in a different timeline.

Personally I'd be in favor of just forcibly vaccinating people and getting it over with already.

People have lived with governments that forced them to do whatever they wanted. With enough support, perhaps we will see those times again.

The government already has such power so let's quit pretending otherwise and use it for the public weal IMO.

There isn't a single country with 100% vaccination rate, I highly doubt there will ever be. Trusting that the definition of "public weal" won't change once given such power is naive. I wish it worked that way.

Again, what I'm telling you is that the government already has extraordinary power to take away your freedoms. Look into American incarceration rates for instance. The bad part of government power I'm supposed to be worried about is already here.

We should start by banning cigarettes. One of the greatest killers ever.

And Im in favor of banning video games, social media and pornography.

Btw, what do you plan to accomplish by assaulting people who don't want it? The virus isnt going away no matter how draconian you get. Just for fun, imagine forcibly vaccinating Afghanistan. Or Central Africa. Not happening. Not without an army (one that can win wars, America’s doesn't count)

> And Im in favor of banning video games, social media and pornography.

Those are quite bad analogies you have there.

Playing video games, reading/posting to social media (assuming you're not posting content inciting violence etc) and watching pornography (or producing pornography, assuming consent of all involved) are not actions that have any significant potential to cause harm to others. I don't mind if somebody spends their entire day jerking off with their left hand while playing video games with their right, all the while posting to Twitter via Siri. I wouldn't personally want to be that person(or follow them on Twitter, for that matter), but it's their life and they're not hurting anybody.

Socializing without taking proper COVID precautions however puts other people at immediate risk. Getting vaccinated is one of the precautions we can take to avoid that, and it has been shown to be tremendously effective. It is also very quick, and very low risk for healthy adults. So it is our social responsibility to get vaccinated.

FWIW, I'm OK with people choosing to not get vaccinated for whatever batshit reason they may cite. Their body, their choice, right? But my body is not their choice. So if they choose to commit to endangering myself and other responsible people, and potentially contribute to overloading the health system we rely on, then I also expect them to accept the necessary consequences: minimizing social contact, getting COVID tests whenever they want to enter any establishment, potentially having to look for a new job that can be done 100% from home, and waiving their right to be treated for any COVID infection they may contract while unprotected.

You clearly haven't read much about the societal impacts of pornography. Being a enthusiastic consumer doesn’t make you am expert.

But, I’ll take you up on your offer. Its better than the one Im currently facing.

You do realize that viral immunity is possible without vaccination, right?

Yeah, the only downside is increased death; continued disruption to the economy and everyday life for everyone, not just the refuseniks themselves; and continued strain on the medical system for no good reason. Otherwise, letting things run their course is just as good.

> Btw, what do you plan to accomplish by assaulting people who don't want it?

Endemic status of the disease, pretty obvious. It's still around but doesn't disrupt daily life that much, like other respiratory illnesses we've had to deal with all along. Curiously the people least willing to take the vaccine seem pretty confident in their ability to shut the border, but having a relatively porous border isn't actually that much of an issue with 100% vaccination.

Thats not what endemic means. Endemic means regularly found. The virus is already endemic throughout the world.

Either way these vaccines will not accomplish your stated goal. The vaccines wear off too quickly. The virus bifurcates too quickly. With Pfizer talking about the need for quad shots, you cant manufacture enough vaccines for the world in the various variants present.

However, forcibly injecting people (legal assault) with the vaccines will create a very angry, motivated, minority. A recipe for a society to descend to hell.

If you're paying much attention, they're using "endemic to refer to a managed, "steady state" of the disease, comparable to other infectious diseases, as opposed to the current, crisis level it's at.

The claim about the vaccines "wearing off" does not seem to be true. Compelling immunization also does not, in my view, constitute "assault," and I don't care if it makes people upset, something you could say about almost any policy imaginable.

So they should use the word “managed”. Endemic has a very specific meaning.

If you haven't seen the push for boosters, seasonal shots, etc then you’re not paying attention.

As to assault, you’re right. Legally, the sovereign cannot assault (not even MBS in SA). that being said what the sovereign is doing easily falls into the common law definition of assault:

“An intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact”

Note the words “offensive”, “contact” and “apprehension”. As my lawyer friend once explained to me, merely touching someone’s arm who you know doesn't want to be touched is assault.

A vaccination necessarily requires that a needle purposely touches, pierces, and injects a foreign substance into another.

If unwanted it constitutes assault, except that the state (as the BLM folks, thankfully, explained last year) has sovereign immunity.

We shut down the economy, forced everyone to stay home, made everyone wear masks, warp speeded multiple vaccines, and still make people wear masks at the doctor and the post office. The world has to keep turning at some point.

And many are fighting all of it every step of the way, even more not in compliance, etc

Because there's more to creating effective public policy than just forcing people to do what "the scientists" say.

People value things differently. There's people who bristle at the idea that the government should coerce them into getting unwanted medical procedures or restrict their movement. There's people who don't believe governments who have badly and repeatedly bungled the response to covid are a reliable or trustworthy authority on the matter.

Not everyone may take covid exactly as seriously as you would wish them to, but it doesn't mean they don't take it seriously just because they value other things more. People going out en masse to protest police brutality for example apparently understood the risks of covid but believed their cause and their right to protest it to be more important. Who are you to say they are wrong? People who understood the risks but believed border closures to be wrong or racist believed that cause was more serious than covid, again who are we to say that's wrong? Do we have some ivory tower of government experts who are there to provide us unthinking plebs with the canonical guide for ranking everything in seriousness and importance?

If we had the government telling us that driving automobiles causes a million deaths every year and the only way to solve it is for everyone to stop driving, but maybe we can start driving again after everyone's cars have been fitted with modifications to limit speed to 5mph which should be at least 90% effective at eliminating hospitalizations and deaths, then they're not exactly _wrong_, but of course people are going to protest it. If you drove anyway that does not mean you don't take automobile accidents seriously, that you're anti science, or that you're a grandma killer. You will certainly statistically increase the load on the hospital system if you drive, that choice does not make you responsible for possible deaths of other people who could not access sufficient medical treatment. Not even if you just went for a drive to the beach, up a mountain, or an aimless drive through the streets just because you enjoyed it.

It's 30-40,000 automobile deaths a year, which is bad enough.

If it were a million, I certainly hope the government would step in. And if you drove anyway, illegally, knowing that it caused a million deaths a year, it would reveal you to be an anti-science grandma killer, yes.

I was talking global but sure in USA 40,000 per year. So an ongoing disaster of a far larger magnitude than covid all told, which is only 20 years worth of automobile deaths so far.

So my point stands for USA as well. And we're generally not talking about crimes here, we're talking about people deciding not to wear masks, not to get vaccines, or to attend events or go about in public or go to work perhaps against advice of experts, but not breaking criminal laws.

And who are you to be the decider of what exact number is acceptable or not? Who are you to say 40k/yr is okay? Some people surely believe that's far too many, so are you an anti science grandma killer for driving? No. Neither is someone who doesn't get vaccinated, doesn't wear a mask in public, and doesn't shut themselves in their homes and avoid going out in public.

Can you not see that people can have different thoughts and values, assess risks differently, or have different opinions on the trustworthiness of government advice, without being evil boogymen?

"So an ongoing disaster of a far larger magnitude than covid all told, which is only 20 years worth of automobile deaths so far."

I'm sorry, this sentence makes no sense. 40k annual auto deaths is of larger magnitude than 400,000 annual covid deaths? Are you saying that auto deaths are a more serious phenomenon because covid is . . . new?

I certainly think 40,000 auto deaths is far too many. I would love to see the government step in with safety measures, as some levels of government have done for covid. We have indoor mask mandates where I live, as well as vaccine mandates for a number of public-facing job categories.

People certainly have different thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are muddled.

No, I'm saying covid in the US has caused about 20 years worth of auto accidents, and with vaccinations and natural immunity and the pandemic running its course, it's not likely to reach the scale of the ongoing automobile disaster, which has been over 20k/yr for about 100 years and total might have killed about 3 million people and will continue to kill tens of thousands of people very year for many years to come.

If covid does somehow reach that scale, then automobile deaths is still a perfectly valid comparison to use.

And so my point stands. People aren't monsters, evil bigots, anti science or grandma killers for choosing to drive places, even though statistically that will result in increased deaths and increased load on the hospital system. They would also not be any of those things if they protested government bans on driving.

I'm repeating myself though. If you simply can't accept that anybody could reasonably have a different opinion about things than you without being anti-science or evil or stupid or bigoted, I don't think you'll be able to understand or accept my point.

I'm not sure driving is a great analogy to taking/not taking a vaccine or refusing to follow COVID restrictions, but if we do, we also need to consider this:

When driving, you can exercise caution and attempt to minimize the risk of an accident. I'm not from the US, but where I'm from you're also legally obligated to do so - if I drive and hit somebody, and it turns out I did so because I was going too fast or not paying proper attention to my surroundings, I will be held responsible for their injuries and damages.

Further, there are laws stipulating what safety requirements newly sold cars have to meet: again, this may vary by country/state etc, but fairly common requirements are having an air bag and seat belts (which you are legally obligated to wear where I'm from, and you will be fined if you do not).

I would say that the rules governing driving can be considered analogous to those governing social distancing, masking etc. And the safety guidelines for car manufacturers can correspond to vaccine mandates.

Of course you are free to refuse to follow driving rules, but the only legal way to do so is to refuse to drive a car entirely. Just as you can be responsible and stay at home and avoid contact with anybody as much as possible if you refuse to be vaccinated.

Driving is a fine analogy in my opinion. It doesn't have to be 100% exact identical to the other situation to be able to explore the idea and consider different perspectives on the argument.

Not wearing masks or shutting down the economy for the flu and common cold, obesity, driving cars, extreme sports, and more are all great analogies you can use to explore logical consequences of various measures or lack of measures being advocated for dealing with covid.

Maybe gun violence is the best analogy, as it is a situation where people's preferences and convenience are given priority over thousands of other people's lives.

Maybe. I think automobiles is better because preventing driving prevents automobile deaths, so there is a pretty reasonable case to make that it is a necessary and sufficient measure to end deaths from car crashes. Pretty hard to rebut the automobile analogy, isn't it?

Gun violence is illegal and quite significantly committed with illegally obtained guns and particularly pistols. So banning or increasing legal controls on rifles (for example) would not be an evidence based policy for reducing the largest sources of gun violence. Unless you are drawing parallels with the relatively low effectiveness of vaccines, but even then I don't think vaccines are quite that bad :)

Forget cars. Think cigarettes. They kill way more people every year and even if we banned it tomorrow it would keep on killing for the next 20 years

Obesity too. As well as the injury to the sufferers, load they put on the hospital and healthcare system, and wider society is just staggering. Hundreds of billions, or about 20% of annual medical spending in the United States is due to obesity.

And yet I would never ever advocate for restaurants to demand BMI licenses for service, people denied jobs or freedom to travel or freedom to buy and eat the food they want to combat this, or forced gastric surgery "for the greater good". It would be horrific and inhumane.

If you could transfer your obesity and smoking habit to me by being too close to me at Target it would be a good comparison. Kill yourself however you please by all means.

Transmission according to the CDC involves prolonged close contact. Not very likely that you are going to catch it by a random choice encounter at target

And if you're so irrationally petrified of catching it despite being vaccinated you can choose to shut yourself in your house.

It's not like you can't catch it from vaccinated people, even if you could somehow tell them apart.

No, obesity puts a huge load on the hospital system and therefore deprive others of health care. This is one of the arguments used to bully people who don't want to be vaccinated.

If there was a vaccine for obesity i would absolutely bully you into getting it for the same reason

Yep, people seem to forget history. The polio vaccine had issues when it was rolled out in 1955. No one bats an eye taking it today because it saves lives.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

If only it were true that "nobody bats an eye" at taking various vaccinations that have been used safely for decades.

I remember before covid, Marin county was the antivax central, with mostly wealthy hippies that refused to give smallpox and measles vaccines to their kids. They had measles, whooping cough, all those old diseases.

At Greenwood School in Mill Valley, 61 percent of the kindergartners are partially or completely unvaccinated, according to state figures. At San Geronimo Valley Elementary in San Geronimo, 58 percent of the kindergarten children are partially or completely unvaccinated. Half the children at the New Village School in Sausalito are in the same boat, according to the health department.

https://www.kqed.org/news/107741/despite-the-science-marin-v...

https://www.marinij.com/2015/01/31/california-measles-outbre...

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/whooping-cough-returns-to-mari...

There is certainly a subculture that rejected vaccines in general long before covid.

>No one bats an eye taking it today because it saves lives.

It saved lives in 1955. No one bats an eye taking it today because we know it's safe.

You've been breaking the site guidelines a ton - posting flamewar comments as well as routinely being snarky and aggressive. This is not ok on HN. I've banned your account until we get some indication that you intend to, and will, follow the site guidelines in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you review them and decide that you want to actually follow them, you're welcome to email us at [email protected].

I understand your sentiment, around people treating different diseases differently, but I am also not so sure that comparing polio and SARS-CoV-2 makes sense. Polio created a lot of psychological fear due to the graphic imagery of children dying or becoming permanently deformed. The WHO says (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelit...) that 1 in 200 infected with polio experience irreversible paralysis (usually the legs), and 5-10% of those with paralysis die, meaning the IFR was 0.025%. The IFR for COVID-19 is incredibly low for those under 50, as most of the deaths impacted senior citizens. Even the CDC's conservative planning scenarios (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...) use a planning IFR for minors of 20 in 1M infections (0.002%) - which is an order of magnitude less than polio.

The side effects you called out (like loss of smell) are rare to begin with, subside over time for most people, and aren't as serious as having to live on an iron lung. Additionally, it isn't clear if "long COVID" is even a real thing or just a casual/imprecise term for the unknown. My speculation is that many illnesses like the common cold have similar side effects, but we're only now rigorously studying and measuring them because of the prominence of COVID-19 in the public's mind.

I would also point out that there are potential consequences from a lot of things we've done in response to COVID. Limiting social interaction, hiding faces/emotions, reducing oxygen intake via masks, normalizing government overreach, hurting the economy, keeping children out of schools, and so on can have impacts we don't yet understand. And then there's the potential for vaccines to have some kind of long-term side effect of their own. My sense of the probabilities and risks is that it is preferable to take the vaccine, implement some basic hygiene protocol, and avoid the worst of it. But I also feel there is a fairly wide spectrum of reasonable choices and policies in this situation.

I'm also not sure what you're expecting in terms of taking it "seriously". COVID is going to be endemic. Everyone will be exposed to it over time. In terms of government intervention, I don't think it ever made sense to do more than 'flattening the curve', and even that was perhaps a step too far since those who are healthy and under 50 can more or less treat COVID like any other common illness. It may have even been preferable for that group to simply contract it and build up antibodies so that others who are more vulnerable could re-enter society with a lesser chance of transmission.

> loss of smell is rare

Not sure if 20% (at least for the original strain) qualifies as rare. And, it doesn't matter if it goes away after months, the question is - is there long term neurological damage from that process.

> reducing oxygen intake via masks

This is not true. Breathing is more difficult but oxygen intake is the same. Especially for n95 designs which have really tiny volume

> I'm also not sure what you're expecting in terms of taking it "seriously"

I mean that there is real chance of serious brain damage and long term consequences due to neuroinvasion. Instead we're thinking of COVID as if its the flu or cold.

> My speculation is that many illnesses like the common cold have similar side effects, but we're only now rigorously studying and measuring them because of the prominence of COVID-19 in the public's mind.

In one of the brain studies, they specifically compared with flu. With COVID, T-cells are found in the brain (i.e. neuroinflammation): https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/14071437500323635... - with flu, there isn't anything like that at all.

And this is precisely what I mean - its in the general mindset to treat SARS-2 like the flu. We think flu, we think fatality rates etc - we dismiss long term consequences, we dismiss long covid brain fog as psychological. I think that's a fatal mistake. It may not be Polio exactly, but it should be placed at similar distance from the flu in our minds.

The writing is all over the wall, but we're in optimistic denial, trying to cope, grasping at any (sophisticated) potential straws.

> Not sure if 20% (at least for the original strain) qualifies as rare

Even for the original strain a year after most people have recovered their sense of smell. This is not a long term effect.

We can split hairs about what constitutes "long-term" and what doesn't, but if I can't smell anything for a year - not knowing for sure if I ever again will be able to - I'd consider that pretty devastating.

The point is that there are basic steps (vaccination being one, but not the only) that too many people still refuse to follow that can spare many people from having to wonder if they will ever be able to smell again (or worse).

> We can split hairs about what constitutes "long-term" and what doesn't,

Pretty easy to define. Long-term = chronic illness. There are tons of such conditions around. Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriasis, or even viral infections with flares that never go away for the lack of good cures. 1 year is nothing.

> too many people still refuse to follow that can spare many people from having to wonder if they will ever be able to smell again (or worse).

What a ridiculous position to have. You also have a simple way to avoid STDs, is to never have sex in your life ever again. If you want to avoid risks at all costs, you don't have a life anymore.

> Pretty easy to define. Long-term = chronic illness.

Not that easy. If I'm unable to exercise for a year due to COVID complications, that is a major life changing event and has long-term impact. Does it have permanent impact on my health? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly enough that I want people to take this shit seriously.

> You also have a simple way to avoid STDs, is to never have sex in your life ever again.

Fortunately I don't have to, because we have condoms. Do you see where I'm going with this?

> those who are healthy and under 50 can more or less treat COVID like any other common illness.

That's best proof that we need more serious studies on its long term effect, instead of just judging by acute symptoms.

Does human know if COVID-19 make you older and mentally/intelligently affected?

> those who are healthy and under 50 can more or less treat COVID like any other common illness.

Is that true? I thought that changed with the variants?

This data should reflect changes in risk to the young as the distribution of variants changed.

https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html