No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.)
That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.
There are other metrics beside “least fatalities” to factor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment would be just fine without that swipe.
The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion meaningless and honestly a little stunning.
Correct. Instead it was agenda driven sarcasm, which while not forbidden on HN, adds nothing to, and always lowers the quality of discussion.
Rather than take the emotional bait and be sarcastic in return, the person who responded pointed out the misrepresentation that was behind the sarcasm, which is the most civil way to address it.
Their response was far more measured and constructive than the "take it to Reddit" response that the parent comment type usually elicits. There was absolutely nothing stunning about it - rather it was a standard civil response method in a debate whose civility has been lowered through sarcasm.
The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid.
There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.
It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US.
South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding.
The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread.
That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it
And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask.
And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?
Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you.
(P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)
“Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036
Study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
You're leaving out the context: they can be just as infectious once they become infected, which is significantly less likely for those who are fully vaccinated.
Vaccines significantly reduce the transmissability of the virus by making it less likely for those vaccinated to become infected, NOT by making them less infectious if they are infected.
None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.
Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.
Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool.
It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.
I wasn’t making any judgment about the woman yelling at people, I’d be mad if I was being threatened with fines by the local government for having maskless people in my establishment too.
Ha. Perhaps she was mad because she was at risk of being exposed to Covid all day long due to boneheads who were incapable of reading, or wearing a mask, and some of them turned around and gave her grief for it?
The idea that once you are vaccinated you don't need to social distance or wear a mask is wrong and is getting people sick. In fact a vaccinated infection appears to have the same viral load as an unvaccinated. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
If I'm out in public, I wear socks everyday (well most), I wear a shirt, I wear pants. Its not much of a stretch to wear a mask out in public too.
Vaccinated people also have a lower rate of transmission.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... (table 5 page 19)
Your second statement is categorically false. See my comment above... you know the one you responded too. It actually links to a study showing the viral load is the same. Or here is another study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Please stop spreading misinformation. Saying vaccinated people have a lower chance of getting covid is a true statement. However both of your statements are straight up misinformation.
Please take a look at the rest of the thread for sources that vaccinated individuals spread covid at lower rates than the unvaccinated.
Please stop spreading antivax FUD.
By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...
In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.
Those restrictions are on their way out:
https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i...
> Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes.
Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place.
This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing.
Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.
I'm in the East Bay, and most of what you have described - people at the park wearing masks, riding bikes or skateboards with masks, nannies wearing masks - are voluntary behaviors not mandated by any authority.
Why does it matter to you what measures others take to protect themselves from the virus voluntarily, and which is totally within their personal liberty to do? Does it offend your sensibilities somehow? Should they not be wearing masks to make you feel like things are "normal" per your definition?
The other cases you raise -retail, restaurant, and daycare - all have very specific risks either due to density or because unvaccinated children are present.
It is "normal" now because I can go shopping or to a restaurant, have a drink at my neighborhood bar, take my kids to school, fly somewhere on vacation, have a gathering in my house, attend public events (Halloween was huge in my neighborhood) - everything I did before the pandemic - with the tiny inconvenience of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when indoors in public.
Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was shouting at a woman to put on a mask, then was yelling at the same woman to leave because she refused to comply. I’m glad she didn’t see me because I literally didn’t think to bring a mask with me and needed to run to the restroom.
I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.