The vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization and/or death from the virus by 20x or more.

That’s pretty great even if not perfect. Much better than we ever had when facing the initial waves of any previous pandemic virus.

Unfortunate that delta and then omicron seem to have bypassed the immunity from getting sick but most of his have had a “mild” sickness many times in our lives and the vaccine will prevent it from getting worse.

I've been telling people to "get it, and get over it" since March 2020. The best thing anyone can do is live a healthy lifestyle, and the majority will be fine.

This was terrible advice. Rate of spread and our inability to treat it early on would have been catastrophic if we took that approach. Like it or not, lockdowns and mitigations were effective at keeping infection rates manageable and our healthcare system functioning.

It's a somewhat more reasonable stance since omicron seeing as our ability to prevent spread is greatly reduced and infection severity is also down, but I haven't been convinced completely yet. The current healthcare "collapse" is a real enough consequence to make me think twice.

You don't care if hospitals hit capacity and healthcare workers become exhausted and people then die from lack of care? Preventing that scenario, which has occurred to varying degrees in many places, is and has always been the primary reason not to spread the virus.

Not to challenge the overall idea too hard, but have you thought about what that really means, to say that? If you extend the IFR of, let's say, 1% to the entire population of (let's pick, for example, the US), would it be acceptable to just let 4,000,000 people die and take no mitigating procedures against that happening?

4 million, my mistake, squeezed an extra zero in there.

Probably depends on a number of factors. If you're 4 years old and the next year is 20% of your life and you may never have this level of social and intellectual plasticity again, you may be way better off being free to intermingle with people and learn to live life at the expense of more dead old people.

If you're old and vulnerable, but not near death, a year of reduced social exposure might be better for you.

Sadly the pandemic measures have forced us to sacrifice one for the other. I fear my toddler's development will always be just a little decayed due to masks during her early linguistic development and being shut in the house during shutdowns. But I also acknowledge some old folks may have been saved at her expense.