For example: HIV is something that is now endemic and (still) deadly. And yet we don't go around forcibly shutting down gay bathhouses, bars, and Grindr and implementing condom and prep mandates, even though they would be effective at reducing its spread. And for good reason: it'd be a massive (and homophobic) violation of civil liberties.
But because mask and vaccine resistance is red tribe coded, a lot of people who would usually be level-headed about epidemiology and cost-benefit analyses end up in a stance driven more by moralizing than sound science.
Ultimately these interventions, mandates and other public health measures, which wind up as a mix of education, awareness and mandates or laws become a balancing act between personal inconvenience and public good; so the work done for HIV is different from the intervention for covid-19 for that and other reasons.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't strongly encourage vaccines. But there is a difference between education/awareness campaigns and a mandates.
The same people trying to prevent unvaccinated people from being a part of society would have flipped out if you had to show PrEP status at gay bars in 2019.
>Knowingly infecting someone or non disclosure of positive infection status during possible transmission activities is a jailable offense.
But you aren't charged just because you don't wear a condom or take PrEP while you don't know you have HIV.
Did they? Seems laws have only gone one way, decriminalizing since the late 70s
That's less true with Covid given its contagiousness through the air.
I'm of the opinion that private companies have every right to require restrictions they see fit. I'm more mixed about government restrictions now that we're post vaccine (with the exception that requiring vaccine mandates for healthcare workers seems reasonable).
What gets to me about this whole thing is it's not binary but people often talk like it is (probably just political tribalism).
Vaccinated people who are infected spread the disease like the unvaccinated, that's true - but since vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected on exposure things like the vaccine mandates for restaurant entry do have an affect and are not just theater. They reduce the overall probability of positive people in the restaurant.
I think people like Bret Weinstein have done a lot of harm and I'm often surprised by the extent to which intelligence is independent from accuracy.
It's really interesting in the context of this book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Basically, the argument in that is a little reason (incompletely applied or understood) can be a dangerous thing and blindly following consensus is sometimes the adaptive behavior. It's a little misapplied to vaccines since in that case someone did actually know the details and understand the mechanism, but it's possible for a cultural understanding to be entirely selected by natural selection and the reason for it was never understood by anyone!
When we see animals do complex behavior we don't usually assume it's because they understand fully why that mechanism is adaptive, but we often misapply this understanding to ourselves.
Mostly getting off topic, but I thought this was an interesting thing to think about.
With Omicron, vaccinated people are MORE likely to get infected, 90 days post-vaccine.
Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...
The source link supports that claim as far as I can tell from what's on that page and doesn't say anything about vaccinated people being more likely to get infected vs. unvaccinated (both without natural immunity).
The infection rate 60 days post-vaccination were higher in the vaccine group.
Yeah, I think it's more likely that this is the explanation. At least I'd need to be persuaded that the more unlikely explanation is the correct one.
Source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-co...
And, of course, we do have an absolute shit ton of mandated vaccines, so mandating one for Covid is not at all novel. It's even already a condition of federal employment in a lot of cases. If you're serving in the state department or military or something where you need to go overseas to places where anthrax or malaria are risks, you need to get vaccinated, and that's been normal and in-bounds for half a century.
Actually, following some FUD by a now famous doctor, this had a lot of political and popular support back then: https://www.congress.gov/98/crecb/1983/07/14/GPO-CRECB-1983-...
Check page 28, July 14 1983.
Mask and vaccine resistance is stupid tribe coded, even if now there might be some valid reasons for talking about it. Stupid tribe and red tribe do happen to overlap, but it's the stupid part that upsets people so universally, not the red part.
Also, HIV is not even remotely as contagious as SARS-CoV-2, so it's not really a fair comparison. We absolutely would have shut down whatever we needed to if HIV were airborne.
I would likely find myself much more reluctant to get vaccinated if the person attempting to convince me is calling me an idiot and just shouting that i’m wrong instead of providing me data on the subject, and being honest enough to openly discuss the subject.
A small amount of humility and respect go a very long way.
It was an abjectly stupid position, held by stupid people. Now, it's possible that the situation has changed and it's marginally less stupid of a position, or even not a stupid position at all, given new information.
It's hard for people to make that switch.
I think this Fridman podcast interview explored such things, either way it was quite informative on the subject:
AFAIK that's not true.
1-3 days of additional self-quarantine solves this issue.
I agree that, for the average person, COVID is easier to contract than HIV. But by the same token, COVID is much less severe than HIV, even with modern treatment plans. It's not at core about some abstract principle about how preventing disease spread trumps all other concerns but is instead a cost benefit analysis. Keeping the country shut down perpetually is an extreme cost that we are continually incurring.
Which country is this that is perpetually shut down? Even the most mask and vaccine forward (ergo "shut down perpetually") parts of the US are pretty operational. Offices are open as are restaurants and schools Disneyland is packed.
We've learned how to keep society running during the pandemic: vaccines, masks, testing, and occasionally heightened indoor occupancy restrictions during large waves to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
That's nothing at all like a "perpetual shutdown".
Nope. The existence of simple, effective countermeasures and ease of accessing them set the level of moral culpability for refusing and then infecting someone else as a result.
I'd agree that the cost-benefit is nearing the point of "fuck it, let the selfish jerks have what they want."
It's far easier to accidentally infect someone with COVID than it is to infect someone with HIV, and the harm of the former is less than the harm of the latter. The latter per incident is significantly more costly to society as well.
Should the government require Grindr and gay bars to require customers to show an up-to-date negative status and proof of being on PreP in order to be allowed to participate? With poz people banned from participating at the venue/platform?
Do you have a source for this? This wouldn't surprise me for the Omicron variant, but I'm surprised that (for example) someone getting the Delta variant in 2021 was "much less severe" than someone getting HIV in 2021.
HIV was and is invariably fatal. Yes, current drug regimens are remarkably effective. They are also very complex, required for the rest of your life, and do not affect the odds of you infecting someone else by unprotected sex.
*No one*, not even the most ill centenarian, would choose HIV over COVID19 if required to be infected by one.
I'm still amazed that the person I responded to thought that HIV would be preferable to COVID19! What does that say about the effectiveness, so to speak, of media campaigns about COVID19's dangers?
In abstract, given the choice between something that had a (say) 30% chance to kill me but was mostly harmless in the long-run and HIV, I would "prefer" the former over the latter. But I also think that the former is more severe. In my view you're equating two things which are not the same.
For some context, I lost 6 family members in a short period of time to the Delta variant of COVID. My experience with COVID is not "media campaigns" but funerals.
You wrote
>I'm surprised that (for example) someone getting the Delta variant in 2021 was "much less severe" than someone getting HIV in 2021.
I do not think that my
>No one, not even the most ill centenarian, would choose HIV over COVID19 if required to be infected by one.
and
>I'm still amazed that the person I responded to thought that HIV would be preferable to COVID19!
are so far off.
>In abstract, given the choice between something that had a (say) 30% chance to kill me but was mostly harmless in the long-run and HIV, I would "prefer" the former over the latter.
If the only two choices were infection by something that had a 30% chance to kill me, or HIV (presumably followed by the appropriate drug regimen to control it), I think I'd probably take HIV!
But that's not a choice between COVID19 and HIV. Let me repeat: COVID19 has a 0.6% IFR. Yes, IFR increases by age, but even 85-year olds' IFR is 15%; not great, but (as I understand it) pretty comparable to the flu for the cohort.
>But I also think that the former is more severe.
This is more support for the accuracy of my paraphrasing of you.
>For some context, I lost 6 family members in a short period of time to the Delta variant of COVID. My experience with COVID is not "media campaigns" but funerals.
I am sorry to hear that about your family. But (thankfully for society, if not so much for you or your loved ones) your experience is very atypical. Unless all had multiple comorbidities (immune suppression + obesity + something else), what happened to your family members was very, very, very rare.
Agreed, I wasn't attempting to extrapolate it over the general population. But you may consider your "media campaigns" comment from my POV.
The point I was attempting to make is that (as a relatively young man) I would risk many illnesses over a long-term debilitating illness that affected my sexual health, even if the former were objectively worse for my overall health. That's why I don't think severity and preference are necessarily correlated. Anyway, the "8 replies deep semantics argument" is not a good use of time for either of us, especially since I don't think our viewpoints are that far off.
If nothing else, I have learned more about HIV from this subthread than I expected, so there is that.
> The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency. It doesn’t mean that COVID-19 will come to a natural end.
> In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.
> Stating that an infection will become endemic says nothing about how long it might take to reach stasis, what the case rates, morbidity levels or death rates will be or, crucially, how much of a population — and which sectors — will be susceptible. Nor does it suggest guaranteed stability: there can still be disruptive waves from endemic infections, as seen with the US measles outbreak in 2019. Health policies and individual behaviour will determine what form — out of many possibilities — endemic COVID-19 takes.