So? If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to?
The impact on the hospital system could be blunted simply by saying "This wing is for COVID patients, when it fills up further COVID patients will be turned away" and leaving the other wings for normal hospital patients. They have to do this for quarantine reasons anyway. Now that COVID is essentially preventable, it's a huge misallocation of resources to let all the hospital fill up with people who chose not to prevent it while leaving other ER patients to their fate.
> If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to?
There just isn't a way to ensure the "not harming anyone else" with a highly transmissible virus like this, even if we were to somehow convince hospitals to assume the legal and ethical risks of denying treatment to COVID patients when they have room to preserve hospital capacity, and even if that solution didn't expose healthcare workers to unnecessary risks, you would still be exposing other populations to risk who cannot get the vaccine or for whom the vaccine wasn't effective.
If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough, given the tools people have at their disposal, to warrant authoritarian government or societal overreach. That unfortunately hasn't stopped the government, or it's political allies, from trying anyways. I firmly believe this overreach will backfire on the US democrat party and they will feel the backlash in the midterm elections of 2022.
I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.
> If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
Vaccinated people can still get coronavirus variants, albeit with seemingly milder symptoms and at a lower rate. There is some evidence that they can still be transmissible as well.
More importantly, there are also whole categories of people who cannot get vaccinated or who are not allowed to get the second vaccine dose due to an allergic reaction to the first. My mother is in the second category.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/who-cant-have-covid-19-vac...
> If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
Masks work in part by catching and redirecting particles that come out of your own mouth. I am not an epidemiologist and have limited understanding of the effect, but my limited understanding is that models that epidemiologist have used suggest that effect might be more important than the filtering effect of the mask itself given the other mucus membranes like the eyes or gaps in most masks. So your mask helps protect others as much as yourself if you are carrying the virus asymptomatically.
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/covid-19-pandemic-ma...
> I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.
That's a nice false dichotomy you have there. Florida's average death rates in the US despite having a highly vulnerable elderly population prove that.
Of course vaccinated people can still get COVID. Everyone knows that. Why repeat it? The point is that covid becomes a very low risk to the vaccinated. Once vaccinated, you are more likely to die of the flu than of covid.
Most theoretical mask studies were done when we thought COVID was primarily spread by droplets, not aerosols. To this day I haven't seen any study plausibly show that others' masks protect you as much as your own mask. I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there's any real scientific evidence out there.
I'm not sure I understand the Florida example. Deaths per Capita are currently spiking in Florida again and not in places with strong vaccination rates.
The reason I repeat the point about "breakthrough" infections is that vaccinations are not a cure all and we can't just leave everyone to personal responsibility on vaccination/no vaccinations.
Also, importantly, not everyone can get vaccinated, they are more likely to be infected by those unvaccinated and are affected by the unvaccinated's use of our scarce hospital resources.
Mask mandates and higher vaccination rates seem to result in lower infection rates in pretty much every empirical study I've seen. And in places where they are fought tooth and nail like Florida, people disproportionately tend to die.
I was literally in the military and we would train to meet body standards that were based on minimizing the long-term statistical risk of death. We also got vaccined for the same reason. I'm not sympathetic to your argument that a bunch of people should pointlessly die in your wasteland of misinformation so you might feel "free". We didn't say "comrade" so much too.
Okay, now factor in that breakthrough infections are more common in the elderly, can still kill (though rarely), and are more likely to happen the more COVID is circulating in the community, which is then a function of the vaccination rate. My vaccinated grandmother is being put at risk by unvaccinated folks in her town. There's no "independent" risk.
Unrelated, but one thing I've been curious about for a while is: what useful treatments are actually available when you're hospitalized for COVID-19? Is there anything besides intravenous fluids/vitamins and oxygen that is regularly provided? From what I've read, it seems that most people that reach the critical level of needing a ventilator don't recover anyway. Does being hospitalized improve outcomes by a substantial margin? Could people just use oxygen at home?
At that point, you need constant supervision and monitoring from the critical care team. You may be on other forms of life support (IV medications for blood pressure, etc). Your condition could rapidly deteriorate to the point where intubation is called for. It’s not like having a chronic illness where the patient has a home oxygen concentrator.
The various therapeutic treatments (monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma, remdesivir, etc.) are helpful, and need to be administered in a hospital setting (IVs, complications, etc.)
It's hard to isolate the personal risks (illness, long-term complication, death, cost) from the social risks (healthcare resource exhaustion, healthcare worker burden, socialized costs, increased transmission).
But assuming we could, how many people that choose to take the risk are _really_ prepared to accept the downside costs if their number comes up? How many would accept a reduced standard of care (or no care at all) as a risk they assumed? Or would there be much anger, regret, and gnashing of teeth?
Assuming the risk requires a degree of rationality that, while perhaps more common on this site, probably does not characterize the population that would choose to assume the risk...
It’s needs to be a step further though. This wing is for COVID patients who couldn’t be vaccinated for legitimate health risks or for the vaccinated who still get COVID. Anyone who willingly skips the vaccination should not be eligible for COVID ER beds.
The impact on the hospital system could be blunted simply by saying "This wing is for COVID patients, when it fills up further COVID patients will be turned away" and leaving the other wings for normal hospital patients. They have to do this for quarantine reasons anyway. Now that COVID is essentially preventable, it's a huge misallocation of resources to let all the hospital fill up with people who chose not to prevent it while leaving other ER patients to their fate.