[macintux]

Given the disaster that has been south Texas healthcare for the last week or two, that hardly seems like a ringing endorsement.

It’s not all about personal choice. Everyone is impacted by the decisions we make.

How many healthcare personnel have to die so people can go to the bar?

[Covzire]

Great, now apply that logic to automobiles in general.

I think more people understand the situation with COVID than some realize, that it's a trainwreck from top to bottom and a lot of the decisions being made are far more political than they should be, as evidenced by the sheer amount of hypocrisy surrounding the supposed safety of protesting for left wing causes vs anything else. Even if you're totally right, the optics of this hypocrisy have created a permanent and un-mendable fracture where a large chunk of the country is never going to believe anything Coumo or De Belasio say about COVID.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Great, now apply that logic to automobiles in general.

Do automobile accidents experience exponential growth? If so, I guarantee they'd get the exact same treatment.

Or guess what else with your auto example. Drinking and driving. You don't get free reign to do so because society shouldn't have to pay your costs for you.

[Covzire]

> experience exponential growth?

Exponential growth of the spread isn't the same thing as exponential growth of mortality rates. By now we know that virtually no children are affected by it at all. The most vulnerable are 60+ with preexisting health conditions. The very same kind of people Governor Coumo and a few other governors in the country put at risk by forcing COVID19 positive patients into nursing homes.

They've pushed the disease on the most vulnerable while making the least vulnerable afraid of their own shadow, literally, so they stay home and afraid and unable to work in many cases.

[BoiledCabbage]

I think you may be missing something fairly fundamental about the math.

If you're seeing exponential spread, and a fixed portion of people die from it (whatever portion you'd prefer to define), that means you also have exponential growth of mortality from it .

Maybe that's the issue here.

[raisedbyninjas]

There seems like a difference in utility between automobiles and getting drunk in pubs. I can't quite put my finger on it though.

[munificent]

A lot of psychological literature shows that one of the most important factors in a long, healthy, happy life is being part of close-knit social fabric, so it may be that "getting drunk in pubs" has the greater utility.

[dehrmann]

> the sheer amount of hypocrisy surrounding the supposed safety of protesting for left wing causes vs anything else

Even if these protests have been have been relatively safe, I worry about a publication bias with those findings (publishing that the protests spread covid would be politically risky) and, more importantly, the lack of criticism essentially gave people permission to go have their own gatherings.