[tipsysquid]

>No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.

This is preposterous. Each individual must evaluate their own risk tolerance.

If you're waiting on the world to decide something for you, you're playing life as a waiting game.

Please don't shame people for having a different risk tolerance than you.

[esrauch]

I don't know about this argument in general: it seems about the same as saying we shouldn't criticize people for drinking and driving because they should decide their own risk tolerance. Sure they're deciding the risk to themselves, but they don't necessarily get to unilaterally decide their tolerance to risking others without criticism.

[ck425]

That's a solid metaphor but it ignores that there's a considerable downside to self isolating. No one has major mental health issues because they can't drink drive. If someone proved medically that they had to drink drive or feel suicidal I'd have a hell of a lot more sympathy for them risking it.

[nevinera]

The reason he's confused is that he's thinking of isolation in terms of its impact on community transmission rate. That should definitely be part of your personal calculations (evaluating your personal risk without concern for any risk you create for others is sociopathic, if common).

But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.

Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.

Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.

[InitialLastName]

You don't think that in the next one, people will be more willing to believe that all the freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets actually exist, and that the nurses and doctors all over the world saying "this is really bad" aren't crisis actors? Because I'm inclined to agree we're screwed.