Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by deanc 1788 days ago
As I mentioned in my comment, many folks have families. We are not dealing with individuals when it comes to a pandemic. We are dealing with contagion amongst bubbles of people. Many people have vulnerable people in their bubbles at home and need to make a living.
1 comments
joshuahughes 1788 days ago
But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily. What has changed with covid to create so much additional fear and the subsequent authoritarian responses? Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill. What's changed that now a particular course of action has to be mandated with the threat of job-loss as the alternative?

Seems to me that those who are concerned about unfairness for one group are simply transferring that unfairness to another group.

link
deanc 1788 days ago
> But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily.

Because covid is more transmissible [1], more dangerous, has far longer lasting effects (long-covid), and because vaccines for non-covid viruses are generally more effective to _immunocompromised people_ as we've had longer to deal with them.

Furthermore, flu has been around for generations. We've all probably had some variant of it in our lives, and have some level of immunity. Covid is entirely new. It's far easier to rip through the population and get into the proximity of vulnerable people than flu.

> Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill.

Sure. Except you don't know you're ill. A majority of people will be asymptomatic and spreading it without knowing. This is what is happening in the UK right now.

link
VBprogrammer 1787 days ago
I'm personally feeling pretty uncomfortable with comparisons to flu and the cold today.

One of the guys on my team has just got out of hospital, he is in his mid-20s with no underlying conditions. Yet when be caught Covid he ended up in hospital on oxygen, was admitted to ICU, there was talk of him having to be intubated before he started to recover. That doesn't sound like a sniffly nose or a bad case of the runs to me.

I know it's only an anecdote, a single data point, but it means a lot more to me.

link
himinlomax 1787 days ago
Why is it there is no lock down for the flu?

Answer: it's not the same disease.

link