[mathverse]

I am sorry but no. I have already lost 2 years of my life just following and obeying the orders. Enough is enough.

This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.

[gruturo]

I hate to break it to you, but a virus doesn't really care if you're sick and tired of the situation. It sucks, yeah. No, it's not OK to stop caring only because it's been so long. The socially responsible behavior is still the best course for an individual, even if surrounded by morons.

[junon]

"I'm inconvenienced and no longer care if others die because of it!"

[mathverse]

"I am not arguing in good faith nor do I have an ounce of empathy for someone that have not seen family and loved ones for more than 2 years".

[junon]

I'll be sure to tell that to my neighbor who lost both of her parents and a sister to COVID before the vaccines were available. I'm sure she'll understand.

If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.

I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.

We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.

[mathverse]

Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.

>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith. We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.

Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?

[junon]

> Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.

Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.

> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?

My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.

[lobocinza]

> Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.

In pandemic times medical community matters more but nobody should be the only one making decisions about the life of others. People on the front-line lack insight about everything else that's happening. And experts on other fields and even politicians know things that epidemiologists don't. This has gone too far.

There are many bright individuals around the world that could contribute to this fight but as long as their opinion goes against the built consensus they will stand no chance of getting heard. As a global society we are committing all in to a local optima that sucks.

For the last two years I tried my best to stay at home and used respirators even at outdoors. Please see that politicians are the ones that benefits from this new status quo because on this long lasting and seemingly eternal crisis they have absolute power over people freedom to travel, to gather and to express on public. This being the new normal scares me.

[RobertoG]

There is not realistic healthcare infrastructure that could compensate for exponential grow of patients.

[Dumblydorr]

How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.

And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.

So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.

[techdragon]

Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity and attempt efforts at preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals available to staff those hospitals. In fact a lot of countries have an artificial cap on the number of doctors and nurses which is driven by various medical professional associations, the government could easily have said “STFU, well take as many doctors and nurses as the universities can graduate” to these “industry self regulations”.

[chimprich]

> Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity

The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.

> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals

What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.

[techdragon]

I did mention the fact that in many countries the medical students are put through a course structure designed not just around individual achievement on simple academic competency, but aimed and structured sometimes explicitly capped to only graduate a fixed number of doctors. Many put forward justification for this such as “there aren’t enough placements in the field once they graduate” and other semi-valid arguments to put downward pressure on the number of doctors able to and willing to (many migrate to other non “doctor” fields after the first few years of medical school) finish a medical school education as a doctor capable of working with patients on the front line.

I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.

[tomp]

> You can't train a doctor in 2 years

Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?

Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.

[1] https://pmj.bmj.com/content/96/1137/375

[corinroyal]

Maybe if more people voted for the party that typically funds healthcare, instead of the one that tends to defund healthcare, we would be further along on hospital capacity. There's only so much democrats can do when republicans insist on opposing everything sensible just because the hated opposition supports it.

[techdragon]

That’s certainly one element of what’s happened in the USA… but I was trying to keep a more global perspective as the fact we are clearly watching the development of what may become an endemic infection like the seasonal influenza virus waves currently are makes it more clear than ever that in the long term this is a massive global issue we need to be coordinating better on.

The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.

[blain]

For starters I would want my government to change the narrative. They should do their own independent research and present their own facts. Instead they blindly buy vaccines from US and repeat the agenda as everyone else.

There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.

[mathverse]

>How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.

This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.

>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.

This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying. Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.

>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.

I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.

[chimprich]

Threats don't disappear just because you feel the solution is inconvenient to you.

[lobocinza]

Covid is not the only threat. And what is being labeled as convenience sometimes is just physical/mental health. How I'm supposed to exercise, be healthy and productive by staying indoors all the time? Also, am I supposed to substitute IRL social activities with video calls and social media?

Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.

[Bud]

"You lost"? You?

This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.

You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.

As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.

[_moof]

Over 800,000 people in Europe have lost a lot more than two years.

I understand that it's been a long time and you're frustrated, but this simply isn't over yet, and the consequences are real.

[kingkawn]

You’ll learn the hard way then not to address nature at your convenience

[Mistletoe]

It’s wild how few campaigns I am seeing for vaccination. I want 1950s era propaganda posters on every street corner and at every tv and radio break until we get these numbers to 100%.

[Bud]

We had plenty of posters and advertising on this. Vaccination rates were great in early 2021, before an entire major political party decided to cynically pretend that fighting vaccination was somehow defending "freedom".