[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.

[corinroyal]

This global pandemic is highly inconvenient to me, so I demand to be able to take actions which are likely to worsen and prolong it.

[lobocinza]

Of course, because there's no local context and you have all the information required to infer that. If you're in Europe I understand but in my local context "staying at home" as I was doing would have a near zero impact on improving this global pandemic while being a huge cost for my well-being and health.

I live in a poor country with cases slowly approaching zero, a high vaccination rate and in the midst of the hot/humid season. Also staying at home is a luxury that the large majority of the population can't afford so my decision has a linear effect because nobody on my neighborhood will be "staying at home" or using masks anyways. Right now poverty and hunger are more of an issue than Covid.

Oh yeah let's ignore all the economical, social and health issues that are side effect of the "staying at home" and insist on social shaming and in a policy that is unsustainable. Let's adopt a dogmatic approach to solve novel issues.

If you want to shorten the global pandemic please lobby your politicians into not holding but subsidizing vaccines to poor countries.

I'm a supporter of building longer term effects that contribute into making society more robust against Covid and other kinds of airborne diseases. Like proper indoor ventilation in public spaces, load balancing, better respirators for daily use. Improved vaccine manufacturing capability and shorter lead times for vaccine development. I understand that they are not mutually exclusively in theory but there's so much we can lobby for at the same time and I prefer not to waste it.