Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by moron4hire 1481 days ago
This is the sort of technically correct that functionally doesn't help anyone, like arguing "guns don't kill people, bullets do".

If you intentionally broke quarantine, knowing you were sick, knowing you could get other people such, yes, you killed that person. That is not controversial.

2 comments

> If you intentionally broke quarantine, knowing you were sick, knowing you could get other people such, yes, you killed that person. That is not controversial.

Do you feel that way for all communicable diseases or only for Covid?

If you have AIDS, hide it from your partners, don’t use protection and happen to get someone infected…

I think we can both agree this isn’t some Covid slippery slope.

That's a wildly extreme example to compare going outside with Covid to.

Given that you are incredibly unlikely to kill someone by going out when you have Covid, this is more like going to work when you have a minor respiratory infection, which many people do, and are even sometimes tacitly encouraged to do so by their employers. As a society we haven't typically referred to those people as killers, even though there is a small risk that, for example, they have influenza, pass it on to someone who is vulnerable, and that person dies. It is clearly inconsistent to treat that situation differently to someone who goes out while they have Covid.

Honestly we'd probably be a lot better of if we handled lesser diseases with some more selfimposed responsibility and societal scorn. At least the way much of east asia started operating following sars and bird flu. (wearing masks if they suspected they or people around them were ill even without a new pandemic around well before corona)

Not because we should be scared of the risk of dying or infecting someone else that could die of it (tho that's certainly a good argument for wearing a mask when suspecting you have the flu) but because that person could infect another few, and they another few and oh woops flu season with 3-5 billion in economic damage in the US alone from a single shitty disease let alone others.

Countries with habitual mask usage have flu seasons just like the rest. Has it ever been studied whether it has a measurable impact at population scale? I'm skeptical.
I'm not surprised by the downvotes, but if you can manage to form a counterpoint more sophisticated than clicking "down", please do!
> If you intentionally [...] knowing [...] knowing

This hardly seems relevant to mosquitos.