[mschuster91]

> Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.

Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.

Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01702-2

[paul_f]

This is nonsense. Omicron is quite mild compared to the original strain. Death rates from COVID in western countries is now minimal. Time to move on

[mschuster91]

Death is not the only metric that has an economic impact, that is the point.

Yes, COVID is by far less deadly now than it was in the beginning, thanks to vaccines, medication and treatment knowledge. Nevertheless: When hundreds of thousands of people, especially in industries that make close contact with random people necessary such as healthcare, hospitality and public transport, get sick for weeks, the economy still suffers.

Or, to use a pun I'd hoped to be able to avoid, but the opportunity is too good: How can we move on from the pandemic when public transport literally [1] doesn't move? How are people supposed to go to work when entire train grid cells are not working because the signalling controllers all have COVID?

[1] https://www.hessenschau.de/wirtschaft/corona-und-stellenabba...

[wesleywt]

After years of covid we still are getting ignorant comments like this.

[yonaguska]

Was your friend vaccinated? From my own anecdotal experience, all of my triple vaccinated friends and coworkers are catching covid several times a year, while myself and my family that are unvaccinated, haven't been seriously sick from covid except once. I caught it once, very bad early on, and then was out for a week about a year and a half later, but have had countless covid exposures with no issues.

One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.

[euix]

This has been my experience as well. Among those who I know who contracted Covid, either this year or last, all had >=2 shots. None of them ended up hospitalized, but did get very sick, bedridden, trouble breathing, no sense of taste, etc - I never took any shots and have yet to experience Covid that I know of.

Just lucky? Maybe, but there should be enough statistical data to find out the efficacy of the Covid shots versus baseline by demographic - I be really curious to find out how much marginal gain there is in for those who are young and healthy, you have to also slice up the data by variant - because I suspect it wasn't worth all the coercion around taking it. And that I think will have political ramifications in Western democracies terms of the amount of societal, political and workplace pressure that was brought on to enforce vaccine mandates (outside of hospitals and the military, If you sign up for those two, you signed up to a be human guinea pig imo).

As for China, when I came back from Xinjiang in 2018 I described the surveillance and constant social control to anybody that would listen, especially when meeting relatives in the wealthy coastal cities in China. Basically, nobody believed me, or just shrugged their shoulders, some even endorsed it because "Uighurs are thieves and bad elements and need a heavy hand". To this day, I have relatives who believe this latter point.

Well now the shoe is on the other foot, zero-Covid is basically just rolling that kind of "Grid management" control to the whole country. It was first used in Tibet to quell the monk immolations (anybody even remember that?), and then in Xinjiang and now its nation wide. Back then it was all in the name of "combating terrorism and splittism" now it's "disease control".

The fundamental principle is and has always been - just how much individual power should be ceded to the state in the name of the good of the group - and if it is ceded, what clauses and guarantees are there that such measures are temporary? These last years in the West, a lot of has been ceded but people can protest and disobey, there are ways to live outside of the system if need be, or at least take a break from it - in China that is extremely hard.