[logicalmonster]

> Society is still effectively shut down for them and very few people seem to care.

1) I feel bad for you if you're genuinely sick and at risk, but I'm sure you know that there's a perception out there that many people are trying to milk Covid concerns merely to continue working from home or reaping other benefits that they value: and meantime they go out to restaurants and live life more or less normally. We all saw many of our political leaders who were fear-mongering Covid the worst do that.

2) You have to feel bad for anybody who is scared and feeling isolated, but what else do you want humanity to do? Short of just incinerating the planet, there's no method known to science to eliminate Covid in the wild. We shut down a lot of human activity for years (at massive expense, that we're going to be paying for many years) and even sacrificed part of our children's future to help the most vulnerable. Other than putting humanity in a total economic death spiral (that will be many times worse than Covid) I'm not sure what else can be done to give immunocompromised people a better situation.

3) I don't know how I'd live if I was genuinely immunocompromised, but the really sick people I know such as cancer patients going through chemo who are in/out of hospitals constantly are genuinely trying to go out and live their lives as normally as they can and trying not to be a slave to their illness.

4) Has anything qualitatively changed for immunocompromised people with Covid? Pre-Covid, there was influenza and other diseases that posed some measure of risk to people. Covid seems worse than them and can kill of course, but obviously isn't anywhere near something like Ebola in terms of risk. You're facing maybe a tiny bit more life risk than you would have in say 2018.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

>many people are trying to milk Covid concerns merely to continue working from home or reaping other benefits that they value

How is this "milking" anything? The last few years have proved that lots of white collar jobs don't need to be done from an office building.

>Other than putting humanity in a total economic death spiral (that will be many times worse than Covid) I'm not sure what else can be done to give immunocompromised people a better situation.

This is a false dichotomy. The science is clear on this one. Continue wearing masks in public places, physical distancing, practicing basic hygiene, and continue requiring vaccinations. Yes, all of those things are proven to reduce transmission of COVID as well as other airborne viruses like the flu. Society doesn't need to shut down or enter a "death spiral" to do any of them. Leaders just caved to political pressure and stopped enforcing them.

>are genuinely trying to go out and live their lives as normally as they can and trying not to be a slave to their illness.

Yes, and they probably still have to wear masks and avoid certain places that are likely to carry an increased risk of infection. "Not being a slave to the illness" doesn't mean you go out and take stupid risks.

>Has anything qualitatively changed for immunocompromised people with Covid?

Yes, COVID is significantly more contagious than influenza, and causes more severe illness than influenza.

[logicalmonster]

> How is this "milking" anything? The last few years have proved that lots of white collar jobs don't need to be done from an office building.

I strongly agree with you that a lot of white collar jobs don't necessarily need to be done from an office building. I'm referring to people who playact at being terrified of Covid as a justification for working from home while in their personal lives they go out and live life normally. The fear that some people exhibit is an act for personal gain: based on their actions they don't believe it.

> This is a false dichotomy. The science is clear on this one. Continue wearing masks in public places, physical distancing, practicing basic hygiene, and continue requiring vaccinations. Yes, all of those things are proven to reduce transmission of COVID as well as other airborne viruses like the flu. Society doesn't need to shut down or enter a "death spiral" to do any of them. Leaders just caved to political pressure and stopped enforcing them.

I've written responses to this kind of argument on HN many times. In a nutshell my position is the following:

1) I honestly don't think too many people are having major science disagreements: they're having risk-management disagreements. Your risk-tolerance and values are different than others, and you're disagreeing about what's worth doing, you're not actually disagreeing all that much about data. Pretend it's 60 degrees F out: a Canadian might say that it's a scorcher and an Australian might say it's freezing. Same exact science (60 degrees to both), just a different way of looking at things. Neither is scientifically wrong.

2) For what it's worth, suggesting a human action is never the outcome of any science experiment. The science is NOT clear on wearing masks or doing any of those other things because that is not the domain of science. All science can do is provide objective data (to the limits of human ability to measure) and humans decide what to do in light of that data outside of the domain of science.

> Yes, and they probably still have to wear masks and avoid certain places that are likely to carry an increased risk of infection. "Not being a slave to the illness" doesn't mean you go out and take stupid risks.

I honestly don't know the statistics on how immunocompromised people actually live, but anecdotally I've seen that it depends on the person. I knew somebody that died of his illness that wanted to live his life completely normally for as long as he possibly could and was willing to risk being knocked out by Covid.

> Yes, COVID is significantly more contagious than influenza, and causes more severe illness than influenza.

The phrase I used was "qualitatively" changed.

As far as your use of the word "significantly", what does that word actually mean here? I'm curious what the actual stats are. How many immunocompromised people were around in say 2018? What percentage of them died due to a random respiratory illness then? Compare that to Covid time-period as best as possible. How much does that death rate actually change? Does it go from 5% risk of random death to 6%? or from 7% to 88%? I am not sure, but I suspect that the actual difference wouldn't be jaw-dropping to anybody here, but I'd like to learn those stats from you so I can appreciate your situation better.