Quote (IceMage @ 12 Jan 2022 01:20)
I've been camp vaxxed and done too.
Also interesting to see a liberal author in a liberal magazine finally come around to agree with what I have been saying since April of 20-fucking-20:
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The risk of COVID to vaccinated teachers and even unvaccinated students seems lower than we initially thought. Meanwhile, the costs of remote schooling seem higher than we feared.

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The obvious starting point for any such discussion is that virtually everyone who's at any noteworthy risk from covid can protect him- or herself by getting the vaccine. Hence, the vaccines have turned covid from a collective to an individual health risk and there no longer is any moral or ethical obligation for the barely-at-risk segments of the population to sacrifice their own lifetime to protect others.
Therefore, the main unsettled question imho is the following: if we all got back to our pre-pandemic lives and let Omicron rip unmitigated, would there be enough severe cases to overwhelm the healthcare system on their own, excluding a potential "mass quarantine effect"? As soon as we can be confident enough that the answer is no, all the quarantine rules are obsolete and the mass quarantines are no longer a cogent argument in favor of keeping restrictions up.
As far as I know, things are pointing in this direction, but we don't have the necessary confidence yet to make such a decision. So some of the milder restrictions should be kept in place for a couple more weeks if you ask me, until the picture on Omicron is clearer and a larger share of the population has been immunized by contact with the virus. But unless the data on Omicron's hospitalization rate and lethality change for the worse, we are through the worst in 4-10 weeks. In any case, I don't think that we will need a vaccine mandate anymore and all restrictions must end once and for all come this spring.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 11 2022 06:52pm