^ That depends on the “sniffles”. If you’ve got the flu or might then yeah, stay home. But not seasonal allergies.
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Originally Posted by someone123
I think there's a lot of diversity of opinion and more sanity out there than say Twitter would have one believe but the politicization has been deranging some and scaring away others. It also seems like a lot of the institutions and public communicators charged with handling this are not very good, particularly in the US (FDA, Fauci, and so on).
It was hard a year ago to talk about the most basic concepts of QALY, mortality and how around 1% die every year, how $$ can be translated to human health, mitigation costs matter and can be worse than disease burden, a sick 95 year old dying is not the same as that person dying at age 22, etc. These things would probably have been considered "obvious" outside the context of the pandemic. In 2019 all the progressive people were up in arms over how certain disadvantaged groups earned less money or had lower educational attainment and then in 2020 they said it didn't matter if schools were closed down indefinitely and double digit percentages of the population were thrown out of work. If anybody cares to look back at this stuff 5-10 years in the future when it's no longer actively politicized it will look crazy.
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Agree with this generally.
The thing is my work involves a lot of time spent with pharma companies and various healthcare providers, and looking at disease mortality, cost of drug development, treatment funding (whether Medicare reimbursement or various national health systems, etc), so I’ve been pretty dispassionate about Covid since the beginning. A lot of old people were going to die and that’s just life. Society was going to need to accept a fairly large number of deaths, ie, the ones where the costs to prevent them would just be too high. I am quite sure I mentioned QALY in explaining the fact that there has always been a consensus that a young person’s life was worth more than an old person’s. That’s just obvious and logical.
Unfortunately we had this mass/social media and political freak out that just took on a life of its own and it’s going to cause damage that lasts decades, rather than just, you know, 5-6% of old people dying a bit prematurely.