unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Going to raves during a pandemic, going to school during a pandemic, going to work during a pandemic.
Mask and vax requirement a step in the right direction. Two preventative measures, the more the merrier.
Remember when you didn't want to get the vaccine, during a pandemic?
a young person who was 18 when this thing started is probably nearing 21 now. they’ve never been to a pub/bar, a music festival, a nightclub - any of the rites and follies of youth. asking the very youngest and most healthy – as well as those with the most energy – to sit on their hands for 3 years really is a big ask. there are now 40 deaths a day in the U.K. hospitalisations are way down. deaths are way, way down. at what point do you decide to stop suspending ordinary civil and social society for the sake of < 100 deaths a day? any number of any seasonal or endemic illnesses claim those sorts of numbers.
i was adamantly against reopening or this sort of ‘acceptable death’ calculus in the early stages of the pandemic. that’s because we had no provable vaccines or way of mitigating the plague spread at all. now we do. the vaccines are of changeable effectivity, sure, and we will need to devise booster shots. but the pandemic is now generalised and covid will be with us forever. we really need to think about widespread vaccination drives now as the top priority, not lockdowns and restrictions.
the WHO this week are worrying about the Mu variant already. this thing is never going away. whilst, yes, having relatively open societies could incubate more strains, there’s not exactly a directly linear relationship between the two. new strains are going to mutate and arrive regardless. viral evolution doesn’t have clearly marked accelerator and brake pedals. shutting everyone inside for the next year won’t directly retard the chance of mutations. it doesn’t work like that.
even australia and NZ, the remotest places in the civilised world, are now muttering about ending their ‘zero covid’ policies. it’s simply not tenable. for a multitude of reasons, human and natural, covid is here to stay. you can’t decouple yourself from normal real life, or the global system, and keep it out forever. suppression and eradication became impossible over a year ago.
and yet dilbert still has a problem with 2-3x vaccinated youngsters going to (medically approved) raves. WHAT is the fucking alternative? the young generation today have already had their schooling, exams, expensive university experiences etc. be totally disrupted by this thing. imagine being $75,000 in debt after 2.5 years of a university course given via zoom, with zero class contact, zero social element, zero campus access. then some arsehole who lives at home with his parents accuses you of ‘not being very smart or considerate’ because you go to a party. after mass-scale NHS studies have already established them as safe! lol FUCK off!