Coronavirus and You - Page 515

On November 20 2021 09:42 Mohdoo wrote:
wait, we can subscribe to threads? what does that even mean? lol. have I been a TL noob this whole time?

On November 20 2021 09:47 Gorsameth wrote:
Left corner, below the last post on the page and the reply box.

and https://tl.net/mytlnet/mythreads.php will show you all your subscribed threads and if they have new replies.
(your automatically subscribed to any thread you post in)

On November 20 2021 11:48 Mohdoo wrote:


This feels redundant. I use tl.net/myposts

On November 20 2021 09:17 WombaT wrote:
I don’t really understand how this is some new Rubicon that has been crossed.

There were far, far more stringent impositions on freedoms of all kinds in both World Wars, but these are seen through misty eyes as some high water mark of collective sacrifice and pushing in the same direction.

Which were ultimately completely repealed, come the cessation of said conflict. They weren’t some slippery slope into tyranny in perpetuity.

Especially by (many) of the same people who seem to have some instinctual political instinct against, relatively minor impingements on personal autonomy in the current pandemic scenario.

This isn’t to say legitimate objections aren’t a thing, I am aware and share some of them. And I thoroughly respect some of the measured objections contained within this thread.

But, for others, in the wider non-TL Corona thread sphere absolutely not. People wanking off over their Remembrance for veterans of the World Wars and the sacrifices they made, complaining about modern ‘snowflakes’, but for whom even wearing a mask is too much of a contemporary sacrifice, never mind getting a vaccine.

No, just no. Fuck off with your nonsense, it’s utterly ridiculous. Fuck off and get with the program.

On November 20 2021 18:09 Simberto wrote:


Regarding WW2 and vaccinations. I talked to my grand parents about this, and apparently after WW2 there were also mandatory vaccinations by the occupying troops. They remember that everyone had to get vaccinated or you no longer got food rations. And no one made any fuss about that.

On November 20 2021 20:06 BlackJack wrote:
"There were far, far more stringent impositions on freedoms of all kinds in both World Wars"

No kidding... Is this where we are setting the bar now? lmao

On November 22 2021 08:00 BlackJack wrote:
I assume everyone has enough common sense to respect bodily autonomy enough to not take it lightly when Austria threatens to fine or jail people for not getting an injection. So there has to be a strong argument to override the right to bodily autonomy. So here are what I think are the 3 strongest arguments for vaccine mandates and why I don't think they pass muster. If anyone wants to add another argument feel welcome to.

1) Vaccinating the unvaccinated is for their own good
2) The unvaccinated pose a health threat to the vaccinated by infecting them with COVID
3) The unvaccinated pose a health threat to the vaccinated by overwhelming the healthcare system


1) Vaccinating the unvaccinated is for their own good

Obviously by far the weakest of the 3 arguments to the point where I don't think anything even needs to be said here. Overriding someone's bodily autonomy for "their own good" is not something that is done in any developed country as far as I know. We will literally let people die before forcing a medicine/treatment on them as long as they have mental capacity to make decisions for themselves.


2) The unvaccinated pose a health threat to the vaccinated by infecting them with COVID

Let's just set aside the stupidity required to believe that the COVID vaccine protects you from COVID but it doesn't protect you from the unvaccinated. Or the stupidity that the vaccinated need to be protected from a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."

A lot of people here still seem to be buying into this myth that the unvaccinated are preventing us from reaching herd immunity and if we just coerced the last of them to get the vaccine we can be over the pandemic. This is bullshit. I don't think anyone serious scientific organization is still promoting the idea that we can eradicate COVID. They have all switched their messaging to "controlling" COVID. COVID will still continue to exist even if everyone gets vaccinated and we already have real world examples of that. Gibraltar is the "most vaccinated place on earth" with 100% of its population being vaccinated and 40% receiving their "booster" dose, yet they have the highest rate of spread of COVID out of anywhere in Europe right now



But okay, even though COVID can still spread among the fully vaccinated, the unvaccinated can also spread it even more, so there is still an increased risk posed by the unvaccinated that could be reduced if they got vaccinated. So how do we quantify the benefit here? Well according to the CDC COVID tracker the most recent data for the week ended September 4 shows a death rate of 0.74 per 100,000 people among the fully vaccinated. About 7-8 people per million. Now as I said, there's little evidence to assume we could reach 0 COVID deaths among the fully vaccinated even with strict vaccine mandates. So now you're willing to violate people's bodily autonomy to protect some fraction of that 0.74 per 100,000. Meanwhile an equally large number of people would die of the flu every year and nobody thought twice about any preventative measures to protect the vulnerable. The desire to trample personal liberty to protect people from a respiratory virus when everyone here has spent their entire lives sleeping through tens of thousands of respiratory virus deaths every flu season doesn't make their position morally superior, it just makes it arbitrary and hypocritical.

3) The unvaccinated pose a health threat to the unvaccinated by overwhelming the healthcare system

By far the best argument offered. Nobody should go along with hospitals running out of oxygen and people dying on sidewalks waiting to be triaged. However we're now at a place where we are firing HCW who refuse to be vaccinated. We're 2 years into the pandemic now and all those "field hospitals" that cities and hospitals spent millions to erect have long been torn down and never used. It's hard to simultaneously argue that the healthcare system is going to collapse while at the same time firing healthcare workers and tearing down supplemental hospital beds. We've already seen Florida get to the other side of a bad delta wave and their governor was shit talking masks and mandates the whole way through it. It's hard to believe that a state or country that has more of it's population vaccinated than Florida and has a government with better messaging would not be able to make it through a COVID wave without the collapse of their healthcare system. Although hats off to Florida in the way they blitzed out the monoclonal antibody treatment centers - that was quite impressive to see and maybe was a game changer and not something other states or countries could replicate with less competent leadership. I also have very little knowledge on the capabilities of other countries to increase their healthcare capacities. The US currently has a shit ton of travel RNs, RTs, and other healthcare workers that can deploy to hotspots and are compensated quite well. I don't know if countries with single-payer/socialized systems have the ability to increase capacity by just throwing $ at contractors in the same way.

On November 22 2021 10:34 RKC wrote:
Elsewhere, some of my friends are pissed that the government rushed to reach a vaccination target to open up with soft mandates and distribution of less than effective vaccines. Now the government is desperately calling for people who took those vaccines to quickly get boosters (three months after second shot).

This is why protest is gathering steam. Trust is waning, just as vaccination effects is waning. Yes, people were aware that boosters were on the cards. But the "please jab yourself every three months" isn't exactly what they signed up for.

I really hope governments would just make hard decisions right now, instead of just going with the flow.

On November 22 2021 09:18 Gorsameth wrote:
2) Are we really still comparing it to the flu? Covid is a lot more dangerous to a lot more people then the flu. This argument was stupid 2 years ago, it's still stupid now.

3) not everyone is the US. The US in general has more ICU beds then most other countries. 5 seconds on google puts them at 3e in the world per capita.
The Netherlands on the other hand are 31st and have less then 25% capacity compared to the US. We normally don't need them and ICU staff takes a while to train (and healthcare has a shortage anyway) so we can't really just increase capacity. Because beds isn't the problem, its people who can care for them.
And yes firing people for refusing to get vaccinated sucks but when i've seen it in the news the % have been tiny to insignificant.

A quarter of Dutch OR's are not in use as of a week ago because personal was sick or needed elsewhere.
1 in 6 hospitals is having issues delivering critical care on time (defined as needing treatment within 6 weeks to prevent health damage)

I don't know what the hospital situation in Austria is, but I know that 'just let it happen it will be fine' is absolutely not sustainable for the Netherlands.