Imagine a society which is not able to handle a pandemic in a better way than just to throw people age 60+ under the bus.
Interesting thought.
For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism?
A pandemic.
We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere.
I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better.
But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society.
We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.
>For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
I'm not 100% sure of the answer to this, and I don't think anyone is, but as a resident of Melbourne, AU (world's most locked down city!), I can categorically state that destroying the quality of life for an entire society just so that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years is absolutely not the answer.
It's not even a young vs. old thing at this stage. People aged 60+ (who were already lonely before) have suffered just the same as we have and I'm sure would have a very similar opinion to the rest of society.
> that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years
What do you even mean? The population-weighted infection fatality rate is somewhere around 0.8% (for vanilla SARS-CoV-2), can you even imagine what that would mean in terms of deaths alone? We are not even talking about hospitalisations or severe cases or chronic disease, or the collapse of critical infrastructure and the economy.
I don't get this "Covid is just a problem for the old and weak" rhetoric, is that the society you want to live in?
Is 0.8% of people dying really worse than 100% of people enduring two years of crushing misery?
Call it cold, but I'd rather live in a society where we throw the old and weak under the bus rather than make life unbearable for all.
Hell, I suspect even if I were old and weak I would have rather died surrounded by my family and friends in 2020 instead of gone through two years of isolation only to die alone in 2022.
Not to mention having all the gyms shut and not being able to do many of the things that help to keep people physically and mentally healthy as well.
It seems that there's been little effort or focus on how to cater for increased hospitalisations, or problem solving on how to ensure there are enough people trained to handle covid patients.
The only tools available are vaccines and lockdowns...
The rules are ridiculous - for example you have to wear a mask stepping inside a bar but as soon as you are seated you don't need one. You have to wear a mask to check in at the gym but as soon as you are in the gym you don't need one.
Everyone needs to check in with a QR code... for what reason I really don't know (assuming it's "just incase" a new variant emerges, but half suspect it's just a psychological trick to remind is of covid 24/7)...
I get that a small percentage of people get very sick and may die (and we should protect those people) but the way things are is just ridiculous and is a bunch of red tape that at this stage I don't think is really helping to do anything except keep people obedient and in constant fear.
The Danish authorities assume the "Omicron" variant will be the "natural vaccine" which will end the pandemic in about 2 months [1]. As far as I'm concerned it has been over since the vaccines became available for anyone who cares to take them. While they have proven to be ineffective with regard to getting and spreading SARS2 they did seem to be moderately effective in reducing the need for hospitalisation for the earlier strains - up to and including "Delta". This does not seem to be true for the "Omicron" variant but fortunately this variant seems to require far fewer hospitalisations and have a much lower mortality. Knowing that natural immunity is both far stronger as well as longer-lasting compared to the temporary boost in antibodies caused by recent vaccination and seeing how "Omicron" infects vaccinated and unvaccinated alike this seems like a done deal. As far as I'm concerned, it is.
That's my hope as well, but I think it's mostly wishful thinking.
Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu.
We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu)
I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
"End of the pandemic" does not mean the end of the disease, it means it will become endemic and as such something we have to deal with. Influenza is endemic, it takes many lives yet society abides. The same will be true for SARS2 until it either dies out by itself (like SARS1 did) or some generic coronavirus vaccine takes out this class of pathogen once and for all.
I’m imagining a post Covid world where contingents that were the most affected by Covid lockdowns (restaurant workers for example) harboring immense bitterness and resentment about it all. I wouldn’t go around telling people we wfh’d home the whole time or worse, those that lucked into prolonged government stimulus (not everyone needed it, but got it).
Just imagine it would be okay to stay at home as a restaurant worker, not fearing to lose your job and knowing that nothing changes in a bad way when the pandemic is over.
We can easily afford this as a society. We just don't.
You're right that we should keep searching for better solutions, but I don't think it helps to trivialize the problem or the steps people have taken to date.
While we're all painfully aware of the shortcomings in various responses, it's disingenuous to say that the pandemic would "not have been an issue if we would talk to each other". Similarly, "just" taking our cumulative knowledge and resources and having WFH, vaccination, and all the other adjustments work instantly and without issue is a high bar; I've personally worked on projects over the past two years trying to help smooth the transition on a small subset or those adjustments, and it's not an easy undertaking.
To have a reasonable discussion of the tradeoffs of various measures, it requires acknowledgement of the challenges and drawbacks of the alternatives. I agree we've got far better capabilities than 100 years ago and we should have these discussions, but thought it might help to shift your framing a bit.
Your 100% renewable energy mentioning sounds like you believe this and use it as an excuse to make it okay.
Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.
Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.
You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.
You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.
Interesting thought.
For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism?
A pandemic.
We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere.
I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better.
But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society.
We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.