What is "Heard Immunity"?

[eppie]

"Old people gonna die anyway." My mother is 86 and in good health; her father lived to 98. COVID would have a very high chance of keeping her from seeing what may happen in the next 10 years. She has 7 grandchildren from 16 to 34 -- how many will get married, will graduate college, will have kids during that time? She would miss all that. She's had to struggle this past year with the reduced contact.

"The obese deserve to suffer and die." (Usually not said explicitly, but the thought is there.) But a lot of obeseses contribute to society in positive ways. Where I work, we've had about 11 people die; these people had years of experience that benefited us greatly. In our case, a lot of the experience is unusual; these people are hard to replace, their jobs are not just cookie-cutter stuff. Obese people, even diabetic ones, can be diligent and actually live long; but it is much more difficult if there's a pandemic and a large number of people are too petulant or inconsiderate to take measures to keep others from getting sick. Along the same lines, a lot of good doctors who were over 55 have died; the world lost a lot of expertise. (What's my point?) Uh, so, don't just assume that losing someone over 55 or big-boned is no loss for society.

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Vandiablo: The thought is not there. Nothing which you write here is something that comes to my mind. I can explain it again. Obesity and especially morbid obesity cuts of 10s of years of your life on average. One of the reasons is that when you get another diseases (diabetes, cancer, heart, pnuemonia, flu) it can get you extra hard making an otherwise not deadly disease deadly for you.  A fact is just that covid is almost not taking victims below 60 without any underlying diseases.  I guess in the US the number of healthy young people dying because of covid are far below the numbers of people dying in shooting or car incidents.
Again, no opinion, just facts.

Also yes I understand a healthy 86 year old would like to live another 10 years (most with covid do anyway) but a lot of things can happen at such an age.
People do die, anyway, period....and often way to early.


The question: and I agree with team last post, is what does this cost us.
-liberty (loss of human rights)
-damaged young people (they pay the price on many levels)
-economic problems...so far favouring the rich and double damaging the poor


Everyone can make his or her own choice. I do wear a mask, I am careful even though I will highly likely not suffer from covid, I don't eat meat but I am scared. And I see strange things happening.
Why can we just like this spend 100s of billions to fight this crisis why we don't want to do this for getting us of fossil fules a few years earlier.


Animal-mutated viruses will keep popping up often unless we cut down our meat consumption dramatically (it will not eliminate zoonoses but it will bring down the chance a lot). Global warming will (besides rising of the sea level, biodiveristy loss etc) also increase the chance of new diseases popping up.

I don't think it makes much sense to go on the way we do now just to create a society where we wear masks permanently, where we vaccinate for a series of diseases on a yearly basis and in the mean time blame other people and accuse them of not caring for the lives of other people.



@Jester. I don't want to defend dutch people (I hate nationalism) but to be fair....it is not that we are doing much worse than other countries......this is something that you read in the papers every week. AT moment A: '''we are better than the other because we behave in this and that way and that is just better'' moment B when numbers are rising '''we are worse than other because we do this and that''.....repeat.