Posted by: Couch_Surfer
Fair point. I get that this person is uncomfortable with a changed set of conditions, and will have to adjust. I guess I’m just not buying that our current mishmash of (mostly cloth) masking is the thing de-risking life. Life cannot be completely de-risked, and this person unfortunately lives with higher day to day risk than others. I don’t know how to solve for that, but there are many activities we all choose to accept even though they add risk for everyone.
We have vaccinated everyone that will get it. We don’t have overrun hospitals. Omicron variant is significantly less dangerous than original Covid. We have anti-virals to treat it. We have a hospital staff that have had a 2 year course on how to treat this disease. It’s here to stay, we need to get comfortable with that.
It's not just that immunocompromised and other vulnerable folks are "uncomfortable" with the lifting of mask mandates, or that they "feel at risk" (to quote DBH), they ARE at increased risk. While wearing a mask themselves will help protect them, it's not as effective as having the majority of us wearing masks too. IMO, wearing a mask is a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the risk of dying. I will continue masking in public indoor spaces to protect more vulnerable folks.
Having anti-virals available helps, but there are a number of contraindications for taking them (e.g. many of the most vulnerable can't, such as folks with kidney or liver disease). They need to be taken within five days of onset of symptoms, and with BC's very restrictive testing, good luck with that.
Oh, and kids under 5 aren't vaccinated yet.
Learning to "live with it" should not mean giving up & removing protections.
Things like increasing health care capacity, making testing easy & accessible, wearing masks (or better yet, providing N95 or equivalent for free), improving ventilation/air filtration in public spaces & monitoring, and working to distribute vaccines world-wide are what we need to "live with it".
This is worth a read... https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/