You want to avoid vaccines altogether, since you’re going to be wearing a face covering even after you get vaccinated.
You’re embarrassed by the fact that you should have but didn’t prepare for a pandemic (you’re a “rationalist” after all and knew about this xrisk stuff!) and don’t intend to make that mistake again. You think that much worse pandemics could happen in your lifetime, so you might as well get used to wearing the right gear today. Practice makes perfect.
Lugging around oxygen tanks is not as practical or necessary.
Paranoia stops being paranoia if it is true. We have the mortality statistics for covid, so you tell me why the science is flawed and I’ll listen.
The science isn’t in on long covid, and the stuff that’s already known about it isn’t reassuring.
And even if some of us aren’t technically in a high-risk group, we may have had very bad experiences with the flu, and we don’t want to have an even worse experience with covid.
If you live with high risk people then covid would be a non issue for you because you’d already have been dealing with infection control protocols.
That would be true only if those control protocols are good enough, but we have to assume that they’re not due to the arrival of the second wave (or third wave in the US) and more contagious variants.
You won’t be avoiding covid. It will (arguably has) become endemic, exactly as all its predecessors have. You will get a variant at some point.
It’s too early to say whether this virus will stick around or not. Even if that’ll be the case, we’d want to wait for the weak, cold-equivalent variants to appear before ditching our respirators.
Vaccination for coronaviruses is largely irrelevant for those who are not high risk. I’ve had to have a pointless bureaucratic vaccine before, and I fully expect this one to be more of the same.
Even if they’re not high-risk, why would they want to endure something that could make them suffer more than even a bad flu and possibly put them at risk of long covid?
Prepping comes in two flavours: real and cosplay. The main component of actual prepping is attitude. For example, we had the situation where you couldn’t get a mask, so what did you do? You cannot prep for everything, and even if you do prep things go wrong. Prepping isn’t having the latest shiny mask, prepping is being able to figure out how to deal with having no mask.
No, we can be preppers without being survivalists. If we need to become survivalists, we’ve failed and survival becomes much harder even if we’re also survivalists. If we could have easily prepped for an obvious threat (a pandemic) but didn’t, that means we’re just not very good preppers. The only reason that someone didn’t get a respirator is that they didn’t prep, not that their prep wouldn’t have worked. At the start of this pandemic, only a fool would have worn a mask if they had access to a respirator, because no one knew what the real risk was. Sure, it’s better to become a survivalist than a statistic, but it’s even better to prep in order avoid becoming a survivalist.
Even if wearing a respirator wasn’t strictly necessary for this pandemic, “cosplay” is important in case a worse pandemic arrives.
I gave people a ghetto fitment method on a real mask, I advised to get the fuck out of the danger zone, and I gave another solution involving positive pressure that removes the issue of fitment entirely. What I personally believe to be of risk is irrelevant to the efficacy of the advice.
This is less effective than just acquiring and (correctly) using a reusable respirator.
We have provisional statistics on longer term issues. Either those numbers are too high for you or they aren’t.
That seems to be the black-or-white fallacy. Given a certain level of risk there are some interventions that are cost effective and others that aren’t.
I’m still not exactly sure why you seem to be against wearing reusable respirators when we can’t run into our bunkers. It’s almost-no-risk, high-reward, especially for a many of us that think there’s a decent chance that we could live forever and that much worse pandemics could arrive in the not-too-distant future.
“Are you being gassed to death? Well, don’t use a gas mask because it might provide a false sense of security.”
If you can wander the streets freely in some token PPE you bought from a hardware store then it is not a crisis.
“Reusable respirators won’t work because I said so.”
In another comment:
the only reason I’ve worn masks is for legal mandate, manners, and to hide my face. If I seriously believed I was at risk I wouldn’t be wearing a mask, I’d be at home behind a locked door.
“Seat beats? Forget it. Avoid driving and stay home forever. I just wear seat belts because it’s the law.”
I wanted to know if you had any reasonable objection to wearing reusable respirators during pandemics (i.e., a strong rationale for why they’re inadequate) but comments like these indicate that you don’t.
Between running and staying there’s walking a bit. In the pandemic context that means reducing your exposure but not moving it to zero. There’s no reason to treat either of the extreme of no contact at all or normal contact as the only two choices.
Car accidents are a serious problem. It’s possible to reduce that risk to zero by not driving any cars but that’s very costly. Wearing a seatbelt on the otherhand isn’t costly and therefore worth the effort to reduce risk. There’s no reason to see either extreme of driving cars with maximum risk and not driving at all as the only possible choices.
If the act and the risk are not divisible then if the act is taken risk will always be non-zero.
It turns out that you can’t live with non-zero risk. Both completely isolating yourself (the sepsis death of a rationalist but also other risks) and leaving your flat comes with risks.
If the true risk of disability or death were unacceptably high then I am of the opinion that one shouldn’t take that risk without seriously consideration and potential payoffs.
Without engaging in serious consideration you don’t know the true risk anyway. I don’t think anyone here advocates taking actions regarding isolating or not without serious consideration and potential payoffs.
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The “paranoia” can justified for several reasons.
You live with high-risk people.
You want to avoid long covid.
You want to wait for better vaccines.
You want to avoid vaccines altogether, since you’re going to be wearing a face covering even after you get vaccinated.
You’re embarrassed by the fact that you should have but didn’t prepare for a pandemic (you’re a “rationalist” after all and knew about this xrisk stuff!) and don’t intend to make that mistake again. You think that much worse pandemics could happen in your lifetime, so you might as well get used to wearing the right gear today. Practice makes perfect.
Lugging around oxygen tanks is not as practical or necessary.
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The science isn’t in on long covid, and the stuff that’s already known about it isn’t reassuring.
And even if some of us aren’t technically in a high-risk group, we may have had very bad experiences with the flu, and we don’t want to have an even worse experience with covid.
That would be true only if those control protocols are good enough, but we have to assume that they’re not due to the arrival of the second wave (or third wave in the US) and more contagious variants.
It’s too early to say whether this virus will stick around or not. Even if that’ll be the case, we’d want to wait for the weak, cold-equivalent variants to appear before ditching our respirators.
Even if they’re not high-risk, why would they want to endure something that could make them suffer more than even a bad flu and possibly put them at risk of long covid?
No, we can be preppers without being survivalists. If we need to become survivalists, we’ve failed and survival becomes much harder even if we’re also survivalists. If we could have easily prepped for an obvious threat (a pandemic) but didn’t, that means we’re just not very good preppers. The only reason that someone didn’t get a respirator is that they didn’t prep, not that their prep wouldn’t have worked. At the start of this pandemic, only a fool would have worn a mask if they had access to a respirator, because no one knew what the real risk was. Sure, it’s better to become a survivalist than a statistic, but it’s even better to prep in order avoid becoming a survivalist.
Even if wearing a respirator wasn’t strictly necessary for this pandemic, “cosplay” is important in case a worse pandemic arrives.
This is less effective than just acquiring and (correctly) using a reusable respirator.
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That seems to be the black-or-white fallacy. Given a certain level of risk there are some interventions that are cost effective and others that aren’t.
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I’m still not exactly sure why you seem to be against wearing reusable respirators when we can’t run into our bunkers. It’s almost-no-risk, high-reward, especially for a many of us that think there’s a decent chance that we could live forever and that much worse pandemics could arrive in the not-too-distant future.
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“Are you being gassed to death? Well, don’t use a gas mask because it might provide a false sense of security.”
“Reusable respirators won’t work because I said so.”
In another comment:
“Seat beats? Forget it. Avoid driving and stay home forever. I just wear seat belts because it’s the law.”
I wanted to know if you had any reasonable objection to wearing reusable respirators during pandemics (i.e., a strong rationale for why they’re inadequate) but comments like these indicate that you don’t.
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Yes, and the reasoning you used is clearly the black and white fallacy. You are free to make reasoning errors and I’m free to point them out.
Reducing choices to two is again a textbook example of the black and white fallacy.
Whether or not you are afraid of dying, living with CFS or something similar because you got long covid isn’t fun.
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Between running and staying there’s walking a bit. In the pandemic context that means reducing your exposure but not moving it to zero. There’s no reason to treat either of the extreme of no contact at all or normal contact as the only two choices.
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Car accidents are a serious problem. It’s possible to reduce that risk to zero by not driving any cars but that’s very costly. Wearing a seatbelt on the otherhand isn’t costly and therefore worth the effort to reduce risk. There’s no reason to see either extreme of driving cars with maximum risk and not driving at all as the only possible choices.
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It turns out that you can’t live with non-zero risk. Both completely isolating yourself (the sepsis death of a rationalist but also other risks) and leaving your flat comes with risks.
Without engaging in serious consideration you don’t know the true risk anyway. I don’t think anyone here advocates taking actions regarding isolating or not without serious consideration and potential payoffs.
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