These are your examples to back up your first post? Some lady somewhere on TV and a lady from the View who happens to agree with the CDC regarding extension of masks on planes until May (which is the opposite of what you’re trying to claim).
It may be that part of the new normal will be needing a higher level of ER capacity.
To some extent I understand and agree with what you’re saying but I also think that there’s a cost/benefit balancing act and I don’t think that, in order to give in to anti-vaxxers we should have to increase ER capacity when a couple of simple but annoying (but far less annoying than a ventilator or long covid) could mitigate some of this.
And yes, though we in Canada have free health care, it does have some mismanagement issues.
I get what you are saying, but honestly, our current ER capacity is really determined by, among other things, the ability to handle peak flu season. Universal vaccination could dramatically lower that, too.
That point is moot in the US for now. Before Omicron, estimates were that nearly 95% of people over 16 had antibodies due to infection or vaccination. Considering the rate at which the unvaccinated were catching it relative to vaccinated, there probably wasn’t many unvaccinated adults left who hadn’t caught it. Then omicron came along and infected over half the population with a much higher rate of reinfections. I wouldn’t be surprised if most unvaccinated have been infected twice. That’s their two vaxxes.
Immunity is so high here, ba.2 is barely a blip. That’s why local departments and the cdc have lifted restrictions for now. My area has record low hospitalizations, icu, and ventilator patients.
The news has been very proactive in reporting new variants, so most people will have plenty of warning. I’ve stopped wearing a mask to class. However, I’ll start wearing one if cases start to rise again.
If 82% of Canada is vaccinated, how many adult antivaxxers are even left? I could see an issue getting people to be regularly vaxxed every year or so. Is that what you’re referring to?
In none of those scenarios are they requesting to see any portion of your personal medical history.
This is the first time you’ve mentioned checking on medical history. Are there any other conditions I should somehow guess that you’re going to bring up?
Anyway, if you don’t want to share your medical history, don’t go. Well, that’s how it was, sort of, in a few places. Most of the country never had anything like that.
Schools, of course, have been checking on medical history forever.
Yes, but that was settled by the courts something like a hundred years ago.
Grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, and bars, have not been checking until just very recently. It sounds as if you’re not much in favor of medical privacy.
Please provide a cite that grocery stores were checking vaccine status. Thanks.
Grocery stores were a bad example. Withdrawn.
I didn’t mind wearing my mask and dutifully wore one even when a lot of people around me didn’t, but at times it seemed like the decision on when to wear a mask or how to be safe was arbitrary. It was okay to hang around outdoors at a protest but you couldn’t hang out at the beach in some states. Watching people at the airport attempt to social distance right before cramming themselves into a plane with a hundred people just seemed absurd to me.
Here in Arkansas I’ve never had a private business check my vaccination status before allowing me to enter their establishment. There’s at least one restaurant in downtown Little Rock that requires proof of vaccination but I never went there before the pandemic and I’m not any more likely to go now. I’m not too keen on getting into the habit of carrying and showing proof of vaccination just to participate in normal life. It’s one thing to do so during a full blown pandemic, but for how long?
It’s pretty easy to carry proof of vaccination on the phone. Here, it shows your name and a QR code; anyone can download the app and scan to see your vaccination status, but none of the rest of your medical history. It’s pretty seamless.
I agree that a lot of pandemic precautions amounted to security theatre: a lot of surface cleaning which, while welcome, does little to nothing against the virus, and lots of plexiglass barriers which (as I understand it) impede airflow and actually increase the risk, but make people feel better. That also speaks to your counterintuitive airplane thing: the airplane is very low risk, because of the air circulation; the airport, probably, too, but higher than the plane.
Ultimately, though, this is about two things: we’re at a point in our culture where there’s a real resistance to making any accommodations to help strangers, which to my mind is antithetical to a healthy and well-functioning society. Forcing people to be considerate of others until we get the hang of it is maybe necessary.
The other issue is just promoting good hygeine and health, including trust in the medical establishment.
Both of these are areas where a lot of strong messaging is needed because institutional trust and social cohesion are much weaker than they were, say, 25 years ago, to our obvious detriment. In order to strengthen those, I’m willing to put up with some pointless gestures, or ones of only nominal utility.
It’s not a matter of how onerous it is showing someone my proof of vaccination, I just don’t want to do it on a regular basis. I’m fine with a private business choosing to check, and I’m even okay with being required to do it during a pandemic, but I do not want it to be a normal part of every day life as required by law outside of a public emergency. Given how hard it was to get people to mask up and socially distance at the height of a pandemic, I don’t believe there’s any danger of requiring proof of COVID vaccination to participate in public life.
So, at this point I don’t actually care whether other people are vaccinated, for reasons I’m not going to type out right now. But this is a silly point. My birthdate, heck, my age is MUCH more important and deserves at least as much privacy as whether I got some vaccine.
And legally, birthdate is private information. I’m a professional in a field where we need to protect people’s personal information, and I can assure you that birthdate is one of the pieces of data that’s protected – as it should be.
There’s lots of medical information that’s sensitive. But if you were to rank medical information from most sensitive to least, frankly, your vaccine status is pretty close to the bottom of that list.
I don’t follow. How are which medical treatments one has received be less sensitive than mere birthdates?
Birthdates appear on driver’s licenses, state ids, passports, etc. And you have to show one of those to buy alcohol, enter a nightclub, fly on a plane, open a bank account, rent an apartment, sometimes just to look at an apartment, and many other examples.
But one is almost never asked to verify that they’re vaccinated for influenza, hepatitis, or measles.
And, it wouldn’t have been necessary to do that for this, if 30-40% of the country hadn’t decided that not getting vaccinated is some sort of bullshit political badge of honor. And, most of the country didn’t do any sort of vaccine status checking anyway, so unless you spent a lot of time going to restaurants in NYC, I don’t know what your complaint is. In liberal NJ, no one has ever checked my vaccine status.
If that many people had shunned the polio or smallpox vaccine, or even the measles vaccine, you may have seen the same kind of restrictions. Don’t blame those of us who were reasonable for having to check who was being unreasonable.
And, in any case, those restrictions are basically all gone now anyway. You were complaining about people not following CDC guidelines now, and came up with a few examples that didn’t affect you in any way. You have yet to show how concerned you were when people weren’t following CDC guidelines then, when it could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
In terms of birth date privacy, I’m inclined to believe puzzlegal. My birth date is one of the things I have to enter when logging into my health insurance site and they check it at the doctor’s office. It’s one of the gatekeepers for all the rest of my medical information.
One is almost never asked because almost no one cares, not because it’s sensitive information.
Your birth date, like your social security number, is a crucial piece of private personal information that can be used to steal your identity. It also tells a stranger quite a lot about you. Yes, you are accustomed to showing it to strangers despite that. That’s exactly my point. If you aren’t outraged that you need to show your birthdate to buy a beer, you are being silly to get upset about showing a vax record, which is much less sensitive.
Back on topic
Yes, i expect the new normal will be needing higher levels of intensive care capacity (probably not ER), lower life spans, and higher levels of diabetes, dementia, and heart and kidney disease. I’m not happy about that, and don’t really want to dive in. Personally, I’d rather we become a nation where masking is normal, like most of East Asia. But i don’t get to choose.
But i don’t care if some random stranger has been vaccinated. I used to. Back when the vaccines provided a high degree of sterilizing immunity, and there were lots of immunologically naive people out there, i cared a lot. Back then, my odds of catching covid from you were dramatically lower if you’d been vaxxed.
That’s not true any more. Omicron greatly reduced the power of the vaccines to offer sterilizing immunity. (That’s immunity strong enough to prevent the virus from replicating in you, so you couldn’t pass it on.) And most unvaccinated people have had covid by now, and have some immunity. It’s my business how likely you are to infect me, but it’s really not my business whether you were vaccinated or had covid a couple of times.
So i no long support vaccine passports because i don’t think they’ll help any more. They won’t help me, they won’t help the immune compromised.
I do still support masks. They still work. And unlike a vaccine passport, everyone can tell, immediately, if you have it. There’s no paperwork, nothing complicated. Are you masked right now, or not?
But again, with the latest greatest iterations of this virus, only the only good masks, worn moderately well, do much good. And for reasons that i don’t totally understand, a lot of people really hate wearing masks. (I don’t like to wear headphones/earbuds/etc., though, which gives me a little insight into why people hate masks.) So i don’t think we’ll get to keep mask mandates, probably not even in places where we really really should, like the doctor’s office and the pharmacy.
Maybe I shouldn’t wear glasses then, or wear a cast if I’ve got a broken arm - then people will know my oh so sensitive medical history.
We’re talking about one injection that someone got in the last couple of months. And if enough people had gotten them over the last couple of years (instead of comparing Fauci to Hitler FFS) then a lot of people would not have had to add ventilators to their medical histories.
Oh, and let’s not forget the headcold conundrum. Joe the coworker is at work coughing his lungs out - holy crap! Now I know he has a cold. So he better stay home so that part of his medical history won’t be known. But wait, why isn’t he at work? Is he sick? Is there something about his medical history he’s not telling us? Like he has a bad headcold?
Just to be clear, we make “medical information” private because some of it IS private. Do you have erectile disfunction? Were you just tested for HIV? Are you on anti-depressants? Do you need to poop into a plastic bag attached to your side? Those are all things that you probably don’t want to discuss with the bank teller.
But you vax status isn’t like that, and it was also RELEVANT to that bank teller.