I'm incredibly sick of bad-faith, flamebait nonsense that equates racial segregation to policies that restrict unvaccinated people's ability to spread disease to others.
Racial segregation wasn't a choice Black people could make. Vaccines are.
Vaccine mandates are broadly popular, they work, and they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us.
Opinion pieces like this are intellectually dishonest and unlikely to drive any substantive discussion on HN, so I've flagged it.
> they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us
Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission?
Race isn't the only dimension on which segregation can exist. For instance, it could be decided that Muslims should be excluded from public accommodations. They could always just choose to renounce their faith!
> Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission?
It's not our job to educate you. Search for yourself. There are literally dozens of studies from around the world that show that the vaccines reduce transmission[1]. Why should we bother to dig up research when people like you have proved that they don't want to change their mind on the issue? Why don't you provide studies that prove your conclusion?
Also, no one cares primarily about transmission. If an infection were harmless, we wouldn't mind if it spread to 100% of all humans.
The vaccine is intended to reduce illness and death, which it does dramatically.
"but Delta is an unknown" right in the title of your link! Are you unaware that there was a sea change in thinking around transmission and the Delta variant within a week after this Nature article was published? Also, household studies do not have adequate controls as there may be a significant number of confounding variables at play.
"No one cares about transmission" until the point they want to make the case for mandates, because it collapses if one acknowledges that the vaccines are not very effective in reducing it.
“Transmission” is not what is important at this time. Keeping people out of the ICU is the primary objective. Healthcare systems are failing. The unvaccinated are destroying our ability to provide healthcare to anyone else. It is not viable to continue on this path.
It’s not so much letting staff leave as it is burned-out nurses and doctors have no more to give. The unvaccinated are destroying healthcare systems.
Oh, and for a few percent of staff, it’s not letting them leave: it is booting them out the door because they have rejected vaccination. They’re far too likely to become patients, they are a liability.
It's not "compassion fatigue," it's every kind of fatigue, physical and emotional. People are working 80-120 hours a week just to treat existing patients. They're losing time with family, seeing conspiracy theorists/idiots say that the virus isn't that bad, and watching a lot of people suffer.
Where I live in the South, none of my nearby hospitals are accepting anyone to the ER, so if I get into a car accident, I'm likely to have to go 45-60 min away to be seen by a doctor.
You can easily see statistics yourself by looking for them, but I'm guessing it's an issue of not wanting to.
> "Of the 22 percent of nurses who indicated they may leave their current positions, 60 percent said they were more likely to leave since the pandemic began, driven by a variety of factors, with insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll topping the list."[1]
Thanks I really appreciate it. In fact I just haven't seen it nor did it come up in any conversation (until now). I guess I still don't see what that has to do with covid, wouldn't it be prudent to increase staffing to alleviate the most common concerns (insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll)? Firing staff which has a high probability of possessing immunity would seem to aggravate the existing situation.
> I guess I still don't see what that has to do with covid
The hours are longer, the cases are more likely to result in death, and there are just more cases. Medical staff also get verbally abused by Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers.
A friend of mine who works in the ER was physically attacked by a spouse because they refused to believe the Covid test. It was their opinion that such a sever illness could not be Covid.
> wouldn't it be prudent to increase staffing to alleviate the most common concerns (insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll)
Yes, absolutely! There were doctor and nurse shortages in the US long before Covid even started. They're hiring as many people as they can. There just simply aren't enough people to go around, especially in "less desirable" locations for people to move.
> Firing staff which has a high probability of possessing immunity would seem to aggravate the existing situation.
"Immunity" != "unable to spread Covid"
They're not firing the staff because we know that they're disease vectors. They're firing the staff because they refuse to take a guaranteed, basic, zero-cost, easy, medically-indicated step to reduce their ability to spread disease.
In general, medical providers should not believe conspiracy theories about important drugs that save people's lives.
Also, the number of people being fired is extremely small[1].
> Houston Methodist Hospital, for example, required its 25,000 workers to get a vaccine by June 7. Before the mandate, about 15% of its employees were unvaccinated. By mid-June, that percentage had dropped to 3% and hit 2% by late July. A total of 153 workers were fired or resigned, while another 285 were granted medical or religious exemptions and 332 were allowed to defer it.
> At Jewish Home Family in Rockleigh, New Jersey, only five of its 527 workers quit following its vaccine mandate. Two out of 250 workers left Westminster Village in Bloomington, Illinois, and even in deeply conservative rural Alabama, a state with one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates, Hanceville Nursing & Rehab Center lost only six of its 260 employees.
> Delta Air Lines didn’t mandate a shot, but in August it did subject unvaccinated workers to a US$200 per month health insurance surcharge. Yet the airline said fewer than 2% of employees have quit over the policy.
> And at Indiana University Health, the 125 workers who quit are out of 35,800 total employees, or 0.3%.
In America, we see vaccine hesitancy is highest among marginalized groups. Insular religious sects/cults, black Americans with little education, the white rural South. Some of these people will double down when mandated to get vaccinated. Some are in positions where vaccination would be social death to them (which is usually a bigger motivator than real death in humans).
It's unavoidable most of the impact of such policies will fall on some of society's more marginalized groups. A woman whose husband won't allow her to be vaccinated now loses her part-time job and social contacts. Some kid whose parents won't allow them to be vaccinated in a religious sect now loses contact with some of the few non-brainwashy social outlets they had. The job losses for non-vaccination will disproportionately affect the poor, uneducated, and racial minorities.
Maybe this is a necessary cost. But I hope people have really thought it through.
Your perception that vaccine hesitancy is limited to insular and uneducated groups of people is off the mark. 25% of eligible Americans still haven't taken the vaccine despite months of unending propaganda across all forms of media, intense social pressure, and even threats of job loss.
I have a similar hard time intuitively believing 30% of rural Albertans refuse to be vaccinated when 92% have been here in Toronto. But there are pockets where people aren't getting the same media diet and uniform messaging you or I were. Like tends to cluster with like.
Racial segregation wasn't a choice Black people could make. Vaccines are.
Vaccine mandates are broadly popular, they work, and they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us.
Opinion pieces like this are intellectually dishonest and unlikely to drive any substantive discussion on HN, so I've flagged it.