I'm feeling frustrated with covid discourse these days. I think it's easy to conflate three distinct things:
1) Truth: what do interventions do?
2) Individual values: what interventions are worth it for me?
3) Community values: what interventions are worth imposing on others?
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Now that everyone in my community has had ample opportunity to get vaccinated, and with Omicron looking pretty mild in vaccinated people, I think that very few interventions are worth imposing on others.
Don't want to wear a mask? Fine by me.
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(The only interventions that I'd still advocate for are "background infrastructure" with positive effects outside of covid, like air filters. Let's see if we can just eradicate the flu in the US for $100 billion = ~10 years of flu costs?)
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Air filters are really good appliances! I have one to help with dust and it's cheap and quiet. They're basically zero effort once they're set up, unlike masks or shutting down businesses. Lots of people out west already have them for smoke season.
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I've seen a lot of people making leaps from "we probably shouldn't force people to wear masks anymore" to "masks aren't useful". That's confusing community values with truth!
Masks still do what they've always done. It's our values that have changed.
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Even worse, I've seen a lot of people confusing community values with individual values. Unless you know someone well, I suggest letting them pick their own risk tolerance?
If you don't know the details of someone's life, how can you know what the right risk tolerance is?
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There's also complicated game theory based on complex intertemporal preferences. Maybe just let people make their own choices rather than trying to enforce a universal norm?
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My own values are somewhere in the middle, but I think that anything between "avoid Omicron completely for the next while" and "actively seek out Omicron to get it over with" is pretty reasonable right now.
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