01-07-2022, 07:48 PM
(01-07-2022, 07:25 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(01-07-2022, 07:06 PM)jeffster Wrote: I don't think it's a false comparison. Rather, quite opposite. People who take care of their health -- exercise, eat healthy, don't smoke, drink moderately, are highly unlikely to end up in the hospital (let alone ICU) due to covid. At the same time, people who don't exercise, eat junk food all day, smoke regularly, drink heavy, quite often end up in the hospital, regardless of Covid, and vaccination status.
Right now, we have 319 people in the ICU due to Covid, 87 are fully vaccinated. Should we take into account their lifestyle if we penalize their other 232?
As it stands, about 75% of people in the ICU are not there because of Covid. Many times they are there due to lifestyle choices.
Bottom line, one can argue that those who smoke, those who are obese, those who take extreme risks, are the real reason why our hospitals are at the breaking point. Our system was never built to handle a pandemic. It was built to take care of those (as mentioned) and not much more.
Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should get vaccinated if they can. But everyone should have the right to decide if they want to get a medical procedure done, especially one with limited testing and limited success. My kid ended up in the hospital and almost died due to his vaccine (Moderna) -- luckily, at least for those under 30, Moderna won't be offered. But these vaccines aren't without risk. And for someone like my 19 year old, fit and healthy, doesn't do drug, alcohol or smoke, being unvaccinated would probably not have put him in the hospital. But that's not the narrative of our PHAC and PHU's -- as rarely do they encourage people to take care of their health.
To add: those who are fully vaccinated and hanging out with family and friends and spreading the disease and clogging our hospitals are also just a guilty as the unvaccinated. While a lot of the blame goes to our stupid politicians and healthcare experts with spreading falsehoods with the efficacy of the vaccine, we have known for some time that being vaccinated doesn't give you immunity, nor does it prevent you from becoming a carrier and spreading the virus to others -- so do we likewise treat those people the same as unvaccinated?
And I say that, because my family has sacrificed having friends over, from seeing family, etc. Yet I know some that are out and about every moment they have. They are just as much as a problem, 100%.
Why do you feel it is a fair comparison.
When have we cancelled surgeries because of people who smoke? We are cancelling surgeries because of covid. That is the ONLY reason.
That's only because Covid is new. If we had been dealing with it for the past 50-100 years like smoking and obesity, we wouldn't be cancelling surgeries.
We have been living in a flu epidemic for the past 100 years. We accept a certain number of people being hospitalized and dying because of the flu. Our health care system is built to handle this. We don't discriminate based on flu vaccination status.
I don't think that the fact that Covid is a *new* virus should be sufficient reason to change how we treat people in our medical system.