Dude, you yourself exemplify exactly the selfishness I’m talking about:
While I’m sincerely happy you had a very mild COVID experience, you admit yourself that you didn’t give one flying fuck about the people around you, and socialized with all sorts of people in all sorts of environments while contagious. You didn’t know everyone else’s medical history, life situation, economic situation, or health situation. Unless you took other precautions to respect the people around you—which, based on what you said here
—doesn’t seem to be the case. All cared about was yourself and your own minor inconveniences, with a complete disregard for other people, and that is what you’re being judged for, not merely your vax status. AFAIC, if you chose to engage in those behaviors, you don’t get to complain about how long it took to get out of the pandemic. People acting just like you is why it took so long.
I think there’s some major revisionist history going on here.
First of all, N95s were not available “the entire time.” As noted
here, for the first year and a half or so of the pandemic, the focus was on getting N95s to frontline healthcare workers. 3M along with 6 other leading manufacturers of N95s collaborated to do just that. Average citizens didn’t have a lot of access to them and were asked not to use them, so that healthcare workers could. The market was flooded with counterfeit N95s, and price gouging of legitimate ones. By early 2022, the govt had successfully expanded the stockpile of N95s and they began to be available to average citizens. I did use them once able, but that wasn’t until the last half of 2022.
I think there’s a lot of things wrong with the “COVID doesn’t kill average people” mindset. Firstly, even when it isn’t killing people, COVID still
stressed healthcare workers and the healthcare system, and that’s reason enough to take action. Secondly, no matter what demographic is most represented, it’s still an unnecessarily large number of fatalities. We had 350,000 COVID deaths in 2020. That’s the population of a good-sized city. We actually ended up
exceeding that in 2021 because even though the vax was available, the US had a piss-poor 56% vaccination rate. Compare those numbers with the worst year for the flu we’ve had recently, in 2018, when only 52,000 died. Flu deaths some years are as low as 12,000. There was a huge difference.
It beyond crazy to make an argument like: “Well, if you’re worried about COVID, how about
you wear a mask, and
you get the vaccine, and stay out of other people’s business!”— The “mind your own business” argument is one I might make if we are discussing, you know, gay marriage, or abortion, or something where that actually makes some sense.
But we are talking about a pandemic—of course we have to not only worry about what we’re doing but also the people around us, because that’s
literally how pandemics work: they are communicable illnesses that rip through populations of people, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the actions of the people.
Vaccines are only as effective as a community needs them to be when enough community members are vaxxed.
This article contains a short animation which shows how a virus moves through a community when the community has a vax rate of 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 95% respectively. This fact, and the fact that the most vulnerable people often can’t get the vax because of their age/medical conditions/immunocromised status, is why getting vaccinated is so important.