Hedonist, The vaccinated and boosted are less likely to catch Omicron:
Great idea! How about we go through the DMV and mine for people with more than one speeding ticket because, wait for it...... they are at higher risk for medical costs! Then we could insist that every American provide to the government..... their weight because as we all know by now, Covid loves the obese. If we didn't have so many obese people with type 2 diabetes, which of course is the fault of the person who doesn't eat right and exercise, we could all pay less.
OH, OH, you know how we could really reduce medical cost to the rest of us? Deny insurance to people who went years and years not paying medical insurance and when they get a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes at 50, they want to pay the same price ( can you imagine ) as those who signed up for insurance when they were healthy and they yell, "you can't deny me because of the poor choices I made in the past not to get insurance the day I turned 18, now 26 apparently", I have a pre-condition!
I think you are on to something here Tiny. I'll bet if we put our heads together, we could eliminate half the population or more from the insurance pool! Think of the money we could save on premiums? All un-healthy people should be denied insurance and admission to hospitals and this would be a much better place, right?
Remind us Tiny on the longevity of a KN95 mask, one day, two days? Surely not a week, right? So theoretically, we will need 400, million masks produced at the very least every week till Covid is over, right. Now that's ridiculous.
Originally Posted by HedonistForever
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S...674(21)01496-3
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....13.21267748v2
And much less likely to be hospitalized:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270
To be clear, I don't believe in mandating what private businesses may and may not do, without good reason. Are you saying insurance companies should not be allowed to charge smokers and unvaccinated individuals more? That sounds like something straight out of Obamacare.
I agree about pre-conditions. They're not something a person can control though, like smoking.
The way I wear KN95 masks, each lasts for days. My cost is around a quarter a day. As to government funding, George W. Bush had it right. We had a decent stockpile of personal protective equipment when he left office, that was depleted during the Obama and Trump administrations. While I'm Libertarian in outlook, trifling sums of money to prepare for and persevere through epidemics are a good use of government money.
And in any event, what would have done more good than government funding for masks would have been encouraging people to use the better quality N95 and KN95 masks instead of single layer cloth masks and the like. And also encouraging them to use them in appropriate settings, like their houses when family members have COVID. That might have saved the life of a buddy of mine. But Fauci, the CDC, the Biden administration and others never really got on the bully pulpit and pushed this, until recently. And Trump discouraged it.
