Sources are divided on the statistics, but catching Omnicron so you don't catch Delta would be a winning trade (not a big a win as catching one-time-use mRNA, haha, but we're talking strict economics.)
Nobody, in this comment chain, made the claim that one should intentionally get infected (I don't think, unless I'm missing something implied).
It's inevitable that at least some portion of the population is going to be infected, intentional or not. We wouldn't exactly be in a pandemic otherwise. And it's certainly not some new found knowledge that coming into contact with germs/diseases leads to an immune response to better respond to future infection.
Instead of looking at it as "Why should I intentionally get infected to avoid being infected", maybe try looking at it through the lens of "I've already been infected, how does that change my risk analysis?".
I personally know people who's calculus on this is literally "I am going to catch covid explicitly so that I can build immunity to covid." These people are idiots. I probably was too hasty assuming everyone in the comment chain was of this mindset before giving them an chance to make whatever potentially rational case they planned on making.
I think they key point of any risk analysis should be that "I can spread Covid even if I'm unaware that I have it". We know that if you have caught Covid once, you can catch it again. We also know that while some people do gain some longer-term immunity to Covid, many don't. There's no way to practically tell if you have that immunity or not. So, based on the fact that you can assume that you'll catch Covid for a 2+ time at any time, and will spread it before you know you have it, the math points to trying to not catch it.
And with that, if you have not caught it once you should really really be trying to not catch it for all the same reasons.
This is assuming you care about reducing spread, of course. If you don't care about reducing spread I can't really debate with you because our moral frameworks are so far removed from one another that there's no sort of argument one can make that will sway the other.
Sure, so you become infectious and quarantine for 10 days (at a time you can test and control), and then don't have to worry about it in the future. Removes a burden going forward.
You can catch it more than once and you are contagious before you’d reasonably have the knowledge to test. Now you’ve spread it when you didn’t have to.
Wait..... The coming variations are unknown, and the current variant is known.
I thought the only game we were allowed to play was to prepare for the worst and hope for the best?
If those are still the rules, you DEFINITELY want to prepare for the worst by getting Omicron, the real weak attenuated live virus vaccine. You definitely don't want the vaccine whose one trick S-spike protein is functionally useless as of now.
For healthy, already vaccinated people it's reasonably safe to contract omicron. I haven't gotten omicron (I don't think) but it's not at all something I would worry about at this point.
Concern is still warranted for high risk groups. It's important to vaccinate to reduce symptoms. It is safe for most people to contract omicron.
Modern medicine weights the benefit of a treatment against its side effects. Chemotherapy, as one example, absolutely ravages a person but the alternative (ongoing cancer) is significantly worse: that is why chemotherapy is a recommended treatment for cancer. The current consensus is that we shouldn't be intentionally infecting ourselves with COVID as an inoculation. The side effects of this treatment aren't well understood and we have evidence that they can be pretty bad (long COVID).
Remember that we are currently only counting deaths. You should continue to do everything in your power to avoid catching COVID... and vaccinate, obviously.
The virus has no doubt been bad for many groups of people, but when the leading cause of death in the U.S. for adults 45 and under is drug overdose from a single drug, fentanyl, and when the excess deaths over the pandemic from suicides far outstrips COVID deaths for teenagers, it's time to pause and reconsider health from a more holistic perspective. COVID kills the elderly and those with a few other comorbidities like obesity and diabetes, but, for many, the risk factor is too low to justify the outrage people have over the unvaccinated, as much as it is the fault of the media and the established government for stoking this outrage.
How many people out there do you think are making that decision?
In order for them to do so, they would have had to avoid being vaccinated and getting infected this whole time. There just aren't that many of these people left at this point.
There are however millions upon millions of people who have already gone through the ordeal of an infection and are tired of being harassed, badgered, shamed, attacked, etc, even after the talking heads are finally admitting that these people are not the plague rats they led everyone to believe they are.
Why not? I'm triple vaccinated with Pfizer, and I was seriously considering getting infected. I still don't see any data on hospitalization rate between getting infected with delta vs omicron variant for triple vaccinated people. At the same time getting infected with a variant would prepare my body for newer mutations.
