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I made 24 high-quality Covid illustrations. Free for commercial and personal use (pixeltrue.com)
325 points by andyydao on Dec 4, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 124 comments




These are great!

You may be interested in joining the Lifeology community.

https://lifeology.io/lifeology-community/

"The Lifeology community connects scientists, health experts, artists, storytellers, expert reviewers and audiences to improve how we all communicate about science and health."

They have published various COVID-19 resources for adults and children: https://lifeology.io/coronavirus-center/


(off-topic)

Do you know any community for 'Self reporting symptoms of long COVID'[1]?

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/170-self-reporting-symptoms-of-...


Awesome! I'll check this out :)

Thank you!


Very nice work - thank you!

I'm curious how long something like this takes to put together. Not the website so much as the illustrations themselves.


In total it took us about 2 weeks of researching, sketching and then designing :)


That explains how the result is so beautiful. You did a really good job, and gave the results away. You have a lot to be proud of.


What is the intended audience or setting for these illustrations? Is this to teach young children or for use in elementary schools?


Preschools would be a good fit. But they'd be infantilizing in a setting much older than that.


as a 36-year old grown-ass man I find these images high quality and adorable and wouldn't mind getting a shirt/sticker/etc with some of them.


Just out of curiosity is there a name for this visual style? It's sort of a cartoonish cutesy flat design thing that you typically associate with explainer text on a website or subway ads or similar.

It seems common with the generation of consumer facing companies that launched about 10 years ago and since, I'm thinking of Warby Parker or Oscar Insurance as examples among many others. It also seems to be heavily influenced by a Japanese style of "cute" marketing I remember from trips to Tokyo.

In my head I've always considered it to be something like the "millennial marketing" style but I wonder if designers have an actual name for it.


The pejorative name is "corporate memphis".

See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22890877


This says it's under "creative commons" license, but there are many creative commons licenses and the link just goes to creativecommons.org . I'm guessing you meant to use CC-BY, CC-0 or CC-BY-SA?

CC has a license chooser to help you pick one: https://creativecommons.org/choose/

Edit: Just noticed that someone else had the same question, my bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301038

Sounds like it will be CC-0 when the license is sorted out, which is awesome! If true, advertising that these are public domain will probably be an even stronger selling point!


Hi there!

I've just updated the license to this - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Let me know if that works well :)

all the best


CC-BY-SA is not "free for commercial" use. CC-BY would be.

Whether you choose CC-BY or CC-BY-SA is up to you but the title says "free for commercial use" which CC-BY-SA is not or at least not for the use cases shown.


The linked page literally says:

> You are free to [share and adapt] for any purpose, even commercially

You might be thinking of the previous* NC (Non-Commercial) variant, e.g. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

If you really mean the share-alike part, i.e. that when you modify the image then anyone is free to use your derived version under the same terms, and you actually object to that clause, then I'm sorry but that's just stealing the author's free work without sharing whatever small edits you made back.

* incorrect, Non-Commercial is still an available variant of CC also in version 4.0, see u/quadrangle's comment below.


Unfortunately, there's nothing "previous" about NC. It's right there with the others in 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

But you are right that NC is the anti-commerce or rather, commercial-rights-reserved license.

Without the NC, SA is indeed free for commercial use!


Oh, I thought I remembered them having dropped that because it was hard to define and actually reducing freedoms or something. Perhaps that was the FSF/OSI standpoint instead (though GPL never had it, so idk where this idea came from). I stand corrected about it being "previous" :)


There was a strong advocacy push for dropping NC or at least renaming it CRR (commercial rights reserved) to be clearer. But CC decided that dropping it for v4 would likely just lead to people continuing to use the v3. And if they use NC anyway, better to at least have the updated legal language than the outdated version.


I don't think commercial use is incompatible with an SA license. Maybe it depends on how you define commercial use but if you define it as "any activity in which you use a product or service for financial gain", there would be no problem putting one of these images on a product and sell the product and still give the consumers the freedom to use the images under the same license.


Thanks for pointing that out Gregg! I've just updated it to be CC-BY :)


Gregg is wrong. Thanks but no thanks Gregg, you are confusing people. CC-BY-SA allows free commercial use. It just means that if someone makes a derivative of the work, they also keep that derivative CC-BY-SA (which is good) rather than locking down the rights. But they can do commercial use without any limitations.


The use cases shown on the page https://www.pixeltrue.com/frontliner-heroes are all derivative works. BY-SA means you can sell the picture but as so as you add text it's now a new derivative work (like every example on the page)


This is all a bit confusing but it's starting to makes sense now.

What I actually want the license to be is CC-BY-SA - I think this mean that people shouldn't making money out of the illustrations e.g. putting it on a t-shirt and selling it, but rather using it in their commercial website/app.

Is this correct?


SA is copyleft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html).

That just means everyone you share your stuff with must share alike (what SA stands for) anything they choose to publicly publish that they’ve made out of your copylefted work (their derivative works), in the same way you shared it with them (as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ says: “ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original” — in this case CC-BY-SA).

That doesn’t mean they can’t sell it, it just means they can’t claim it as their own and refuse to let any one else make their own derivative works of it under the same terms they made theirs.

(Edits: Formatting and quote)


There's no license that lets people use it on a commercial website but not to sell it on a shirt.

The only way to have that situation is to keep it All Rights Reserved and make separate contracts with people for all uses. That would totally undermine your goals.

I think CC-BY-SA is what you want. People aren't likely to sell it on a shirt, and if they do, they still have to give you credit (that's the BY part), like on the shirt itself I'd think even. If you left off the -SA part, people could make new versions and make those versions restricted instead of sharing them under the same terms.


Don't listen to this guy, as far as I can tell the only purpose of wanting the share-alike clause gone (which doesn't prevent commercial usage; it literally says that on the page you linked above) is to take your images and sell them on something like shutterstock.


Thanks for this Lucb1e, I've changed it back to CC-BY-SA :)


This is wrong because many uses of the work, like adding it on the front page your your site with some caption, is a derivative work. Putting it on a page by itself or printing on a t-shirt would not be derivative but using it as a logo with text would.


But what is the problem with someone taking your modified (captioned) version and using or modifying it further? Why shouldn't they be free to do so?


And here I was expecting beautiful renderings of the constituent proteins of SARS-CoV-2.


"Avoid handshake" strikes me as weird, with the hands essentially hovering in front of the prohibition sign.


Yeah that would be better if they were just overlapping hands, not shaking hands. Expressing not to touch without invoking the symbolism of cooperation.


They do have an "avoid handshakes 2" option, which might be useful for what you're trying to express.


They look great.

Just a minor point, but your captions are offset from the illustrations in Firefox.

Edit - I took a couple of screenshots; captions for the last row aren't visible: https://imgur.com/a/kTvfeKn


Thank you for pointing this out! It should all be fixed now :)


Looks good now. Thanks.



These look great! Thank you for creating these.

Please note that you do have a link to creative commons, but I could not find the specific license these are released under.


It's my pleasure! Let me get back to you on the license part.

However as a summary you'll be able to use them for personal or commercial use without attribution :)


Kinda disappointed there’s no tik tok dancing nurses one.


haha that's a brilliant idea! Maybe we'll branch out into tiktok soon :)


Thank you very much for these awesome illustrations!


It's my pleasure! Thank you for the kind comment :)


I took the liberty to turn these into a Telegram sticker pack: https://t.me/addstickers/Frontliners (credit included)

Given how TG is being used to spread misinformation, having more positive and helpful content on there can't hurt


They have something Asian about them. Not that this is good or bad per se, but I wonder if they work equally well everywhere.


Asia is 60% of the population of the world.


That makes it mostly good then.


How do you know they are Asian?


Use of animals. Exagerated display of emotion (happy, unhappy).

To get an idea, type "kawaii" in Google images. Or check wikipedia:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawaii


Although it's already been said, great work! Thanks for putting out some positive energy on the internet.


Amazing work! Thanks for the assistance to everyone else out there!

Semi-related: The Noun Project is also a great resource for free icons : https://thenounproject.com/


These are great, though I'm not sure "toilet paper hoarder" counts as fighting against covid. If anything, that one's a minor victory for covid :)


haha very true! Although I still plan to stock up on a few rolls ;)


I don't understand why Mummy, Couch Potato, and Toilet Paper Hoarder are part of the set. What are they for?

What is Quarantine Life intended to communicate?


ah, i collect these! here's my list of free illustrations for anyone else looking https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#ill...


Thanks Swyx! We also have about 150+ free illustrations here - www.pixeltrue.com/free-illustrations


added!


FYI the page remains blank for me for a few seconds. I actually thought it was dead, since the loading was long done, and hit the back button before it flashed the page at me at roughly the same moment as I hit the back button. I've heard of AMP doing this but there are probably more things. From a quick look in the network tool, it seems to be waiting for twenty-odd requests going to your third party chat integration.


Cute! Thanks for contributing :)


> Wear a mask

Still waiting for a very convincing evidence that most masks that people use actually do something. Agree that even with the lack of evidence, it's probably better to wear one, but it's pitiful that by the end of 2020 we still don't really know for sure.


Recent study [0]: "We found that cotton masks, surgical masks, and N95 masks all have a protective effect with respect to the transmission of infective droplets/aerosols of SARS-CoV-2 and that the protective efficiency was higher when masks were worn by a virus spreader."

[0] https://msphere.asm.org/content/5/5/e00637-20


> and that the protective efficiency was higher when masks were worn by a virus spreader

So does this mean that between:

- virus spreader wearing a mask + non-virus spreader not wearing a mask

And:

- virus spreader not wearing a mask + non-virus spreader wearing a mask

The former is safer for the non-virus spreader?

Meaning that we’re more dependent on those spreading the virus to be diligent about wearing masks, vs. those not infected to be wearing masks?

I’m trying to make sense of why we’re seeing more cases now vs. earlier in the year when there was less knowledge and awareness of masks, and this might partially explain it.


I'll give this crack. I believe the current state of knowledge is that it likely works like this:

Mask on virus spreader: Mask will capture a very large amount of the viral load being shed.

Mask on non-spreader: Will filter some amount of the air you're breathing in and lower your initial viral load. Giving you either

A) a low enough dose your immune system kills it off or

B) a low enough dose your immune system has more time to mount a defense before the viral load in your body rises high, potentially leading to a more mild infection.

That's why we ALL need to wear a mask and stay 6ft/2 meters apart.

BTW, further is better 6ft is not a magic bubble.

Also there is aerosol transmission(floating covid in the air). Ventilation is CRITICAL for this to be stopped. Germany is spearheading ventilation as a way to stop the spread as far as I know.

They are making rules about intervals windows need to be opened etc.

Heres a BBC article covering Germany on this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54599593

Here's a random blog that gets into it: https://dirkpaessler.blog/2020/08/13/corona-wie-co2-messgera...


How about a slow-mo video of sneezing with and without a mask?[0] It clearly shows the amount of spray caused by wearing and not wearing a mask. I know there can be micro particles not shown by film, but it does give a much clearer example of how effective masks can be.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ66wJFD3bs


I mean other than that doctors have been wearing them for centuries at this point?


I have never personally (with my own eyes) seen seat belts save lives.

So I don't wear one and I have never been in accident.


The parts we do know aren't exactly reassuring, but they're limited to the physical properties of masks (i.e. do they stop aerosols / particles). It's somewhat hard to test how big an effect they have on preventing infections since it's nigh impossible to control the other variables (ethically).


I've also found the actual epidemiological evidence for mask wearing being effective at preventing transmission lacking, despite the historical precedent and obvious mechanism of action.

I still think it's highly likely that mask wearing is effective (even the shitty cloth masks with designer brands printed on them, and in a sense beyond it being a good idea to as a cheap precautionary measure), but the lack of convincing evidence of that is surprising.


https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818

Please do keep in mind the time it takes to gather the data needed and then to write, peer review, and publish a rigorous epidemiological study.

You'd be very hard pressed to meet that standard in less than 9 months. Which means the first solid epidemiological evidence would not be available until, if we say that the epidemic went global in Feb 2020, until Nov 2020. And guess what, there it is!


Which piece of evidence would suit your need? Beyond the physics of wearing a mask, I mean.


I appreciate your support for mask wearing, but am troubled that you do not see the evidence.

I hate to say "right in front of your nose" because that's where the mask sits....

As others have pointed out, the reasons doctors wear surgical masks is because they prevent the spread of infection. Why do you think they are called 'surgical masks'? Why do you think doctors wear them?

The N95 standard (if you want to upgrade to a N95 mask) requires that the mask have a certain ability to filter out aerosols.

I would consider that pretty strong evidence that a (properly fitted) N95 would reduce your chance of exposure via aerosol transmission, and also reduce your ability to spread it to others via the same route.

Is this really so hard to understand?

If you prefer epidemiological studies linked specifically to Covid,

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342198360_Associati...

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%...


The parent comment asked about the masks most people wear. I'm under the impression most people aren't wearing N95 masks, let alone N95 respirators. I refuse to wear a cloth face covering--I only wear N95 respirators with a silicone seal. I'm not taking that kind of chance.


Excellent work, thank you.


It's my pleasure :)


I like. Was expecting something scarier....

"Wash Hands" and "Swab Test" could use some "ethnic variety".

The rest, with animals, are universal in that regard.


Those look slick, keep up the good work.


Nice. What software did you use?


These look awesome. Can you change "Social distancing" to say "Physical distancing" though?


Even if I agree "physical" is better suited for what's asked for, "social" is now the de facto recognized and used term and people seem to understand it to mean "physical" in practice. At least those that don't subscribe to various "it's a hoax"-theories.


I haven’t heard that phrase as much, why do you think it’s better?


Not the poster, but I agree with them. "Social" distancing says to me at least, avoid people period. Don't talk to them. Don't communicate in any way. Be asocial, if you will. "Physical" distancing is exactly what it says, keep your distance from others, and has no impact on the social aspect of daily life.


I think part of the reason for the social distancing term is that it implies there need to be less restrictions in a non-social (ie work) context, which is of course BS.


I love your art style! :)


everything looks like diaper packaging now http://jollo.org/LNT/public/nursery.html


truly infantile.


Sitting on what appears to be a park bench isn't what I would call "quarantine life". That one should probably be a couch.


I love what this comment - and the certainty in its conclusions - says about our current times.

Having lived in NYC my whole life, I experienced life within the "epicenter" of this "tragic" pandemic. I have never seen the parks so full of people in December - every bench is occupied. Every bench.

In my neck of the woods, many people have largely lived their lives on park benches, doing everything they can to have connections with other people in as normal a way as possible. People "socially distance" as much as they can, sitting as far apart from one another as possible, and talk. Usually with masks on.

In Brooklyn, NY, this is possibly the best way to remain sane without risking being a victim of the huge increase in random senseless crimes, and without risking being a perceived nuisance to the public.

It's sad to see it, because it's so obvious what trouble people are going through to get this all done. To see people bundled up in winter coats, barely able to move, so they can bare the near-freezing temperatures - just to socialize - really shows how hideous these lockdowns are and how much they threaten the human spirit.


Curious about why you choose to scare-quote "tragic": I would hope you feel that there's nothing contentious about death on such a massive scale as being anything short of tragic.


I scare-quoted "tragic" because the tragedy of this pandemic was not the lives lost due to the introduction of a new head cold into our ecosystem - it was the illegal, violent, and world-upending implementations of fascism that governments engaged in, essentially declaring war on its own taxpaying citizens.

I am in the "epicenter" of the virus - NYC. Everyone I know who has contracted the virus - male, female, old, young, thin, fat, black, and white - had about one day of illness followed by 12 hours of recovery. On day two, all of them awoke to feeling pretty much entirely over it.

Anybody who's even remotely healthy has nothing to worry about with this pandemic. If people are truly being killed off by COVID-19, we have much bigger public health problems to be addressing than this stupid virus. By not ever addressing immune system strengthening, healthier diet and lifestyle choices, etc., to fight the virus, we enabled the pharmaceutical companies to continue to herd us in whatever way gives them the best chance at profits.

Obviously, it is this group of people to whom our governments are directing their attention. Obviously, these self-interested elites are using government as a vehicle for compulsive adoption, turning huge profits in the meantime.

The people that died from COVID were going to die of the very next infectious disease they contracted. To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error. If this is a truly global crisis, we're all fucked anyway.

A typical US president amasses a 1mil+ kill count by the end of their first term in office. I am far, far more concerned by these tragic deaths. And I am quite lonely sometimes holding that contention. But I know I am right. Notice how nobody is talking about foreign policy, and hasn't for the entire year, thanks to this pandemic.


>Anybody who's even remotely healthy has nothing to worry about with this pandemic.

Absolutely untrue: [1]Otherwise healthy people have died from COVID-19. And [2], healthy, asymptomatic carriers have infected friends and family members who have themselves died from it.

The parent comment is misleading, dangerous, and should be removed.

---

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-19-underl...

[2]https://www.uchealth.org/today/the-truth-about-asymptomatic-...

(edited for styling purposes)


> Otherwise healthy people have died from COVID-19.

I never said they didn't. In fact, I directly acknowledge the healthy cases:

>> To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error.

Sorry if this was too much of a value judgment for you, but I do not consider any respiratory illness with a less than 0.5% death rate to be something which we need to bring the world to a halt over. I do not think that these unlikely deaths, nor the even more unlikely "asymptomatic spread" purportedly part of this virus's nature, can be used as evidence to the contrary without some actual analysis on your part.

You have, thus far, provided none.


[flagged]


I'm sorry you experienced that, but it's not ok to break the HN guidelines like this, despite how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If users become this aggressive with each other, this community will not survive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Even without direct illness, my ~35yr old relative is a physician running a Covid unit and she is absolutely ruined by all the death that she's seen. She signed over 20 death certificates in one day last week. Just day after day, week after week of 'treating' patients that never get better and who are alone and scared is a massive weight we're putting on everyone in healthcare.

The selfishness of this attitude is unconscionable to me.


Death is horrifying. We in the "civilized" world _should_ know this better than anybody. We are shielded from so much death on a daily basis and yet have to deal not at all with the death we shower on others outside our borders.

We, the taxpayers from these countries, have been ruthlessly drone-bombing innocents, arming horribly violent terrorists in foreign conflicts, and running shadow campaigns against elected leaders for a century.

With extremely few exceptions, just about everybody from a North American or EU country is from a place complicit in these atrocities.

There is nothing new about the amount of death we are reported to be dealing with thanks to COVID-19. In fact, it's a walk in the park compared with the last 20 years of American & European foreign policy.

Maybe you and your relatives are all just a bit new to the whole "death" thing, but many of us have been aware of it for some time and it just doesn't hold quite the same weight.

Once you see a country's ruler getting sodomized by a bayonet until they die, a flu-like illness doesn't really read quite the same as you seem to perceive it.


Personal attacks are against the rules on HN. I realize you must feel extremely upset over the loss of your friend, but the data is extremely clear on this. A recent study examined the relationship between comorbidities and deaths from COVID. Of the deceased COVID-19 patients in the study, 83.29% had a preexisting comorbidity, while only 16.71% did not.[1]

Age is also a major risk factor. According to the CDC's latest numbers, people 65+ account for 79.6% of all COVID deaths in US.[2]

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm


It's fucking obvious that less healthy people die more easily. I don't need data to know that. I'm disputing the claim that healthy people have, quoting, "nothing to worry about".


I was pretty clear with what I wrote. You should have read my entire post.

> To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error.

Your friend falls under the category of the latter - the rounding error. Your experience is far from typical, but your foolish, fanciful insults, I'm afraid, are the "new normal."

I do not think it is controversial to suggest that a virus with a death rate of under 0.5% is nothing to worry about for a healthy person. It would be unhealthy and rather unhinged behavior to worry about it.


I am sorry that posting links to mainstream evidential data gets you down-voted.

Age is pretty much the only risk factor - the average age of death from COVID-19 is higher than the average age of death. [0]

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm


[flagged]


Please do not perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of what other commenters are doing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


[flagged]


[flagged]


[flagged]


This sort of aggressive posting is not ok on HN, and we've had to warn you about it many times before. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future.

Emotions are high, everyone is affected, and people are under pressure. It's all understandable. But we need HN users to react to this by being more thoughtful and kind to each other, not less—and the only way to really do that is to work on it regardless of how badly other commenters are behaving.


Outdoors alone, is the best place you can be right now.


[flagged]


I really wish people stopped digging graves for 275,000 people and counting by being able to tell the difference between basic public health measures and fascism.


The problem with this kind of reasoning is that you put blame on a large group of individuals, without being a 100% the measure have any positive effect at all. This creates a dangerous precedent. Putting health before anything else will make the life we live impossible.

But if you insist on being right, you should stop travelling, stop using electricity or any modern device. They all pollute and potentially will cause some damage to someone's health.


There is zero doubt at this point that mask-wearing and reducing the number of people one comes in contact with do have a positive effect.

And your slippery slope fallacy is also unconvincing. I have a reasonable choice about whether to meet someone in person, but not whether to use electricity. And while both may be harmful, only one of them can be the proximate cause of the continued spread of disease and even death.

The strawman you're building is that we put health "before anything else". Being absolutist and making any one thing a priority to an extreme degree can of course be problematic. But asking people to properly wear masks in public, closing spaces where people do convene and not wear masks, and expecting people to relate to others virtually or from a distance are not "putting health before anything else" - they're making health one priority. You're making up the idea that it's exclusive of everything else.


You not agreeing with my statement, is only because you decided for yourself what you see as a minor or a major inconvenience. But you cannot project your belief system onto others. People should always have the choice to decide what works for them or not. Political or social pressure in any way is unhealthy. Period.

At this point saying that there is zero doubt at this is 100% untrue. To put it mildly, the scientific community is divided on this topic.

Till now hacker news has been my safe haven from politics and propaganda. I am sorry to see that going away also.


Now who's taking the extreme position? But your accusation applies just as well to you: putting individual choice before anything else will make the life we live impossible.

Should I get to choose whether taxes work for me or not? Sure be nice to take advantage of all the public resources without having to pay for them, at least until everyone else catches up.

Should I get to choose whether criminal law works for me or not? Sure be nice to take what I want and shoot anyone who tries to come after me, at least until we're all at each others throats.

People who are taking unnecessary risks aren't just projecting their belief systems onto others, they're threatening their health and their lives. Social pressure has its place against people who threaten us, because it's better than not having a society at all.


> Now who's taking the extreme position?

No. There is nothing extreme about:

>> you cannot project your belief system onto others

>> People should always have the choice to decide

>> Political or social pressure in any way is unhealthy.

You know what _is_ extreme? This is extreme.

> Should I get to choose whether taxes work for me or not?

Thinking that no people or entities make the very deliberate choice to not pay any taxes is not only extreme, it's blindingly and overwhelmingly untrue. We see people complaining all the time on HN about how Amazon, Walmart, etc., get away with not paying any taxes through their expert utilization of accounting, legal loopholes and insider access.

> Should I get to choose whether criminal law works for me or not? Sure be nice to take what I want and shoot anyone who tries to come after me, at least until we're all at each others throats.

It is indefensibly extreme to suggest this is not happening every day. I just wrote in my prior post how NYC's rapid increase in senseless violent crime is the actual pandemic here.

This summer during lockdown I was walking back from the grocery store and got randomly assaulted - punched in the face numerous times - by a complete stranger, who took nothing from me before running away. This is happening all the time now - in all regions of the world.

> People who are taking unnecessary risks aren't just projecting their belief systems onto others, they're threatening their health and their lives.

You are in no way certified to claim who is taking a risk and what constitutes that being a risk.

> it's better than not having a society at all

What we have now is the absence of society. And it's the most wretched, inexcusably grotesque thing I have ever seen governments do to their own citizens.

If this is the way life continues on Earth, who will truly want to live on it?


Now we are getting somewhere. Yes, neither option works.

The points you mention should be open to debate, based on open and truthful information.

And if the points of view are so incompatible that no reasonable solution is possible maybe we should go our different ways. Why not have state without police. There are states or countries with little to none taxes, or villages where you can walk around nude.

But if we keep going into the direction we are going now, things will become very grim. One way or another a side will try to force their opinion upon others. And the price the other side has to pay could be unrealistically high. You cannot ask someone to starve to death for your sense of safety.


> People should always have the choice to decide what works for them or not.

Not really. Not when they participate in a society.

If you're alone on an island, I grant you that your personal choices have no effect on others. For the rest of the world though....


I'd say there's plenty of doubt on the mask front. Lots of evidence that masks encourage risky behavior, lots of evidence that COVID spreads as an aerosol that face cloths can't contain or could even increase, and clearly masks and lockdowns have not been at all effective throughout the world.

The argument isn't "slippery slope" - it's that we are spending trillions of dollars on unproven and ineffective interventions, or even counter-productive policy that directly cost thousands of lives.


I cannot be sure about the rest of the world, but the lockdowns during the first wave (march/april/may) here in Europe have proven to be very effective.


Did the goalposts just move to lockdowns? I was talking about masks and "social distancing".

Spain, France and Italy, before the most recent massive surge, had the best mask compliance in Europe. The surge happened anyway. Italy's death rate is right back to where it was in March/April.

Obviously welding people into their homes is an effective way to stop transmission outside of the home. While the real-world effect of masks seems to have been overwhelming in the case of flu (cases basically down 99%) it has been entirely underwhelming in the case of COVID (more cases than ever). This is most likely because flu predominantly spreads through large droplets and surface contact which homemade masks and handwashing/sanitizing can block, and COVID predominantly spreads as an aerosol which mostly isn't stopped by masks or handwashing.

These interventions are not a binary "work" or "don't work". In theory for every percentage point of people who follow some effective guidance, that should be an incremental reduction in the R-factor. Worldwide cases are over 500k per day, and despite much improved treatments worldwide death rate has never been higher.

But we will never know if, for example, a message of "masks will NOT protect you, the only safe choice is to stay home" would have been better or worse in the final months leading up to widespread vaccination, or if ultimately pushing masks increased the R-factor.

So much of the guidance around COVID has turned out to be wrong. Closing schools for example is now widely recognized to have been the totally wrong decision and cost a lost of lives and severely impacted a lot of people both economically and mentally.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1114375/wearing-a-face-m...


Sure, same as there's "plenty of doubt" on climate change, on the correctness of the 2020 US elections etc. - as long as you are willing to listen to the people who sow those doubts and believe them...


> There is zero doubt at this point that mask-wearing and reducing the number of people one comes in contact with do have a positive effect.

Then why are we locking down a second or third time, with reportedly complete futility?

> wear masks in public, closing spaces where people do convene and not wear masks, and expecting people to relate to others virtually or from a distance

I live in NYC. This is not what is happening. We are being told to not travel. We are being told to not leave our homes without an essential reason. We are being told that we must completely alter our lives, leading to hardship and lost employment all throughout the city.


> Then why are we locking down a second or third time

Most places didn't lock down a first time. You live in NYC, so you got the brunt of the first wave and did actually lock down. I lived in Arizona when it was the next hotspot, and it effectively didn't. The lock down order there basically applied to indoor dining, gyms, salons, and strip clubs. Everything else was open, and 25-50% still weren't wearing masks.

We're still taking measures because we (as a country) didn't do them right the first time. The fact that your community did do things right the first time still left it exposed to the rest of the country. It's not fair, and you've got every right to be angry, and yet it doesn't change anything about how the virus spreads or what it does to people.

There are a number of countries that proved it doesn't have to be futile - it's just futile if people don't do right by each other.


> We're doing things still because we (as a country) didn't do them right the first time.

We in the USA are at 84% compliance with mask mandates. [0] Reconcile.

> There are a number of countries that proved it doesn't have to be futile - it's just futile if people don't do right by each other.

No, there aren't.

There is not a single place on planet Earth where any of the COVID statistics showed any improvement after enacting a mask mandate or a lockdown.

That's because neither masks nor lockdowns work.

Everyone wore masks during the BLM/Antifa direct action that took place all throughout NYC in April and May. It led to a notable increase in infections. We can't have it both ways - we can't say the masks work AND that protesting during the pandemic was safe. If protesting during the pandemic WAS safe, then we don't need lockdowns or mask mandates. Sorry to burst your bubble. Just like the GOP partisans in 2002/2003 who yelled "support the troops" because they had their Republican identity tied to supporting a terrible war, you have fallen into the "follow the science" camp and appear to be doing everything you can to defend your chosen political identity in the face of overwhelming contrary facts.

Just remember: you've got to be a pretty intelligent person. People will be coming to you for greater understanding about these complex times, and you could be a source of immense truth-telling and could help restore a lot of happiness in peoples' lives. Right now, you're filling them with dread - and it's totally unnecessary. I impore you to consider re-examining your understanding of these issues. Watch & read all the banned materials that tear these notions apart.

[0] https://www.mediaite.com/news/whopping-84-percent-of-america...


You live in a place where the COVID statistics improved after a lockdown and mask mandate. New York went from having eight to ten thousand new cases per day to having seven or eight hundred per day throughout the summer. And what bubble? I've never said that protesting during the pandemic was safe, and it's absurd that people think so. They might think it's important enough, but it's not safe.

Speaking of a greater understanding: 84% of respondents to that poll said they "have worn a face mask in public." That's not the same thing as compliance with mandates, and it's not even a statement that they frequently or always wear a mask in public.

Even if it were, how many of those people answer yes but also dine out at a restaurant, or otherwise remove their mask in higher-risk situations?

The good news is that with more up to date knowledge we can likely get a significant reduction in a more targeted way, rather than an across-the-board lockdown [0].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3


> You live in a place where the COVID statistics improved after a lockdown and mask mandate.

That place is now locking down again. Reconcile that for us.

There is no evidence that implementing & enforcing these two actions led to any change in COVID statistics. You will have a terribly difficult time even proving correlative relationships between the COVID data and enforcement of these ridiculous policies.

> That's not the same thing as compliance with mandates

Yes, it is. This shows me that you have not even read the mask mandates. Compliance with the NYC mandate [0] for instance is as simple as wearing one, and only when you cannot "socially distance" from others.

Surely, you are aware that our constitutionally-limited federated republic provides no legal route for these mandates to be anything more than toothless.

> Even if it were, how many of those people answer yes but also dine out at a restaurant, or otherwise remove their mask in higher-risk situations?

See how easy it is for the lockdown policies to enter the mask mandate discussion without any rhyme or reason whatsoever?

The mask mandates were employed so that we could stop being locked down. If the only way for the masks to work is if we also are locked down, you are already admitting that this policy is not only worthless but also misleading in its intent and goals.

Citation needed on the claim that going out to dinner is a "higher-risk situation."

[0] https://regs.health.ny.gov/volume-1a-title-10/content/sectio...


Dystopian flat art, made available for free.

Is this the new normal?


Guessing you're not the audience for the art.


The page feels very weird to me. Why so much marketing speak for free covid illustrations? It just reads to me like a big advert for the illustrations store behind. Do people really respond better when they are told their fight will be supercharged with all the awesome features?


I'm sorry to hear you feel that way, it may be because I'm used to writing copy for other products I have haha.

"Do people really respond better when they are told their fight will be supercharged with all the awesome features?" - Good question, I'm not sure but hopefully people will!


Think it's designed to be a viral self-promotion piece, hence the attribution part in CC.




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