The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.
This matches a lot of my own experience in trying to convince people to take reasonable precautions and get vaccinated. And I was one of the first in line for my age group in my state. You have to do things to build trust first, and you have to be willing to admit that some of the measures taken are farcical and have no basis in science.
People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion. They won't listen to someone who hates them.
The answer to masks being uncomfortable is to have a reasonable discussion about when masks are really necessary and which masks are good (N95), meh (surgical), or useless (cloth) and help people find more comfortable masks, take more breaks, etc. Not the Reddit way of putting up videos on the front page of their 109 year old grandma wearing a cloth mask over her oxygen mask for 5 seconds and mocking anyone who grumbles about how wearing a mask for an entire 12-hour factory shift is uncomfortable is a weak loser... missing the fact that they grumble because they're actually wearing a mask.
If we focused more on helping people comply with rules and explaining things calmly and rationally and being clear about what we do and don't know and took much softer approaches, this wouldn't be so bad.
There are still people willing to listen out there, though. But not a lot of people are interested in actually talking.
'just follow the rules'... that's exactly how we get the blind unreasonableness we're seeing everywhere. you need to examine your assumption that masks are doing anything at all in most common situations, and then consider what's actually reasonable vs. what you've rationalized yourself into.
humility is missing in your thrust to convince others of your correctness.
I think you meant to reply to someone else, because you're quoting words that I didn't write.
If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them.
> "If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them."
to be fair, i agree that we should avoid punishing people for making different risk calculations, and resultant choices, because as a population, it's advantageous to have a variety of strategies employed simultaneously to any potential catastrophe. folks who are trying to coerce a singular "right" approach are literally wrong in their meta-approach.
however, the phrasing of your initial comment fails to recognize that a range of responses could be entirely valid, and suggests 'helping' people find the one right and true way. the better phrasing and intention is to admit that many approaches can simultaneously be valuable, and focus less on being right. being humble is recognizing that no one of us (or even a group) ever has perfect and complete information, and that we should act compassionately and acceptingly towards our fellow humans in light of this truth.
yes, we should share information with each other, but we should also accept that people will actualize that information differently because we're each touching different parts of the elephant[0] and are acting in accordance with our different senses.
Well, I agree that there are valid reasons to make different risk calculations, however, part of that calculation has to be the chance of catching and spreading Covid to people who have higher risk.
I personally have almost no risk from Covid. But if I don't take precautions I could easily kill grandma, who can't vaccinate, and others at the nursing home.
I agree that there's no one true risk calculation for everyone, and there are costs whatever we do, but a lot of this would be solved if we were trying to help each other instead of fighting.
see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility. ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated. visiting with grandma (or any family, for that matter) is an instance where wearing a mask (and certainly a number of other potential mitigations) could make a difference, so use your brain to make that assessment, not some brainless heuristic infringed upon you by an irrelevant affiliation.
> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated
My grandmother can't vaccinate for medical reasons and I have other specific health reasons, including past issues with the flu, breathing troubles, general poor health, and the fact that she's 100, all give me reason to believe that she has special risk factors.
The place she is at has had Covid deaths and there are others of similar age with similar risk profiles.
> so use your brain to make that assessment, not some brainless heuristic infringed upon you by an irrelevant affiliation.
Please, I haven't done any sneering like this to you and you don't know my grandma's situation or her medical history. I have solid medical reasons to believe that Covid would threaten my grandmother specifically, far more than the general population.
That said, I'm not particularly cavalier about a 1-2% risk of death from Covid, even though I know that rate is a moving target (and hopefully getting lower over time with better treatment protocols, vaccinations, etc.). Climbing Everest is something like a 5% risk of death and you can see a trail of bodies on your way to the peak. I see no personal reason not to take a vaccine with a risk ~0.0002% [1] (though I know that some people do have specific medical reasons not to and yes I know of the study that accidentally inflated the risk by 25x due to bad math) and I do wear a mask indoors or when mandated, though I also realize that I'm fortunate enough not to have to wear a mask for long factory shifts or such and I have sympathy for those who do have such problems.
this isn't about your grandma (may she live many more years), but the sanctimoniousness (and misguidedness) of your comments.
your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%, an average that's disproportionately (and unfortunately) inflated by the elderly and unhealthy. the elderly and unhealthy are the folks who we should encourage (but not force) to get vaccinated because of the elevated risk. everyone else can, and should be allowed to, make their own risk-aware decision.
> "and I do wear a mask indoors or when mandated..."
and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions. if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family (i.e., social situations where you're spitting at each other in close proximity), you're just performing safety theater. and factory workers don't need your sympathy or your mask mandate, since most are distanced enough from each other that a mask literally does nothing more for their safety.
the disinformation you seem to have internalized is why this is all so frustrating, and why we need to route around the mediopolitical gatekeepers trying to drown out the 'hard truths' with their relentless deluge of crafted messaging.
It's crazy how you brush aside the elderly and "unhealthy" as people who can die without your consideration and you think their deaths only 'mess up' the numbers. They are treated like an undesirable population whose deaths shouldn't be taken into account.
Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?
> ‘Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?’
you’re nakedly appealing to emotion here, and baiting for an inflexible, naïve answer. that’s a despicable kind of rhetorical move that doesn’t serve to push our collective understanding forward, but rather attempts to coerce and strives for conformity. it’s diametrically opposed to the point made by the linked nature article.
if the question was, “should we take measures to protect the elderly and unhealthy, who are at elevated risk?”, then ‘yes’ is an easy response (and embedded in my previous comment), because that both invites collaboration and admits a variety of potential measures, without ego or mediopolitical posturing. more importantly, it doesn’t presuppose that everyone must be coerced to vaccinate, to wear masks illogically, and to lock down randomly to achieve that objective.
You can't think of a non-emotional, logical objection to millions of people dying pointlessly? Do we need to say something like "the economy will go down" to get you on board?
The virus isn't going away. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but it only has a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.
> your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%
EDIT: I had to address this, too, but even if I assume that figure we get 15.6M dead people once the world is infected. I agree that I have a low personal risk, it's not making grandma die of not breathing--something we know painfully well because of how grandpa died grasping for every breath--that I'd like to avoid. Yeah, there's a DNR order, but I don't wish that misery on anyone.
> and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions.
See, this is an unwarranted assumption on your part. I wear them as mandated because, well, it costs me nothing in general to wear a mask when unneeded. I already mentioned that I don't have to deal with, say, 12 hour factory shifts.
> if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family
I do wear masks when it makes more scientific sense and I haven't been visiting friends & family in the first place. The few times we did, we did wear masks.
So your criticism is just really off base here. You don't know me, you don't know what I do, and you seem to be reaching to find any criticism despite not being in any position to know anything about me.
my apologies for being overly critical of you particularly, because that’s not the strict intent, as there is a larger audience to consider. it’s hard to thread the needle between the personal and the general on an open forum like this.
i do stand by what i said in general however. masks are an insignificant mitigation in most situations (but not for grandma). we can reduce deaths at the margin (like vaccinating the elderly and unhealthy), but without a sterilizing vaccine, many were very likely going to die no matter what else we do/did. it’s ok (better, even) that we don’t all think the exact same things and do the exact same things, since that more completely explores the solution space. in that vein, share information, rather than trying to ‘help’ or convince.
Apology accepted. And on the point of sharing information, I can agree with you. I do want to see more of that because I doubt that any of us knows everything about this. Please continue to share whatever information you find and how you came to know it.
> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated.
No, not quite. It is estimated that 95% of the total US population of >65 received at least one shot, but the percentage of fully vaccinated people in that age group is around 84%.
However, these numbers are averages. Willingness to get the shot varies widely across the US. There are regions within the US where barely half the population took a single shot. For instance, in Idaho, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Mississippi less than half the population took even a single shot, so the majority is still totally unvaccinated.
Your misconception is that you've tried to compare apples to oranges, as you tried to compare IFR estimates with death/infection ratio, which aren't the same thing at all.
Nevertheless, I'm sure no one would make the mistake of interpreting a 10% IFR as being negligible, thus even with that contrarian nitpicking the point still stands.
"Death / infection" is a meaningless number unless you accurately measure the number of infections. Which is what the Infection Fatality Rate attempts to estimate. Which is why the CDC posts that estimate that I linked to, which is 90,000 deaths / 1M infections, or 9%. Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say.
If you're going to be this arrogant then you need to get your facts straight. Yes, 9% is nothing to sneeze at, the difference between 9% and 20% is quite material.
You're displaying signs of Dunning-Kruger - by saying things like "1 death per 5 infections" I'm not wholly convinced that you understand what an IFR is. Tone it down.
I lived with my parents for all of last year and my mom was going thru chemo, so at the time, the threat to her life from covid was very present in my mind. That has gone away since she got vaccinated and I'm grateful. At the same time, my best friend's parents are not vaccinated and I worry that they will get very sick and/or die. My great uncle died from covid. I agree that maybe the phrase "easily kill grandma" was hyperbole from the other poster, and yet i don't know their grandma's situation and the way I read it, their grandma cannot be vaccinated.
Regarding the vaccination rates, I don't think they are as high as you had said/estimated. What I found[0] said 65-74 was around 80% fully vaccinated in the US and 75 and up was around 77% fully vaccinated. If I did the math correctly on my phone, the difference between 80.83% fully vaccinated 65-74 year olds and 95% fully vaccinated is 4,474,231 people. The diff between 77.1% of 75 and up and 95% of them is 4,027,214. While estimating 95% when the percentages were 80.83% and 77.1% may seem insignificant, combined, operating on a large set of people, the difference between your estimate and what I see reported by the CDC adds up to 8,501,445 people...which is just the difference, not the total number of people not fully vaccinated in those age groups. I also think that those percentages are not evenly distributed across geography, as some places have higher vaccination rates and other lower ones, which could make it lower than 80% or 77% in certain pockets.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know if I did the math right above and that I know very little about how statistics work. I think it is very hard for many of us to avoid exaggerating and bending data to align with our fears. Just as I think you were doing your best to estimate the percentage of people fully vaccinated, I assume the original poster was doing their best to estimate the risk to the life of their grandma.
perhaps i misheard it, but i literally heard the 95% for over-65s figure this morning on the radio, which seemed to be quoting the cdc (but again, it didn't have my full and undivided attention). the difference could also be first dose vs. 'fully vaccinated'.
At least this link says even for first dose it's only 91% and 87%, again, which could be off, yet seems as if it would be accurate.
Again, I don't know. What I've learned this year is that statistics can be very unintuitive and I know so little about how they work, that in uncertain times like these, I almost feel reliant on choosing someone to trust who I think understands this stuff better than I.
@nuerow cited nytimes[0] on the 95% estimate in another comment[1]. for the purposes of my argument, the precise number isn’t important, just that it equates to “most”.
and incidentally, that’s the shape of most arguments on most things, because we’re embedded in unbounded uncertainty. the most precision we can have about most things is ‘a little’, ‘some’, ‘a bunch’, ‘most’, etc., not something like 54.736%, despite how enticing precision like that can be. it’s mostly engineering where precision like that is practical, available, and useful.
I think precision also matters when dealing with large numbers. If it's 60% plus/minus 30%, not such big deal if dealing with 10 people, it'd be either 3, 6, or 9 people, a range of 6 people. But if it's plus/minus 30% when dealing with a population of 100,000,000, that's a range of 60,000,000 people.
That being said, yes, I agree there are many situations where precision doesn't matter that much and that qualifiers work sufficiently to describe the general sense of the situation. I think what actually drove me to write my precision rant was ironically where you stated that "easily" was hyperbole, which I took to mean as you believing it was not an accurate or precise enough description of the actions that might kill the grandma. Perhaps this thread wouldn't have happened if the person wrote "I might possibly kill grandma." I don't say that facetiously—I think these disagreements about the accuracy and precision of our observations of the world can lead to so much conflict, as it has for me in my life.
So, in a way, I'm grateful for you going back and forth with me, as I've learned even more deeply that while other people may seem to use too much or too little precision to me, I may use too much or too little for them.
yes, it’s miscalibrations of risk, but not necessarily numerical imprecision, that prods my reaction. it’s possible to kill grandma, in many different ways, but it’s not probable, unless intentionally reckless or malevolent. risk is inherent to life, and we need to be continually adjusting our risk assessments so that our individual and collective behaviors approach consistency.
I think the challenge with "easily" "possible" and "probable" is that they are imprecise and often very subjective. One person's "possible" could be another person's "probable."
Looking at stats from Nov 2020 for infection fatality rates[1] (I didn't know the difference among infection fatality rates, case fatality rates, and crude mortality rates until after I had read this[2]), a female over the age of 80 who contracts covid-19 had a 5.759% chance of dying, or approximately a 1 in 17 chance. Is that probable or possible? I suppose it might be relative to one's normal chance of dying. Perhaps her odds of dying from breaking her hip are much higher and therefore much more probable, so covid becomes a possible cause of death. But also, that was for 80 and above, so maybe at 100 the odds are much higher than 1 in 17. However, with new monoclonal antibodies perhaps they're much lower.
I think sometimes I struggle to have conversations on accuracy of risk calculations without getting more precision. Yes, I don't think it needs to go into 4 decimal places, as that precision is very hard to achieve in non-engineering settings as you had mentioned. I also think sometimes words can be way too nebulous and imprecise to bring clarity between two people, as I've done a lot of work with language, emotions, and conflict, and very often (how often is very often?), conflict comes down to different interpretations of the same word.
yes, that's the calibration aspect of it. for instance, we implicitly accept a 1% lifetime chance of dying in a car accident because of the great utility of automobiles. that's a useful calibration point because it has (nearly) universal acceptance and application.
a 6% chance of dying is nothing to sneeze at, but it's still far from probable, which by definition is more likely than not (>50%). and while it's 6 times death-by-car, it's also dependent on contracting covid in the first place (a prior, in bayesian terms). and that prior probability depends largely on whether the grandchild has covid themselves and how contagious they are (how much and where the virus is), and given that as an additional prior, what relevant precautions they take. this chain of dependent probabilities is also why most precautions have marginal effect (because multiplying lots of fractional numbers results in a smaller fraction). none of this chain of reasoning requires great precision by the way; a single digit of significance at each step being plenty for sound decision-making.
finally, note that a 100-year-old has a 30-35% all-cause chance of death: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html . the addition of covid risk is not immaterial, but relatively not overwhelming.
I appreciate these points, especially about the chain of dependent probabilities. Things can become much less likely depending on many different variables and such.
I guess for me, and maybe for the person with the grandma as well, emotions sway my perception of how risky something is or not, especially with covid. While my mom was going thru chemo, I was already worried that she might die from cancer, and then more so that I would bring a regular flu to her when she was immunocompromised and accelerate that process. Covid-19 stopped me in my tracks, a level of fear I can't recall feeling, that just by being in the same room with my mom and having conversation with her, I could possibly cause her death.
If a grandma of mine were to die from a broken hip, which is probably much more statistically likely than covid-19, I most certainly wouldn't feel as much anger towards myself and regret as if she would die from covid-19 and I had thought I gave it to her.
When my parents got vaccinated, I felt a huge relief, knowing that their probability of dying seemed to drop even more than where it was, almost to zero (I believe), which I probably had originally exaggerated due to fear, and yet, almost all of that fear disappeared for me.
I guess if anything, this thread has helped me pause and reflect on just how much my own emotional state can influence how I see risk, both amplifying or minimizing it away from its more mathematical reality. Thank you for helping me realize this.
awesome, outsized emotional influence on risk assessment is tough to talk about rationally, but it's so important to public policy discussions, not to mention our daily decisions. it takes a lot of emotional sturdiness to self-examine that way.
regarding covid risk, it makes sense to take precautions around the elderly and infirm, because while the risk isn't overwhelming, it's still relatively significant, and feeling relief by taking those precautions is totally understandable. it's just the extrapolation of that kind of situation to blanket public policy that really doesn't make sense (because risk varies so widely for the whole gamut of daily circumstances).
> awesome, outsized emotional influence on risk assessment is tough to talk about rationally, but it's so important to public policy discussions, not to mention our daily decisions.
Yeah, the more I think about, I wonder just how many pandemic decisions have been made by conflicting emotions, especially conflicting fears. Me afraid of my mom dying of cancer + giving her covid-19, others afraid they'll lose the restaurant that they've poured their life into, others afraid the government is using covid-19 as an excuse to gain more control over their lives and steal their property, etc. I talked with a friend the other day who isn't vaccinated and said, "Ya know, if I get covid and die, maybe it's my time." Made me think just how much more I seem to fear death than that person does.
I was listening a little to Sanjay Gupta's conversation with Joe Rogan and one point he made that I liked was talking about how sometimes the conversation about covid-19 risk becomes life or death, overlooking the possible negative effects of just having the virus itself.
> it's just the extrapolation of that kind of situation to blanket public policy that really doesn't make sense (because risk varies so widely for the whole gamut of daily circumstances).
I agree in that risk is widely distributed and it's one of the reasons why I love the idea of decision making at different levels and the concept of federalism in general. I think where it can be a struggle, especially in our current forms of government, is when people cross geographical boundaries. As people move from one place to another (and maybe even as we communicate and therefore virtually feel in many places at the same time or in this one large place together), standardization almost becomes required to make things work. Setting aside the conversation about medical validity of vaccines for a second, one thing they do is help to standardize someone's status for communication to other entities. As someone who (used to) travels a lot internationally, something like a vaccine passport (which they've done for yellow fever for years) makes it easier to verify someone's medical status. Possible to do with covid-19 positive tests as well, just maybe more complex, not sure.
Anyway, I get the feeling you and I could go back and forth for hours on probably any topic lol.
> I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them.
How effective do you believe your approach would be? An unenforceable rule is merely a suggestion, and one which relies on responsible and informed decision-making to be followed.
If anything, the current state of affairs shows that ignorance and irresponsible behavior runs rampant, and we're seeing reckless idiots putting everyone around them at risk.
The alternative is a world where a ~66% majority (if that) can override the remainder on their medical decisions - which is about as personal as decisions can get.
The "force them to do what I say" approach will cause more damage the more effective it is. If this is an option for vaccines, there are a lot of things out there that are more important than COVID.
> The alternative is a world where a ~66% majority (if that) can override the remainder on their medical decisions - which is about as personal as decisions can get.
I'm sure that those who repeat the "rights and freedom" mantra are also aware that there is a tradeoff between individual freedom and the ability to live in a free society, which requires tradeoffs between your own personal freedom and the individual freedom of everyone around you.
The case of Typhoid Mary is a great example. Should she be entitled to dictate her "medical decisions" and not be subjected to any form of quarantine?
Your argument is actually not about freedom at all, but about exceptionalism, entitlements, and excluding yourself from any responsibility or duty towards ensuring that the priviledges you enjoy are also made available to others.
> Your argument is actually not about freedom at all, but about exceptionalism, entitlements, and excluding yourself from any responsibility or duty towards ensuring that the priviledges you enjoy are also made available to others.
The technical term I prefer is "basic human rights". Like right to work, right to freedom of movement, right to associate, etc, etc. That might be a bit entitled I suppose.
> The technical term I prefer is "basic human rights".
If that's what you're going with, please keep in mind that basic human rights include right to health, and your refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions violates "basic human rights" of everyone around you.
So, your argument isn't really about "freedom" but this false sense of entitlement where no rules or obligations should apply to you while the whole world should be forced to accommodate your whims.
> your refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions violates "basic human rights" of everyone around you...
1. I mean, I'm vaccinated. So pardon me for not taking that outburst seriously.
2. That is a stupid argument. We haven't managed to eradicate the flu, I caught it the other year. So it isn't obvious how someone being unvaccinated can expose you to extra risk - COVID is still going to be around and you're still going to catch it eventually - if you haven't already. Probably several times. There is no credible plan to eradicate the coronavirus.
But we have managed to eradicate smallpox, thanks to widespread vaccination campaigns. Not to mention that the flu vaccine saves many lives each year, which is why it's mandated in many areas of life. Perhaps you should dial back the anti-vax sentiments.
Sure, but smallpox may literally be the only human disease we've ever managed to do that with. If Wikipedia informs me correctly.
COVID is much more similar to the flu, which we have not managed to eradicate. It has already manoeuvred around the generation 1 vaccines.
If vaccine is mandated, you're still going to eventually get COVID. It isn't clear how your right to healthcare is being violated here - all the roads lead to the same outcome. Israel, for example, has followed pretty much the pattern we can expect to see. There are still COVID outbreaks.
> Perhaps you should dial back the anti-vax sentiments.
We managed to eradicate smallpox because there are no animal hosts and we have a highly sterilizing vaccine. Those conditions do not obtain with COVID-19. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but SARS-CoV-2 will never be eradicated.
Right to health is not guaranteed. Nor is safety! They get pumped into pursuit of happiness, but again, you'd better have some good legs, or a hell of a wheelchair.
Modern civilization and freedom may come with some obligations and strings attached, but at no point do those justify anyone else as a matter of normalcy, forcing medical intervention or procedures on you unwillingly. We all hope everyone has the good sense to come around eventually; but forced medical procedures is not it. Down that road lay too much atrocity fodder.
Properly understood, they're on opposite sides of the equation and as mentioned, I'd prefer not to do any punishment at all, because I feel like that cuts off most of the nonsense. So that means giving people masks if they don't have one or making reasonable accommodations where possible and making interventions about safety.
But I know it's not quite so easy and especially now a lot of people are hardened and less willing to work together to smooth things over.
> But I know it's not quite so easy and especially now a lot of people are hardened and less willing to work together to smooth things over.
The whole point of enforcing public health and safety rules is that a significant percentage of the population is uninformed/misinformed and shows poor decision-making skills based on their personal risk perception and how they value the impact of their own actions on everyone else's risk.
If it only takes one ignorant fool to spread a deadly disease to dozens around him, how do you expect to mitigate or contain a pandemic?
That's the point, you can't. That's why I believe that softer interventions like this would've reduced the number of people who turned hard against this as they wouldn't have nonsense to point at like that guy who got arrested for being alone on the beach or whatnot.
The resistance is proportional to the force used and the polarization of the populace. I'm trying to reduce those factors. Look at all the non-polarized states and you see that people aren't trying to manipulate each other into doing what they want, they're trying to help each other.
This isn't typhoid Mary, you can't just quarantine one person. I hope that we can patch the vaccine escape from Delta with boosters, but even that is unclear.
"Prefer" is pretty woolly, what happens when push comes to shove? "Well thank you for offering me that mask, but masks simply don't work" [hands you a copy of the DANMASK19 paper]. Do you punish the person why defies you or not?
Yes, it's not easy. In general I prefer interventions like avoiding them, offering them an alternate way to shop (online/someone will gather a list of the items they want/etc.), or similar measures. I doubt there's any perfect answer.
I do feel if things had been like "here's a mask" from the start, though, that there wouldn't be nearly as many people refusing them.
It isn't just humility as many such measures are by nature precautionary without any basis in facts at all. Certainty is certainly wrong, especially when we are talking about risk management. That will affect the message negatively.
sure, but we all hold crazy beliefs and bad opinions, not just a decent chunk of us. the amazing thing is that if, instead of trying to convince each other so hard, we averaged all our opinions together, we’d be collectively right much more than would seem possible. politics literally opposes this astonishing natural phenomenon. politics and ego are the enemy, not the wrongness that pervades the opinions of individuals.
I don’t think any of them are reliable enough to cite, on their name alone, as the foundation for a logical argument where “because X said so” is treated as absolute ground truth. That’s the essence of the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy.
Are they trustworthy enough to modify behavior in ways that appear proportionate to the risk when they make an recommendation and show their reasoning and whatever data they have? Yes, of course, but that’s no longer based on their name/reputation alone and, because it’s only a temporary behavior change, it has a much lower standard of proof.
Government authorities don't always convey scientific information, so you shouldn't trust them without question. I think the CDC has enough bodies in their basement that they need to account to any trust issues. That doesn't mean they will always lie to you, but you have to get secondary sources if you are critical.
And no, it isn't true what you say about the fallacy. It remains a fallacy if the only argument for a statement is authority of course.
>You should really cite something to back up your claim that non-N95 masks don't help.
I suspect that depends on what someone means by the word "help."
N-95 masks have filters that (IIUC) are fine enough to block most SARS-Cov2 containing droplets from being inhaled.
Other masks do not have such filters.
However, that's not the rationale for encouraging widespread masking. Since many COVID infections are asymptomatic and transmission is certainly possible for those who are pre-symptomatic, the rationale is that non-N95 masks don't protect the wearer, but rather those around the wearer, as they trap some (more or less, depending on the materials in such a mask) SARS-Cov2 containing droplets, making an infected person less likely to infect others.
So, if by "help" someone means "this will help keep me from being infected by others," then that argument is correct.
However, if by "help" someone means "this will help keep me from infecting others, and with widespread use of masking, help others from infecting me" then that argument is specious.
I suggest you go back and re-read what I actually wrote.
Because you apparently weren't able to retain the stuff from the beginning and middle of my comment by the time you got to the end, or just read the last sentence, I'm not so sure you'll be able to figure it out.
As such, I'll explain. And I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand.
If you're a selfish piece of shit and only care about yourself, then only N95 masks are useful.
However, if you're a normal, decent human being, you understand that non-N95 masks help to keep you from infecting others. What's more, if enough of us do so, non-N95 masks can absolutely help.
I also want to take this opportunity to tell you to fuck off. Have a nice day!
> People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion.
Is this actually true in the today's world of social media and 24x7 news cycle? I honestly can't think of anywhere (of any popularity) that still engages in nuanced discussion. Probably because people don't tune in.
> People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion. They won't listen to someone who hates them.
The victim argument is standard rhetoric, but they can choose to do what they want. For one thing, I haven't seen much hate at all. Could you give examples of it on a significant scale? Some leaders expressing hate? Mostly, I see resignation.
If anything, the Herman Cain Award is a place to vent frustration about the wave of reckless and irresponsible behavior perpetrated by a largely uninformed/disinformed segment of the population which happens to also be highly vocal and even militant regarding their personal ill-informed beliefs.
The Herman Cain Award focuses mainly on reporting cases of individuals who are eggregiously contrarian and even hostile in their self-righteous militance opposing basic health and safety measures who end up falling victims of their own actions.
If anything, the subreddit documents causes and effects, and showcases the expected risks and consequences of this sort of attitude.
I don't see the Herman Cain Award subreddit as a "place to vent frustration". I see it as an orgy of shadenfreud and a place to mock the dead, no matter how people try to spin it.
I disagree. Perhaps not specifically these subs but the sentiment certainly involuntarily spreads opposition and one main purpose of subs like these is to have something to feel superior about. There are many like that, maybe these aren't the worst offenders.
I enjoy some of those myself from time to time, but it is what it is and has nothing to do with education and is more focused on self gratification. Just enjoy the pleasures in moderation.
> I disagree. Perhaps not specifically these subs but the sentiment certainly involuntarily spreads opposition and one main purpose of subs like these is to have something to feel superior about.
No, that's not really true at all. For a clear example, here's a link to a post from /r/HermanCainAward that popped up in /r/popular right now
Every single time I stumbled upon a post from /r/HermanCainAward in /r/popular, the theme has always been the same. It's pretty much a one-trick subreddit.
> (...) where people are bathing in the catharsis of their dead political enemies.
Taking a vaccine is not a political issue, except to a radical bunch of anti-intellectual militants who for some reason still hold a few cognitive dissonances tied to the last election round.
To put things in perspective, there are countries which already are in the high 90% of total vaccination rounds, have a residual incidence rate, and have already went back to normal, simply due to the fact that they didn't had to deal with conspiracy theorists that adopted denial as a election strategy.
Interestingly, that subreddit has convinced some people to get vaccinated. Otherwise it's basically https://old.reddit.com/r/leopardsatemyface (covid edition) with a lot of venting frustration at folks who willfully spread the virus and the misinformation that keeps it spreading.
Plenty changed their mind due to seeing the subreddit. You can find a bunch by searching it for "IPA" and the twitter account https://twitter.com/YassIPAqueen shares a bunch as well.
I don't think the hateful comments are the reason people are changing their minds though. I think it's just seeing example after example of people who think like they do facing the consequences of their actions which really drives home the point. On the plus side, I think some of the outrage over the tone has gotten people to check the place out when they might not have otherwise. I wouldn't recommend the tactic for general public outreach but it does seem to work for a certain segment of the population and we're at the point now where people are trying everything they can think of. I thought the "funeral home" ad was an inspired idea https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/21/us/covid-vaccine-billboar...
I think a lot more people would be convinced by images of these ICUs and seeing the impact of not being vaccinated as well. However, let's not pretend that the whole point of that subreddit is to "encourage people to get vaccinated". It's to feel good about people (who disagree with you) dying. Maybe if we remembered that some of these unfortunates had more to their lives than being anti-vax, we could be a bit more compassionate and more of them would be convinced in participating in measures against the coronavirus.
> Maybe if we remembered that some of these unfortunates had more to their lives than being anti-vax, we could be a bit more compassionate
Schadenfreude plays a big part for sure! From what I can tell though the fact that these people have families that love them and children that depend on them isn't lost on the subreddit. It just makes people more angry at them for not taking the simple steps that would have saved their lives and spared a lot of needless suffering. When you have people pridefully hurting everyone around them it's going to cause some resentment. They don't just leave their families with emotional grief and guilt they will carry for the rest of their lives, but also with massive amounts of financial debit due to medical expenses which would be unheard of in other developed nations. That too is usually something of a self-inflicted wound.
I don't agree with the gleeful hateful comments, but I can easily see how compassion is starting to wear very thin. I also wish we had more of a view into ICUs and what goes on in hospitals and funeral homes. I don't know how to do that while still respecting the privacy of the people suffering though.
>It just makes people more angry at them for not taking the simple steps that would have saved their lives and spared a lot of needless suffering. When you have people pridefully hurting everyone around them it's going to cause some resentment.
Those feelings are being used to justify behavior I truly find abhorrent on the HCA subreddit. While the feelings in and of themselves may have some basis, they don't excuse that the whole purpose of that subreddit is to "piss on the graves" of the antivaxxers who died.
> I don't know how to do that while still respecting the privacy of the people suffering though
The privacy of the people suffering was never a concern, and the website administration only stepped in [0] once some bad press [1] came about, partially due to those privacy violations.
I really sympathize with your position. I do see a lot of "aggressive anti government" sentiment and I disagree with a lot of their points. However,
I also disagreed with the Chinese "Human Flesh Search" [2] and find it deeply troubling that our society has developed one of our own especially against people I disagree with.
There's a point to sharing how Covid has ruined people's lives, yes. It's the sneering and hate which causes problems.
EDIT: I feel I should clarify that I'm not saying everything on the sub is bad, just the sneering part of it is not good. Sharing stories of how Covid has hurt people is fine and should be done. Cheering for people to die? That's just ghoulish. Yes, I know they're not all doing that, but I've seen more than a few such posts on the front page of Reddit. I don't bother reading that subreddit, though. I don't need other people's stories of how Covid has hurt friends of mine, I have my own.
What political leaders are posting there? Public health leaders? Even medical personnel? Because those people should probably be fired and replaced if they are publicly associated with it.
And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks.
There were plenty of articles (such as the Tufekci one you cite) at the time explaining that normal folks don't know proper mask discipline, such as how to fit masks and avoid fomite transmission.
In this situation with limited supply it makes sense to preserve masks for skilled people who are facing numerous likely transmission sources, especially on the front line of providing health care.
The new data was that fomite transmission is not a strong vector for COVID19, that even modest mask technology is a good source transmission interrupter, and that the contagion window is well in advance of active symptoms.
This new data meant that the flu based studies were not representative.
IMHO it was just a stupid call, because in the face of conflicting data, it would have been a better default option to recommend masks. That's easier to walk back than "oops, we were lying because we don't trust you rubes enough not to hoard, even when explicitly instructed not to hoard." In the beginning of the pandemic I, with effectively zero sewing skills, made a cloth mask out of spare clothing. They could have had an infomercial showing people the most effective cloth mask designs they could sew at home. That's easier to walk back to "oh, cloth doesn't work that great, we recommend N95 now" when the supply of those was adequate.
In short, they could have pretended that the public is not stupid and just told the damn truth.
I agree. Wanting to keep supplies to healthcare workers wouldn't have even been all that hard. Thanks to the horrific amount of consolidation in retail they could have gone to only a handful of major players like amazon and walmart and said "Please pull these masks off of shelves and help us save them for healthcare workers" and that would have kept them out of the hands of the vast majority of the population. A few might have tried ordering them from overseas or spent hours trying to get them from random places online hoping that they were getting the real thing and not overpriced knockoffs, but most people were not going to do that, especially if the reasons they shouldn't were communicated to them.
Claiming the masks are useless to the public but critical for healthcare workers made no sense. I mean, I think most people would accept that putting just about anything in front of your gaping virus-spewing face holes would have some benefit. Health agencies have pushed for things like the vampire cough/sneeze for ages to reduce the spread of all kinds of things, although the crook of your elbow is hardly a panacea.
I think either way we'd have ended up with a bunch of dumb or selfish people who refused to put a mask on, and there were already plenty of people distrustful of the CDC and WHO but they sure didn't do themselves any favors.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of problems that required "thinking outside the box," and the US wasn't up to the task. China banned mask exports for a time. Large N95 exports might still require a license in Korea. The Korean government politely asked Samsung in January 2020 to import a few tons of meltblown plastic, and in March instituted export limits and mask rations to secure the domestic mask supply. (The plastic was then allocated from Samsung to mask manufacturers, and when the manufacturers tried to flex their newfound market power the government threatened to take them over.)
Meanwhile the US continued to allow foreign entities to hoard and export masks and meltblown plastic, and didn't make any effort to secure or guarantee domestic production. It would have been so easy for the national stockpile to place an order for 5~10 billion masks, and then set themselves up as an additional link in the supply chain to hospitals which buffers against fluctuations. I imagine they were limited by their legal framework and budget.
I am not sure if going to e.g. Amazon or Walmart would have worked. If this is timed incorrectly it is easy to cause needless mob hoarding -- see toilet paper de-buckle...
That said yes blatant misinformation backfired royally. I recall at the point already people were calling bullshit and ignoring the "do not need masks" guideline.
This did not happen only in the U.S. or just due to the masks. E.g. the handling of Astrazeneca and other vaccination complications have instilled fear and also a sense of mistrust.
I think there would be a few people not wearing masks or not vaccinated but the percentage would be much lower -- low enough that we can progress forward. The moment masks and vaccinations became a political tool in the U.S. and there was no political solidarity it was game over. Couple that with lying and can you really blame people not trusting the government?
> Thanks to the horrific amount of consolidation in retail they could have gone to only a handful of major players like amazon and walmart and said "Please pull these masks off of shelves and help us save them for healthcare workers" and that would have kept them out of the hands of the vast majority of the population.
Early on, Amazon and other online medical supply stores actually did this themselves. Restricted surgical masks to medical professionals only.
> They could have had an infomercial showing people the most effective cloth mask designs they could sew at home.
In fact, eventually they did something like this. The Surgeon General of the United States produced a video showing how one could make a quick-and-dirty mask with a t-shirt and rubber bands... dated April 4 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI1GxNjAjlw
Exposure matters. I don't think the SG has that many Twitter followers. :)
I feel like there was a real missed opportunity for the President to do, well, Presidential things. Like if whoever was President had done a series of prime-time infomercials that had this kind of information. The kind of TV event where literally every major network would carry it live.
In my wildest dreams I imagine Carl Sagan as President. Or Mister Rogers. Can you imagine how different the response could have been if a careful communicator and good educator had taken the biggest stage, gave us the straight dope, talked to us like adults and children alike, and made us feel like we were in it together. Instead we had the biggest stooge desperately trying protect his only accomplishment, the record stock market and historically low unemployment from cratering because he was only worried about himself.
I agree that it was stupid to take that route. You could always say it was a precautionary measure if effectiveness is low (it is for most masks). Although there is a limit on what you can propose here and it might cause a backlash if you do that too often and may affect future and more efficient measures.
But err on the side of caution for a new form of virus isn't that hard to convey. It was the hobby enforcers of rules that did the most damage in my opinion, with badly sourced data. People should focus to adjust their own behavior accordingly instead of that of others.
If supply for masks was critical, this should be communicated as well. There would be a run on masks, but it shouldn't be a problem to set aside contingency supplies for hospitals. This is what they should have focused on.
Explicitly instructing the public not to hoard is probably the fastest way to induce hoarding behavior. People will hoard two extras so that their family can have those as backup rather than risk them being sold out to the person who hoarded 10 extras when it's time for resupply.
> Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public.
... (a year of arguing and studies ensues while a pandemic of a new and not-well-understood virus spreads out of control) ...
> The new data was that ... even modest mask technology is a good source transmission interrupter, and that the contagion window is well in advance of active symptoms.
A wasted year and all that rigamarole just to figure out what Asian societies have known for decades, and common sense untainted by politics should easily conclude. Masks are a cheap and easy way of reducing airborne transmission.
The US and other Western countries that botched this really need to learn a few things:
- how to learn from other societies that have more recent experience with certain things like airbone pandemics than we do.
- how to do better cost-risk-benefit analysis. Masks are an extremely cheap, easy and minimally invasive means of mitigating potentially serious and vastly more costly systemic bio-risks.
This NIH attitude, and notion that we have to spend a year doing studies to figure out what a little back-of-the-napkin risk analysis shows and other societies already know from first-hand experience, is absurd.
No, actually, there's still no data that mask mandates work. You can simply look at case graphs for different countries, and try to figure out when mandates were added or removed. It can't be done, although introducing changes to the case curves big enough to notice was the only justification for the policy. Given the short serial interval any mandates should have made a clear and obvious impact on case numbers within days, but that never happened.
"we have to spend a year doing studies to figure out what a little back-of-the-napkin risk analysis shows"
Both risk analysis and the studies proved wrong. The real world data is the ground truth here, because that's what the policies were designed to affect.
> This new data meant that the flu based studies were not representative.
I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that having some conflicting data on the effectiveness of masks to reduce the spread of flu is not the same as having data on the effectiveness of those same masks to reduce the spread of a novel virus.
Throw in distinctions between types of masks, estimates for how well people will use/handle/fit them, and things get very complicated very quickly. Distinctions like that can seem like splitting hairs, but they matter and it makes messaging difficult. I totally get why they wanted to keep supplies for healthcare workers and how hard it would be educate everyone on all the factors, but they really could have handled it better and been more honest.
If masks worked effectively, it would be quite simple to find a strong correlation between cases and areas with lax mask usage. Instead it is all over the map (pun intended).
I think it's also worth pointing out that even with them saying masks aren't effective for the public, there was still a run on masks. I don't have the exact date, but when I looked for n95's at my local hardware store in March 2020, they were all gone and this was definitely before we were told to wear masks. And soon after we started getting stories about hospitals running low on PPE.
I am not saying what the right messaging move was/would have been. But all I do know is that no matter what, masks were going to get run on. I also know that, at least from an American perspective, no matter what the government told people to do, there was going to be a contingent of people that would do the exact opposite because we are a stubborn and distrustful people.
> American perspective, no matter what the government told people to do, there was going to be a contingent of people that would do the exact opposite because we are a stubborn and distrustful people.
Right, but you have to start somewhere. The reason we are distrustful is because past experience with the US government has taught us to be distrustful. The first time the US government applies this idea to trust the people and give truthful information, it probably won't go super well. People will still doubt and mistrust. Trust is built over time, not just by saying "yeah, we've been lying forever now, but trust us, we're going to start telling the truth now".
The answer shouldn't be "well, the people aren't going to trust us anyway, so we shouldn't bother being truthful". That's just self-fulfilling the lack of trust, and perpetuates the problem.
Someone else pointed out that telling the truth can also allow you to use social pressure to get what you want. As you point out, telling people "masks don't work so don't bother hoarding them" didn't work; people still hoarded them and there was a shortage. And people who hoarded early could later put on a smug grin and say, "yeah, I knew what was going on from the start and did the right thing". If the government had instead said "masks can help, but we need to reserve the supply for hospitals and first responders", then you create social stigma around hoarding masks. It won't stop hoarding 100%, but it can help. At least you probably won't be worse off than the shortages we ended up having anyway, and, meanwhile, you've taken a step that increases trust. And you paint the hoarders as anti-social and selfish.
When the message was "masks don't work for the public", it was translated to "well they work, but not for you" and thus to "grab as many masks as you can before you are relegated to the no-mask-for-you public bin".
The messaging was crude, obvious, untrue, and ultimately self-defeating. It only takes a small minority of people to buy up everything, especially small, cheap, lightweight objects sold in quantity packaging.
> ...create social stigma around hoarding masks. It won't stop hoarding 100%, but it can help...
That only works in a society with a certain baseline of trust, accountability, and empathy. If you remember 2019, things were already hyper-partisan, a large minority of the population was in a cult of disinformation, and the media was reeling from the shift away from print and moving towards a clickbaiting 24-hour news cycle.
If they were open and upfront about limited masks and reserving N95 and other PPE for healthcare workers there was a possibility of a social stigma of individuals buying up and using N95 and PPE. Like how scalpers get the stink eye and angry stares when they take all the toilet paper, hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. Sure the masks might not have all gone to the right place but I imagine it would have been better than telling people you don't need masks.
Toilet paper scalpers... Last year I scoffed at the people buying two or three packages of toilet paper. I thought that was selfish, and refused to participate in that hysteria. Then a few weeks later, I was wiping my ass with paper towels for a month because I ran out of toilet paper and couldn't buy more. It got me thinking that I should buy a bidet. It also got me thinking that if I had been "part of the problem" and bought more toilet paper than I needed, I would've had enough for myself.
It convinced me to keep a reasonable amount in reserve at least. I don't expect another run on it like before, but toilet paper isn't likely to go bad sitting on a shelf. I can keep a few extra packs around 'just in case' and I can't see the price of toilet paper doing anything but going up in the future, so getting a little extra now makes sense.
This mentality actually was part of the problem. One person buying a few packs is nothing compared to a lot of people thinking they need to increase their stock by just one pack.
Not to accuse you, it's the sane thing to do. But part of the shortage wasn't caused by hoaders, but by a lot of people stocking up a little.
I agree. it's kind of unavoidable, but I took care to only grab a little extra over a long period, and hopefully if people do the same then the next time there's a problem in supply they won't have the sudden pressure to buy up everything available and the jerks who buy up pallets and fill the backs of pickup trucks will be stuck again with product they can't move.
Like mattresses, office chairs, monitors, and other things that will get a lot of use over their lifetime, this is one of those things worth spending a little more on. Unless you're the type of person who also likes the shock of cold showers. The Totos are worth every penny.
Toilet paper shortage was caused by shift from commercial to residential purchasing, with different packaging/distribution/purchase size characteristics. It's not a convenient item for scalping due to low value per volume (comparing to hundreds of $1K iPhones easily fitting in a car trunk.
One temporary solution would be for businesses to distribute / sell rolls of their no longer needed toilet paper to employees. Employees might not have a compatible dispenser at home, but in a shortage they could put it on a flat surface and peel off as needed. Lack of out of the box thinking...
Businesses did sell their stock. But the distribution lines to businesses rapidly collapsed due to lack of demand (or not in the case of essential businesses), and it wasn't viable to keep them open to just distribute commercial toilet paper.
Doubtful. Just think about the toilet paper shortage; a common household item that never would have had a supply shortage if people just maintained their regular buying patterns.
Now think of masks; a non-household item that a small percentage of households carried. Even if people were reasonable and only bought an amount to cover their needs, that would have introduced hundreds of millions of new buyers for that item.
There would have been a supply shortage even if people just maintained their regular buying patterns, simply because they started to use their home toilets much more and their business toilets much less, and those are different products (sometimes literally physically incompatible with the holders) with different supply chains, so an unexpected switch from people using product A to product B is inevitably going to cause a supply shock.
Solution, be honest: "Masks work, but we don't have enough and need them for hospitals so you're not allowed to buy any. Wrap a tshirt around your face instead, it's probably better than nothing."
Huh come to think of it, banning the sale of masks would have been the most brilliant strategy to get people wearing masks.
Imagine if instead of putting out a press release, they had quietly banned selling masks by retailers and then 3 days later when people caught wind of it explained the shortage mean they were only for hospital workers.
All the anti government reactionaries that are now anti-maskers would be the most ardent mask wearers.
> no matter what the government told people to do, there was going to be a contingent of people that would do the exact opposite because we are a stubborn and distrustful people.
Americans are this way because the government continually gives them a reason to. The lying through the pandemic, the Iraq war, it just goes on.
This is why I don't know what the right answer is on the messaging. The US government, and nearly every government, has a history of lying to people. The other side of the coin though is that during those early months, and well into lock down, everything was up in the air about the virus, how it transmitted, and how to fight it. If I was in the position of how to convey that information to people, in the most honest way possible, I don't know if I would have done a better job (or fucked it up even more).
I've disagreed with the general global response at essentially every step. I think any reasonable person would have done better, and get the feeling that there are likely ulterior motives and disgraceful politicised actions to explain how bad the response was.
In particular, in the beginning there were very clear indications given by Taiwan and China that there was a dangerous virus spreading among the people. Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it. They practiced the opposite of the precautionary principle and horrendous risk management.
When politicians knowingly lie to everyone's faces and take harmful actions against the people, pushing toward a more authoritarian society at every opportunity, how can you have any trust and not wonder about conspiracies?
> Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it. They practiced the opposite of the precautionary principle and horrendous risk management.
At what point did the spread in the US stop being driven by sick Chinese people? I don't know the answer, but my impression was pretty darn early - far before politicians were taking the virus seriously as a policy issue. Sometime like early February or even late January.
> At what point did the spread in the US stop being driven by sick Chinese people?
After the first initial cases (that could be tracked directly to travel from China; e.g. that one guy in Snohomish county in the Seattle area), it was already spreading on its own by then.
> Yet sick Chinese people were free to spread over the world for months with no response except down-playing it.
> When politicians knowingly lie to everyone's faces and take harmful actions against the people, pushing toward a more authoritarian society at every opportunity, how can you have any trust and not wonder about conspiracies?
Wouldn't pushing toward a more authoritarian society been not allowing sick Chinese people to travel?
Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now?
Doing health checks and restricting foreign nationals arriving from specific high risk areas is not extreme at all, that has been done plenty of times. I don't think it is comparable at all to the unprecedented restrictions that become normal in the last 1-2 years.
>Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now?
Yes. In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict. It could have been a virus orders of magnitude worse than covid.
> In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict.
That won't work. Right now we have a pretty good idea of how dangerous the virus is, and plenty of US citizens don't want to participate the risk management of wearing a mask or even vaccinating. Hell many governors are outright forbidding vaccine mandates. Those same people aren't going to go along with strict risk management when the risk is unknown.
The same people I knew who were buying canned food and masks in the beginning of 2020 while the governments and health organisations said it was nothing are now the "antivaxxers". Humans are rightfully afraid of the unknown. I fit into this group
However, the next pandemic could be very different now that covid has been used as a political tool and people think of such a relatively mild illness when they think of 'pandemic'.
I still think the pandemic should be managed. I agree the world could've done better at the start, but I don't think that nothing should be done now. Just my opinion.
My understanding is that US outbreaks weren’t even usually sourced by Chinese travelers. Wasn’t the early NY outbreak actually found to have been through Europe? And that was pretty early. I doubt any restrictions from only certain countries would’ve slowed anything down. We would’ve had to do shit Australia did, total closed borders even to our own citizens abroad…
> The US government, and nearly every government, has a history of lying to people.
This is something you should work to fix rather than just say things like "but the other party lies a bit more, so I also have to lie to defend myself! And people doesn't listen anyway so why does it matter if I lie?" etc. I see so much bullshit people use to defend their sides lies and deception here.
To me ensuring the government stops lying and deceiving the public is priority number 1, every other issue is second to that (as long as the country remains a democracy). This goes for your side, no matter which side it is, and no matter how much the other side lies and deceives, I'll condemn you if you lie and deceive. If you disagree then you are a part of the problem, and people like you are the reason the government can freely lie and deceive the public as they do. Governments only stops lying and deceiving when the public strongly reacts to it every time they do, ignoring it just because it helps your cause is how they can continue to lie and deceive.
I agree to an extent, but at the end of the day it's unrealistic. The government is an entity made up of people with their own biases, problems, and their job on the line if they fuck up. I think there is a meme of honorable government employee who will resign before letting down the American people, but the reality is most people (and government employee's) would be more concerned about covering their ass.
This is a long way of me saying that people are liars, the government is made of people, so the government will always lie. Same for partisan pissing matches. The important thing to me is how they react when new information comes to light, or they are caught out on their lies. Or when the lies are big enough (I.E. lead to great suffering), repercussions are put on the table.
> This is a long way of me saying that people are liars, the government is made of people, so the government will always lie.
I live in Sweden, and our politicians seems to be a lot more honest than both sides of American politics. So from my perspective you aren't even close to hit the theoretical "politicians are people, people lie" limit. And until you at least gets somewhat close to it I'd argue that you should strive for it rather than let politicians run wild with lies and deception as you do now.
A good start would be to stop with the "Bundle a million unrelated bills and call it the 'Bill of Freedom!'" thing that is going on. Those bills are there to sow division and hate by saying things like "Our enemy are against freedom, vote for us to get the bill of freedom accepted!" etc.
I am willing to admit being wrong on this. I limited by my experience being only with the American system. From the inside looking out, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking fixing this system is impossible.
America is like that from foundation! Distrust in the government is in this nation’s DNA! Right now Gov. Abbott is taking a major stand against Biden’s vaccine mandates.
I hear this a lot, but there's no reason why this has to be the case. The government has a lot to say in how much the people trust it. If they make the first move (and probably the second, and third, and fourth) in being trustworthy and trusting people with information, they can change this perception.
It would take decades at minimum, probably longer than our lifetimes, but this doesn't need to be a foregone conclusion.
One of the most frustrating things about this for me, is that this pandemic has highlighted just how important it is that the public have trust and faith in science, doctors, medicine, and in government agencies like the CDC. For far too long we've allowed private companies put their profits over human lives and it's hurt that trust. We have seen scientists taking money from corporations to publish bullshit studies for harmful products, doctors accepting bribes to give dangerous drugs to people who don't need them, regulatory capture weaken regulatory agencies and oversight, and time after time there are no meaningful consequences when it happens. It's hard to blame people for their skepticism. Yet even now I haven't seen a whole lot being done to change any of those issues. Instead it's immunity for the sackler family, dishonesty from the CDC, a doctor makes headlines all around the world for telling patients that their illness is caused by daemon sperm and alien DNA, but still has her medical license, etc.
This is some sort of sarcasm right? Arguing that the abhorrent actions of companies like Nestle, DuPont, Phillip Morris, DeBeers, and Purdue Pharma are anything remotely equal to setting federal safety standards while saying I'm guilty of "ridiculous rhetoric"?
The point of the comment you're replying to isn't that we don't just distrust the government now, it's that distrusting the government was expected of all citizens by the people who founded the country. We have an amendment that basically says "if the government becomes tyrannical, use guns to make them stop." Some people think that we are supposed to distrust them, always.
It's a governance technique meant to curb excesses of the ruling elite, informed by the historical frequency of ill behaved governing bodies and their miscellaneous maltreatment of the governed
What leads you to conclude that defending yourself with up to/including deadly force against an intruder with unknown (but quite reasonably presumed to be criminal) intent is unreasonable?
Breaking into an occupied residence is a quite serious crime and I don't think it's reasonable to require the inhabitants to sit down over tea and find out what the invader's intentions are before mounting a defense.
Don't want to get shot after breaking into someone's house? It seems like there's a pretty straightforward way to avoid exposing yourself to that risk.
Irresponsibility and negligence are certainly sad but not very good reasons why people should be stripped of the ability to defend themself and their loved ones
They are precisely the best of reasons why people should be stripped of such dangerous things. We don't let average people fly airplanes, neither should we let average people shoot firearms.
Right after evil, incompetence is the next worst thing for handling dangerous tools.
Though a bit of a tangent, it's quite reasonable to be able to use force against an intruder in your own house. At least in the US the police have no duty to protect or even respond, and depending on location may be many minutes or even tens of minutes away.
It's quite difficult to glean the (true) intent of an intruder, and the possibilities include burglarly, rape, and murder so it's quite reasonable to protect yourself.
The idea is that power corrupts everyone. Thus the system should be set up that no one person has too much power and the citizens should be constantly suspicious of those that hold power.
That's why I don't think it's possible. The priorities and operation of the government change whenever the administration/majority changes. Having decades of consistency like that just isn't going to happen.
That's a fair point. This isn't something that can really be legislated (at least not effectively), so you need successive administrations to be on the same page with this, which isn't likely.
No, that's not really the reason. Those things just further solidified the pre-existing distrust/suspicion.
It's built into the American ethos and the documents founding the republic itself. Having lived in multiple countries it's clear the US government doesn't necessarily lie more than others (often less!), it's just that American start with the premise "The government is probably lying to me".
In some Eastern European country they know that politicians are lying to them and are pocketing money. They do not even try to hide it. They even admitted it! What changed? Nothing. It is still an on-going issue and no one does anything.
My father works in Taiwan and he was aware something bad was coming down well before it hit US news. This was late January 2020, and by then most all of the masks at the stores were sold out, followed shortly by the cleaning supplies. I would say the majority of buyers were shipping these back to family in Asia or they were prepairing for the peak that hit a few weeks later.
I'm baffled that anybody ever thought they weren't helpful. As if we haven't been using masks against airborne diseases for the past hundred years. But suddenly they would be useless against Covid. Then they point to one or two studies as if they support their argument, when there were at least as many at the same time showing the opposite. Also ignoring decades of evidence of the efficacy of masks. I thought I was taking crazy pills. The default for all airborne disease in the absence of significant evidence (particularly in the case of a novel one) is to use masks. Anything else is pure idiocy.
By the time officials admitted they were "helpful" (because of course they were, there's nothing particularly special about Covid in that respect), it was already way too late to get masks. Because anybody with any basic knowledge of disease and medicine had already bought up all the supply long before.
Another way of looking at it is in a betting scenario. I want to make money. The two options I can bet on are
a) Based on decades of scientific evidence, buy fuck loads of masks on the likelihood of them being anywhere from moderately to highly effective.
b) Masks are useless based on two early studies in a highly unstable situation with little accurate information and low confidence, counter to established medical practice with no other basis in reliable evidence.
Guess what I'm betting on. Further, the risks associated with being wrong are far lower with option A than with option B.
Oh I agree completely. I think at the time many of us could read between the lines and see what was really happening: They were preventing a run on masks, and medical professionals needed all they could get.
I don't like being lied to, but in this case I think I have some forgiveness because the end goal was justified (at least in my mind). It's such a weird feeling though, I'm very conflicted about it.
> But all I do know is that no matter what, masks were going to get run on.
To add to this, there were several mask runs in late 2019 and early 2020 in China, HK, Taiwan etc. People were buying out entire inventories of masks to sell online.
By the time the pandemic became a problem in the US, there was already a global PPE shortage, and people were doing the same thing that happened in other countries, where they'd buy up supplies of PPE just so they could sell it for profit online.
I really think this will go down as The Big Mistake that lost the public's trust in the US and made compliance for every subsequent measure difficult to sell, and opened the door to nutters.
Not the fact that cops used to pull me over for no reason because I lived in a poor neighborhood? Not the fact that my family member's lives were ruined because of tiny drug-related infractions? Not the fact that we went on a pointless 20+ year war for no reason (just the one within my lifetime)? Really. Wearing a mask is the breaking point here?
How easy are people's lives? They have everything going for them except they have to wear a mask so THEN they lose faith in the system.
I think you are misinterpreting. They lost faith in medical experts. I don't think hes talking about the US system as a whole but instead trusting the advice that vaccines are safe, masks work, etc. Medical advice.
Can't blame that on the CDC's pandemic response either. Scientists take money to put out fake studies for dangerous products, medical journals publish absolute trash for cash, doctors take bribes from phrama companies, phamra companies bury evidence that their products are killing people and push for more sales, the FDA bypasses it's own process to push out new dangerous drugs as regulatory capture weakens what little oversight exists, and nobody is being held meaningfully accountable for any of it.
If our entire goal was to erode the trust of the American people in science and medicine we couldn't have done a better job. We lost the game before the pandemic and haven't done a thing to turn that around. The sackler family pays a fraction of their profits and get immunity forever. Stella Immanuel still has a medical license. Corporations continue to put profit over human lives and can poison whole populations with no risk of prison time. It doesn't bode well for the future.
Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.
Closing borders is racist.
Two weeks to flatten the curve.
Don’t mask.
Mask.
Stay Inside.
Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough!
Double mask.
Protest crowds are not superspreaders.
Trump Rallies are superspreaders.
School is dangerous, distance learning is good.
Go outside, inside is bad.
Dems-don’t trust Trump Vaccines.
Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination.
Dems-you must trust our vaccines, they are effective.
Biden/Pelosi- we are mandating vaccines.
No mask if vaccinated.
School is good, kids don’t get it.
Still mask if vaccinated.
School is bad, kids are getting it.
Vaccine boosters because they are not as effective as we thought.
Ya, people who have problems with dynamic situations (e.g. best practices continually changing via new information coming in) have had real problems with this pandemic. They wanted a static stable unchanging story from the onset, and were very disappointed and anxious when they didn't get that.
But everything you’ve written above is simply condemning authorities because they didn’t have the best solution from the onset.
This wasn’t an evolutionary change of best practices. This was waffling from one extreme to another, then back again. When you do that, people will lose confidence in leadership.
Everything I wrote above condemns authorities not because they didn’t have the best solution from the start, but by all appearances never had a solution at all. Additionally, one party by my observation spent more time trying to exploit the pandemic for political power gains rather than treating it as a problem to solve.
18 months is a long time. I’m ok with plans changing to find something that works. But again, I understand that a lot of people crave the single right answer from the start.
If we have a dynamic situation, why is it necessary at every step of the way for governments to arbitrarily ban things and then mandate them? Could they not just offer strongly worded advice in line with their levels of confidence?
It is still unclear - and will remain so for some time - if the lockdowns and knee jerk emergency measures were worth the cost.The economic ripple effects have started to appear and we'll have to see how bad it gets.
The changes above weren't caused by "best practices changing via new information", they were caused by political and ideological imperatives.
I mean, seriously. Protests are incredibly deadly. Not BLM protests, those are fine. No, now BLM has run its course protests are illegal again. Obviously that isn't anything based on "new information", and nor have the other changes been so motivated.
Closing specific borders because you don't like the people who come through that border is racist. Closing them all probably wouldn't have done enough anyway since it would have to be combined with mandatory and strictly enforced total lockdown to also prevent the spread internally.
We were able to affect the curve. Maybe it would have been flat or even inverted if people actually stayed home for 2 weeks.
They said not to use masks because hospitals needed them. They weren't sure at the time if the masks were effective enough for others to wear them anyway. Later we both got our supplies in order and determined that even cloth masks limit the spread by significantly reducing the radius around you that is dangerous. We said masks weren't needed for the vaccinated because there was solid safety against the original strain. A few months later, the delta strain became a problem because people didn't do enough to stop the virus from spreading, so we had to go back to masks since the vaccine only partially protects against delta.
Protest crowds were certainly dangerous when it came to spreading the virus. However those people were also far more likely to be wearing masks than people at Trump rallies. Also there's a difference between pushing back against people getting murdered by police and people all gathering to hear a politician that they were already going to vote for tell them all the things they wanted to hear.
I don't want to put any more time into this comment, but I think I've made my point that the changes have been logical.
Yes, you have appropriately conveyed all of the political talking points that attempt to tie logic to the illogic behind some of those flippy floppy positions. The changes are only logical when viewed from a political lens. The party behind all that political exploitation of the pandemic I listed never measures it’s success by the outcomes of their policies, only by the virtues behind their intent (Just as you have done here). Perhaps that is how you think to measure success. Me? I measure success by public trust and successful results. The US government and its experts are sorely lacking in both of those areas.
No, masks aren't the only thing, it's just that it's somehow become the symbol for the whole thing.
But we've got a whole series of documented lies from Fauci. He's admitted to lying about herd immunity numbers [1]. He's had a whole sequence of confrontations with Rand Paul, first claiming that the USA wasn't funding the research there (we were), and then claiming that it wasn't "gain of function" research (it didn't precisely fit the technical definition, but a common sense parsing of the description is that it's exactly what they were doing).
And right from the start, we've got the WHO lying, apparently to cover China's butt. The WHO demonstrably knew that covid-19 could be transmitted between people, and that it was airborne, yet claimed publicly that it had no evidence of either, and went as far as to praise China's response to the outbreak. [2]
It's much easier to lose trust than it is to earn it. Lie just once and you can wipe out years of hard-won good will.
Isn't it a bit unreasonable to lie but expect people to still trust you as they did before? This is not some new premise that the authorities got blindsided by; Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. They should have known better than to lie, no matter the motivation for a lie.
I saw the flip flopping on masks and thought it was silly for them to do that. However, I also was not going to not get the COVID shot over that, because, based on my own assessment, getting the shot made sense.
Anyway, I'm just surprised a whole narrative was built around something I would consider really not a huge deal. Folks could buy masks anyway, even without them being recommended (I did). It's not like masks were illegal to buy or something.
They couldn't for a while though, and that's an aspect of the whole fiasco that really bugged me personally. The initial claim was that we do not need masks, because they are not effective and because if we all buy them then hospitals will run out, so I did not buy any. Then, we were told that we all must wear masks, and there were none available. I was re-using a disposable mask for several days at a time because I had no idea where to get them. It was really frustrating to see wealthy politicians and celebrities telling everyone to "just wear your mask!" because the rest of us could not find any to wear.
Yeah, fair, I still don't know what them recommending this earlier would've done though. It just would've made the shortage sooner, right? It seems that's what they were trying to prevent. I do get that people don't like that they were lied to though, and then mandates were hard to follow when implemented, if people couldn't acquire masks. The pandemic exposed, and continues to expose, issues with our supply chains. If there was an abundance of masks to start with, I don't think the government would've flip flopped on masks in the first place, but since supplies were what they were, I'm not sure there's a good answer here.
I don't have a good answer either. I understand public health at a national level is about being pragmatic and doing things that actually work, and I can honestly understand if they acted the way they did to try and give hospitals some lead time to stock up before the masses did. But even if this was the case, they have not told us about it, and continue to deny that anyone ever said not to mask up. The tweet[0] from the surgeon general was deleted. The CDC page[1] has been taken down. So not only did they lie, they are now lying about lying, and I'm not going to forget that the next time I'm told to "trust the experts."
They never denied saying that they told us not to mask up.
You don't want people linking to obsolete information under the surgeon general's twitter. There is no way to flag a tweet as "for history only ignore the actual advice as what to follow." Meanwhile, the old "don't mask" mandates are in the CDC's website in their archives, which are purposefully hard to find (for similar reasons, to ensure you know you are going to historical and not current publications).
Just wondering, are they currently lying about having made these guidelines before? I haven't heard anything about that myself. I also do remember some news articles saying the government's mask guidelines were so hospitals could stock up (maybe it was once they flip flopped, I forget, it was over a year ago, but I do recall reading that).
I think it's possible they deleted old content to make sure invalid data isn't out there on the web to be cached, linked to, quoted, etc.
However, if they really are lying now (i.e. making current statements) saying that they never flip flopped, then yeah that would be weird.
Different people have different experiences. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Different people have different prior experiences. Some people have witnessed and been harmed by more lies than others. What does or doesn't seem like an overreaction to you, me, or others is going to be different to one degree or another to every individual. What you judge to be a small inconsequential lie may seem like a much bigger deal to other people who have other experiences and viewpoints. That's why the mask lie was not merely silly, it was flat out idiotic. Those responsible, the liars, assumed that everybody else would have the same tolerance for falsehoods as themselves. That was a myopic assumption to say the least.
(I got vaccinated too, but I have no particular animosity towards those that haven't. They are, if anything, victims of the government's long history of being untrustworthy.)
Not just that. In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally and yet everyday the deaths are concentrated in the 60+ brackets. Their latest program has them claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fully vaxxed.
EDIT:Forgot the bit where the JCVI recommended against vaccinating the under 18s but the government ignored the science because vaccines=good
I’m going to call bullshit on everything you just said.
> the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally
I haven’t heard anyone from the government say that.
> claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fully vaxxed.
Here is literally an article from a few days ago that shows 1-in-6 are pregnant women and that the vast majority have NOT had the vaccine.
> Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable?
Have you never heard of racism, bias etc? Yes, when a representative for a group does something then that will affect peoples views of that entire group and not just that person. Humans are irrational like that.
Yes I do understand that. I just hope people would put things in perspective and be a bit more rational. I think racism, bias and all that comes from people taking hard line stances on things, possibly things they inherited from their upbringing, political party, etc. If we take a hard line stance on this as well, I don't see what value we are adding. The way I look at the mask guideline was that it was a mistake but it was an evolving situation with the pandemic, so I understand why some of the actions taken, in retrospect, were not ideal.
Trust is irrational by definition: you are trusting somebody is being truthful without any proof. However, refusing trust after it has been broken even once is rational: not only you still don't have any proof but now you have the evidence that that person/entity can lie to you. You might have heard this saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" what do you think it's about?
Generalization from experience isn't irrational or specific to humans. It's a basic part of any cognitive process. Animals are great at generalizing from experience.
The reason there are social taboos against very specific kinds of generalization is because in the past powerful and evil governments have implemented horrible policies on the basis of such generalizations. But that's an argument against letting governments pass such laws, not an argument against any form of generalization about groups of people.
In this case, public health professionals have been observed behaving as a group in very specific and abnormal ways over a long period of time. It is not merely reasonable to generalize about public health at this point, it would actually be irrational not to do so.
We were told that Fauci and the CDC speak for the medical establishment. And that if you disagree with them you were anti-science, and Google/Twitter/Facebook would censor you. I still trust my doctor, I long ago stopped trusting the political "doctors."
Most of the folks that lost faith during COVID are the ones consuming online rightwing disinformation and also mostly listen to a cable news network and political party that is lying to them for their own political gain.
Pretty sure it's not the only one, it's just the most visible one (the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak). There are tons of other examples above (turning down the music in gyms etc), just not talked about as much. You are reminded about those absurd, knee-jerk reactions when you look at masks (unfortunate given that of all the measures, masks seem to atleast do something).
Yes. The majority of the population doesn't experience the things you have, as unfair as that is. So I think the person you're replying to has a point.
The public hasn't trusted the US government in a long time, probably since Nixon. Recent examples of lies are Iraq WMDs, Iraq involvement with 9/11, Afghanistan progress, and NSA surveillance. Follow that with persecution of whistleblowers and the government seems like it's gone rogue to many.
>Americans were skeptical about the "lone gunman" theory almost immediately after Kennedy was killed. In a poll conducted Nov. 22-27, 1963, Gallup found that 29% of Americans believed one man was responsible for the shooting and 52% believed others were involved in a conspiracy. A majority of Americans have maintained that "others were involved" in the shooting each time Gallup has asked this question over the past 50 years, except December 1966, when exactly half of Americans said someone in addition to Oswald was responsible.
The reality still is, if you don’t carefully specify the kind of masks people are supposed to use (or even specify they have to use non-medical masks!) the effect, if any, is so small it isn’t measurable.
It’s just such a great virtue signal that people keep clinging to it.
It’s a damn religion at this point. The masks most people wear do basically nothing. Wearing an effective mask (for some value of “effective”) is not comfortable at all!
People keep repeating that particulate masks are not comfortable. I don't think this is universally true. Sure, some combinations of face shapes and specific mask models might be uncomfortable, but that is going to be true of anything that is supposed to be form fitting (e.g. shoes).
For me, I had issues with 3M products, but once I switched to Honeywell, I haven't had any issues. In addition to being more comfortable, I have an easier time getting a better seal with Honeywell masks. I think this is in part due to the fact that they have more substantial gaskets.
Higher end masks also tend to work better for me. If you are having trouble with disposable N95 masks, look into N99 or P100 masks or upgrading to a silicone mask. I personally find the Honeywell RU8800 to be very comfortable and I don't have any issues wearing it even on long hikes. This is especially useful when it is smoky.
Another benefit of silicone masks is that it is trivial to test the seal with your face. Poor fit is a common problem with disposable masks and is often cited as a reason why they are ineffective for normal people. Based on my anecdotal experience, roughly 90% of the people I have seen wearing disposable particulate masks in public are obviously wearing them incorrectly. It seems like it would be worth reading the instructions when your safety is on the line.
Just keeping a majority of an infected but not symptomatic persons spit from traveling around the room would seem like a win even if being in the presence of mask wearers being safer is harder to establish than the effecacy of mask wearing and it won't help if those most likely to spread the disease because they won't be careful aren't wearing them.
Personally I've found n95 mask's with head straps more comfortable than cloth masks with ear straps.
Facemask usage has been common in Asia, I think largely due to SARS ( I didn't live here back when that kicked off). It's normal for customer service staff to wear masks even if they just have a mild sniffle/headcold.
TLDR: COVID has both a higher actual body count and a much higher potential body count along with asymptomatic transmission that makes masks which we have every reason to believe decrease transmission by decreasing the amount of fluid breathed out and thus the amount of virions spread through the environment even when cloth masks are worn imperfectly. Models of both chance of transmission and severity of disease decrease with dose of infectious particles.
The utility of preventative measures is defined by an estimate of the relative utility of mitigating vs not mitigating.
Covid is widespread in the community, deadly, very easily transmissible, and transmissible by asymptomatic carriers. This means the single most effective measure we have to avoid spreading illness, simply staying home when we feel ill, cannot and in many cases will not be practically effective alone because people wont practice it.
A mask lets someone who doesn't know they are contagious decrease the chance of spreading the disease in that time frame and it forces immoral people who go to work with their coughing and blowing their snotty nose to at least keep some of their mucus to themselves.
With various mitigation measures we have still lost over 700k people. There is every reason to believe that had we treated it like the flu which we callously spread by not even staying home when we are ill, not bothering to get vaccinated or mask we would have lost 2-3 million people based on the fatality rate experienced by individuals early on not to mention the challenged that would have been faced by our overwhelmed health care system. This is not even to speak of the long term damage to the bodies of survivors.
There is a tendency in those who complain about current health care measures to compare our costs despite countermeasures with the callously unmitigated costs of lesser challenges like the flu. As costs have mounted this becomes increasingly unreasonable as even the mitigated total grows much higher than the cost of something like flu.
We don't make everyone mask up during flu season because the ugly truth is we are ok with killing 50k mostly old people in flu season. We make this choice every time we go out of the house knowing we are sick and work sick knowing we will infect 5 more people who will infect 5 more people and so forth.
By contrast even with drastic mitigations in many case we still lost 350k in 2020 and will probably lose over 400k in 2021.
We have established that in the realm of infectious disease COVID is notably different from the next worst competition.
One could easily argue that behaviors like bad diet lead to as many unnecessary deaths but infectious disease unlike bad diet is something that the vulnerable cannot mitigate. Nobody chases you down and stuffs double cheeseburgers down your gullet but someone may silently exhale death while you all shop for your groceries or work together.
Thus the reason for our elected representatives to on our behalf to set ground rules to protect us from our fellow citizens irresponsibility.
The goal of public health officials is to reduce the overall amount of deaths / infections / disease spread. The goal is not to ensure maximum survivability for a specific individual.
The mask guidance made perfect sense in this light. For the overall benefit of the society, masks were prioritized for health care professionals rather than the general public, in the face of limited supply. But of course wearing a mask improves your individual survivability so you should wear one even if public health officials tell you not to.
The same thing is currently happening with booster (third) shots. For the pandemic to ease worldwide, it is deemed more important to send vaccines to poorer countries with low vaccination rates rather than using them as third shots in rich countries. But if you want to maximize your own chances, of course you should get a third shot.
Public health officials deal with the whole population. You deal with a population size of one. It's a net win for them if their health policy reduced disease by a large proportion in one half of a population but increased it slightly in a different half. It's game over for you if you happen to be on the wrong side.
But public health officials are royally screwed if nobody trusts them.
Importantly, I am NOT arguing that health officials should have changed their guidance in early 2020, I'm arguing they should have changed their messaging. "It's vital that people don't go out and buy masks because if you do hospitals will run out of masks and then we're all screwed" is very different from "masks worn by the public don't work".
I think of myself as someone who "follows the science" and the fact you present is what keeps me skeptical of expert advice. Another example was when the question of which vaccine to get was being asked. Any doctor who knew they were being interviewed, said to get the first one that's available to you. I can see this making sense from a population standpoint, but if I'm personally not trying to get COVID, then of course I'm willing to wait some amount of time to get Moderna/Pfizer rather than J&J. It's just like being told "don't panic", and I honestly don't know if there's any resolution that doesn't involve light deception.
> The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use.
No, that wasn't the real fear.
> But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect.
This was the real fear. They were telling you then what they really believed. (And there was plenty of evidence supporting it.) The statements now to the effect that they were lying all along for the greater good reflect the idea that it's better to be perceived as an evil genius than as a buffoon. They do not reflect reality.
> A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on face masks. It reviewed the evidence and found that they probably helped prevent the spread of disease. Then it asked: how did the WHO, CDC, etc get this so wrong?
> I went into it thinking they’d lied to us, hoping to prevent hoarders from buying up so many masks that there weren’t enough for health workers. Turns out that’s not true. The CDC has been singing the same tune for the past ten years. Swine flu, don’t wear masks. SARS, don’t wear masks. They’ve been really consistent on this point.
Telling people they didn't need to wear masks was a horrible idea. The worst decision by the public health apparatus (as opposed to the political leadership, which made a lot of blunders at various levels) in 2020 and probably the entire past 100 years.
I don't know anyone who defended that at the time or now. On the other hand, I don't know anyone who thought masks wouldn't work well either. Everyone I knew ignored that.
Edit: Everytime I point this out, I get hit by multiple downvotes
That's a pretty poor example since people had already decided covid wasn't even as dangerous as the flu.
The recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said this to his 15 million audience.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Most popular cable channel said this about Covid while Covid was raging in Wuhan and Italy:
Yeah you're getting downvoted because your championing Limbaugh and Fox News, known liars. Probably in your reality they're champions of truth, but seriously, your reality has some blind spots. Big ones.
Your citing quotes from the beginning of the pandemic. Hah, ever noticed how situations evolve and grow? Dubya didn't react when he heard about a plane hitting the first WTC tower because like everyone else, his aides probably evaluated it as an accident and not the start of an attack.
And sure, Limbaugh got awarded "the highest civilian award", but from a president who's a scumbag to a lot of other human beings. Biden also has this award, in your reality is Biden as honourable as Limbaugh? Or maybe Biden's medal wasn't worthy of him because it was "scumbag" Obama who awarded it to him?
>Yeah you're getting downvoted because your championing Limbaugh and Fox News, known liars. Probably in your reality they're champions of truth, but seriously, your reality has some blind spots. Big ones.
Uhh, I am saying the opposite. I am just pointing out the misinformation spread which has nothing to do with CDC mask advice.
I'm not sure how your examples counter what the gp is saying. Are you suggesting that the government didn't need to lie about mask effectiveness because some people weren't taking COVID seriously? Because obviously enough people took it seriously to cause a mask shortage anyway.
I can't speak to what politicians were saying, but I heard a number of virologists and epidemiologists saying that "masks weren't necessary" because 1) convincing most people to use them consistently and correctly is very difficult, and 2) because it was thought that the virus was spread only by symptomatic individuals, who produce larger droplets by coughing or sneezing and which transmit the disease through contact with contaminated surfaces or by close proximity (hence, social distancing).
"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.
"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.
"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.
"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."
Its funny with this mask thing. In Sweden we never had very wide mask usage, and I'm not sure what our "CDC" is saying about masks now, but I still think they are very sceptical tbh.
Part of the problem is that the layman doesn't understand the way scientific communication works.
When asked do masks stop the spread of the virus, the answer is factually no, and people then go and spread that about like masks do nothing. People don't want to listen to "No, masks don't stop the spread entirely but provide an x% reduction in airborne particles" because they've already zoned out
> But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public".
The CDC never really said that "masks don't work for public" [0]. Some other health officials and media did. Now, if you relied on the CDC for information everything would be more or less fine. The two things that make this situation worse is - (1) An ever-changing landscape of information and (2) "Whom to listen to?" problem. We are not good at (1) itself, because we are terrible at updating our priors. Then, you throw in (2) in the mix and there's mass confusion.
Zeynep Tufkeci can say that "oh tell the truth" but there's no guarantee that her version of communication would play better than what we have.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
Yep. The memory-holing is already going strong. In another year, all those "now-deleted" links won't work anymore, and everyone will keep claiming the government never lied, and you'll be a nutter if you claim the government ever said masks don't work. You'll be banned from all forms of conversation, and labeled "alt-right."
The government never said that masks don't work, because "the government" is a thing which does not speak. The former US Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who was appointed by the former president, claimed that masks don't work in his now famous tweet "STOP BUYING MASKS". Fauci did not say this; Fauci instead said that for several reasons "there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask" at that time. The White House Press Secretary was absent, so there was no comment from the former president's Press Secretary. Which of those voices, or lack of voices, or any other voices, would you say qualify as the statement by "the government"? Unless you're a 2-dimensional South Park "nutter" character, you should realize that "the gubbmint" does not share a single voice, if it has a voice at all.
If you're treating the government as a solitary nebulous entity, then accountability goes out the window. It's important to keep the individuals that make up the government accountable and responsible, as President Biden has with Jerome Adams, who is no longer the Surgeon General. Accountability is also why Fauci still serves as the NIAID Director of the NIH.
>The government never said that masks don't work, because "the government" is a thing which does not speak.
The government speaks plenty, it just has many voices. All the ones you hear are specifically chosen people to speak on the government's behalf, they are even told what to say. I'm not really sure what you are trying to justify with that opener. I mean you realize people on this form are more intelligent than the general population, right?
>If you're treating the government as a solitary nebulous entity, then accountability goes out the window.
I think qualified immunity has a lot to do with it. Also the fact that most of the machine wasn't elected and runs the same way regardless of who we put into office.
Given that one of Fauci's emails shows the same opinion on mask inefficacy, I believe the lie came in the 180 about face claiming they do work (and there wasn't any cost to imposing them).
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus
The CDC's main page had much more nuanced advice (as of late March 2020) [1]:
> Wear a facemask if you are sick... If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers.
I agree that the distrust that we are currently seeing has many different sources. It is hard to have consistency when many different organizations are communicating their own messages based on different views of the problem. Even if you could fix that messaging, it would not have addressed the issue of deliberate disinformation.
However, statements like that tweet from the Surgeon General were indefensible based on evidence and clearly damaging to public discourse. Not to mention being nonsense: why would we prioritize masks for health care providers if they weren't effective?
Even the nuanced CDC advice was very bad at the time. In Feb 2020/early March 2020 countries with strong tracing programs were already reporting presymptomatic spread and large outbreaks via the air (following airflow) in enclosed restaurants and workplaces. In such a context "wear a mask if you are sick or caring for someone sick" is really not good enough.
And in hindsight, we now know that Covid is most contagious just as symptoms first appear.
Maybe you really believe this, but to me it comes across as gas lighting. I know what I remember, all the blabbing heads on the media were telling us to stop buying masks because they won't help us. Maybe you earnestly believe otherwise, but I think this line of argumentation will never be accepted by the vax-avoident. On the contrary, it probably contributes to their perception that they are still being lied to, and consequently, will only strengthen their resolve.
You're spreading YET MORE misinformation and you're trying to fool Americans into believing a history that doesn't exist! They're not buying it, and all you're doing is breeding further distrust.
> The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use.
Ironically the run on masks had begun months earlier. I snagged a box of N95 construction masks in late Jan 2020, and they were totally gone everywhere by early Feb
I'm not convinced by that narrative. I think there is still limited proof that masks make any noticeable difference. But the public demanded mask mandates (unlike things like vaccines this is very noticeable so for many people it gives them a peace of mind that something is being done), so the officials delivered. But to save face, they invented a story how they always knew masks work great, but didn't want people to do a run on masks.
This. The officials dig up a scientific story that justifies going along what their electorate among the public demands, then they back up with a cohort of white coats on TV.
Simon says we don’t have masks, so science finds masks useless.
Simon says wear masks, so science finds masks important.
It says “We’ll lie to your face just for the lols”. Also, my government inoculated AIDS to 10,000 patients in 1985 and took 6 years to admit it. This science, is not science. It’s very diligently pruned for political profit, and it works.
So “I’ll take my vaccine in 6 years” is a reasonable answer in a former communist state.
(speaking generally here at those I've seen share the same rage, not accusing you directly)
I just cannot wrap my head around being so upset that a public official lied you're willing to sever friendships, familial ties, and sacrifice your career because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It's not even that the messaging is currently or has been conflicting now. It's like carrying a grudge for years over the smallest of infractions. Are people so bored, they have nothing going on other than to get in a big tizzy about having to wear a mask?
My life has been far more impacted by university security towing my car back when I was 19 and me using a credit card to get it back. Leaving me with debt I couldn't afford for the next year or so. I clearly remember my parents, and all adults in my life, telling me to "suck it up" when I complained how unfair it was. I believe I was far more justified using the parking space at a place I paid 6 grand a semester to attend than any of those adults are now to enter private property for free without wearing a mask.
Why is it only during a global pandemic, with millions of lives on the line, do these same people all of a sudden care about the tiniest bits of hypocrisy and unfairness of our society? Of all the things to be upset about, they choose the one thing that has been proven since mid-2020 to SAVE lives? I literally cannot wrap my head around it. Just wear the fucking mask! Not wearing a mask is such a weird hill to die on...
>"because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19."
As a point of order we can't treat "manageable guidelines" as a monolith as there have been a ton of "guidelines" and rules imposed over the last three years that were dubious, farcical, or overly intrusive. Like supermarkets cordoning off the greeting card aisle because social gatherings like parties were prohibited. Or gyms being told not to play music above a certain BPM because more intense exercise could enable Covid to spread more easily [1]. Going to the beach alone can get you arrested, but standing in a crowded Costco is acceptable. And so on. There's a lot more to the resentment and outrage than people simply being upset at the inconvenience of wearing a mask.
Plenty of small business owners and restaurateurs had their livelihoods destroyed because the government went back and forth on restrictions and enforcement.
[1] South Korea to ban music over 120bpm in gyms, in response to Covid spike : www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210712000804
I often hear criticisms like this (and it's perfectly sound criticisms).
My counter-argument is that, at the time, given our resources and our understanding we had to take wide scale measures and a lot of compromises were made and negotiations happened between people, institutions, governments, etc. so that we wouldn't just shut down everything. I believe most of the time these oddities and weirdness are consequences of those compromises and it's still the case.
Sometimes it's easy to frame things like that and sometimes it's not (especially when the measures is only put in place for 3 days or a week. Eg when they asked people to sit alone next to train windows, rather than all next to each other or when they cordoned off books in supermarkets so bookstores that just reopened could have clients). I don't know how far off the mark I am.
The media's addiction to "scare articles" as well as the government's willingness to promote noble lies puts a lot of weight towards covid risk being heavily propagandized. On top of that, complying with government orders simply because you're afraid is a dangerous way to live.
The scariest thing is how quickly propaganda can convince people others are not worth of life. The cheering of unvaccinated covid deaths is abhorrent.
>The scariest thing is how quickly propaganda can convince people others are not worth of life. The cheering of unvaccinated covid deaths is abhorrent.
I like to study history and I recall an interview with a German who lived during the holocaust. He was asked if he thought the holocaust could ever happen in the US and replied that it could happen anywhere, it's just it wouldn't necessarily happen the same way as it did in Germany. If it ever happened in the US, it would be its own unique flavor of holocaust. It was pretty chilling. People don't even realize the moral road they are traveling when they praise deaths for political "gotchas"; I guess that's what makes going down that road so easy.
Ironically that comes up with wildly inaccurate estimates itself.
> we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the [un]vaccinated population
330 million Americans, less 83 million vaccinated Americans equals 247 million unvaccinated people, not 295 million.
They are also deliberately ignoring CDC estimates.
> CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number.
It doesn't have to be rational. Vaccines mandates are already common for school children, nurses, (and maybe teachers, but I'm not sure about that one)
The rage over masks (and things like "CRT") is being intentionally stoked to win elections. The plan is to make it an us vs them issue. Again, it's intentional and cynical.
If you stoke rage about mask wearing (and vaccines) you can position yourself as also being a valiant anti-mask/anti-vax candidate and win elections on this issue.
>It doesn't have to be rational. Vaccines mandates are already common for school children, nurses, (and maybe teachers, but I'm not sure about that one)
Even this argument ignores nuance.
The vaccines in these schedules are mandated for 2 reasons
1. The diseases they treat directly impact their population in a major way in large numbers
2. Immunization not only prevents the negatives impacts of 1, but also prevent the spread.
As an exmaple for #2. Take Pertussis and TDAP. Even adults that have children will often get a booster. The reasoning is sound there, you reduce the chance of transmitting pertussis to an infant. This is especially true for premature babies that may not have had the chance to get the anitbodies from the mother, assuming she got a booster during pregnancy.
As of right now. COVID-19 has a pretty small impact on children directly ( hospitalization rates at their peak were like 1.9 per 100k for under 18 [2]) . And even nationally its much smaller than any of the diseases used to compare it to (like Measles which has pretty severe complications in like 30% of those that contracted it, regardless of age [1])
AND the vaccine isnt particularly proven to reduce spread [3]. To add insult to injury, CDC specifically stopped even recording breakthrough infection rates unless they were severe as of May 1, 2021.
So it would make sense to question a vaccination mandate for those under 18...
Yes basically. Major complication rates for those under 18 are very low, especially when compared to other diseases in these vaccine schedules (in my example I used measles which was closer to 30%) [1][1.1][1.2] .
By far most of the major complications as a result of COVID are in populations over 45 OR with those with pre existing conditions. This qualifications are almost nonexistent in the under 18 population. At best, the hospitalization rate for those under 18 was about 1.9 per 100k. There have been, according to CDC data, 499 deaths as of 10/6/21 for those 0-17 yo [2][3].
Add to that there is evidence that vaccination doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission, and there have been breakouts where up to 70% of those involved were vaccinated it’s not entirely unreasonable to question a vaccine mandate for that population [4]. Additionally as of May 1, 2021 the CDC stopped really tracking breakthrough rates and only tracks them if they result in hospitalization, which makes it hard, if not impossible to really gather data on how effective the vaccinations used in the US are at preventing transmission.
So theres plenty of arguments to be had about being skeptical of even this argument "vaccines are mandated for kids" as it applies to THIS specific vaccine.
That’s a pretty silly assumption. Those numbers are low enough it could just as easily be exigent reasons (autoimmune diseases, compromised immune systems). 2x more kids die from congenital anomalies. About the same number for heart heart defects per year. [1]
Those numbers can easily be intermixed. Not to mention kids with severe asthma or other respiratory diseases.
There’s no data that would say vaccinations would have done anything for those 499 people.
Not to mention the way many did a lot of these stats is if someone had covid and died from any cause, they were often included in the numbers.
There's something horribly wrong with your link [3].
"The first study saw a drop of 78%, and the second 41%, in infectiousness — with the large difference in numbers perhaps explained by the fact that the estimates are based on a very small number of vaccinated people who were infected and then infected others. ... The results correspond well with studies conducted elsewhere. One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, UK, at least three weeks previously. A study4 from Finland, posted as a preprint on 10 July, found that spouses of infected health-care workers who had received a single dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that produced by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 43% less likely to get infected than were spouses of unvaccinated health workers." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z)
"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. ... Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y)
Government-imposed vaccine mandates were never common for access to private establishments, as is now the case in NYC and LA
Philosophically speaking, It's one thing for the government to say you must be vaccinated to attend public school. It's quite another thing for them to say you must be vaccinated to enter a privately-owned gym.
Or: you must be vaccinated to go to school, AND you must go to school (until you turn into an adult). This means that you have no choice. Not getting vaccinated means you cannot go to school, and not going to school means you may be taken away from your family, or your parents getting into legal trouble. That, and of course not being able to go to school has its own repercussions.
> I have a child attending private school and vaccinations are required by the state. (CA)
No, they aren't.
CA has announced that it will have a school student vaccine mandate, once vaccines for children are fully approved, and not earlier than next school year in any case.
> If you stoke rage about mask wearing (and vaccines) you can position yourself as also being a valiant anti-mask/anti-vax candidate and win elections on this issue.
I'm trying to stoke awareness of how oxygen is known to be toxic, how ventilation is known to be harmful, and how patients' oxygen levels can be improved by using the antidote to oxygen toxicity that has been mostly forgotten by Science™ [0]. Sometimes patients benefit from a little extra oxygen, but it's a very fine line between helpful and too much.
Would I win an election? Maybe an anti-mask/anti-vax candidate will just adopt my term, and point out the harm being done: Medical Hyperventilation causes the deterioration supposedly being treated.
Because they started labelling such arguments as right/left wing propaganda. Labelling any criticism against you as enemy propaganda is a common strategy in authoritarian regimes, and it works really well as long as you have sowed enough hate against the enemy in people.
So even though the plan might not be obvious to those who live in the authoritarian regime, it is often very obvious for outsiders that for example the democratic peoples republic of Korea isn't really a democratic republic.
I agree with you pretty much 100%. My anger is that, by not being truthful, I feel like health authorities played right into the hands of the conspiracy theorists and everyone trying to sow doubt that this is some big power grab.
To be fair, with policies like mandating masking outside, or banning outdoor activities long after it was known there virtually no outdoor transmission, or forcing vaccinations on people who had covid already, or deafening silence on any health improving measures people can take (did we really need studies showing exercise improves covid outcomes? well we have them now, after 2 years passed), or no mitigation of aerosol transmission (we have dentists installing HEPA filters, and nothing in hospitals), it is really easy to play right into the hands of conspiracy theorists...
A power grab by who? Mask manufacturers? People who don't like to look at lips? I am baffled by the belief that asking people to wear masks, in the middle of a pandemic, is a power grab by anyone.
If anything, an intervention that would make it safer to open up more businesses and public spaces should be seen as a great thing for reducing the power needed to shut these spaces in the first place.
I wasn't specifically referring to masks, but now see that the thread had gone that way. I would say, however, that doing good and grabbing power are not mutually exclusive.
I, too, am baffled by beliefs (in general) and would suggest any new powers given to authority be viewed with extreme suspicion and of limited duration before enacted.
Everyone is grabbing for their own power, for their own reasons; they feel this tailwind but they assume that it means they're right, not that they're temporarily useful to other parties with their own agendas.
> I just cannot wrap my head around being so upset that a public official lied you're willing to sever friendships, familial ties, and sacrifice your career because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It's not even that the messaging is currently or has been conflicting now. It's like carrying a grudge for years over the smallest of infractions. Are people so bored, they have nothing going on other than to get in a big tizzy about having to wear a mask?
It's rare, but some of us developed actual health issues from the mask itself, be it the reduced airflow or excess humidity from trapped exhalation. I didn't make the connection for myself until this spring when the mandate was lifted and my problems completely went away.
So, I have no intention of wearing masks ever again, regardless of mandates.
It's not just a grudge or being stubborn when people are asking you to actively hurt yourself.
Emotions can, and often do guide people to do stupidest decisions of their lives that will effectively ruin it, or even kill them. You can't reason with such a person. And getting through the firewall of those emotions, for somebody often on the opposite side of the argument is practically impossible. I suspect IQ level plays a role too (critical thinking not only towards the world but also oneself).
The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.
What covid highlighted like thermonuclear blast is how many people in general population are weird, naive, paranoid and basically... dumb, for the lack of better words. Also how internet amplifies the good and the bad equally.
200 years ago it would be just some random quiet weird dude that you don't have desire to talk to, today its a self-proclaimed patriot who thinks got the ultimate truth in contrary to general population. In their own echo chambers, this spirals into some pretty weird crowd mechanics.
There is no win of argument. There is no going back. In this regard we moved a bit back to the middle ages. And yes, politicians fucked up pretty big time, almost every single one.
The wonderful thing about your statement is it is unclear just what “side” is correct.
You say “ The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.”
That applies a ton to a bunch of ”pro mitigation” people out there who absolutely refuse to look at the data and science. Both strongly show that covid “badness” is very strongly correlated with age to the extent that the median age of death is higher than the average human life expectancy. Kids are almost completely unaffected by covid.
One only need look at Sweden and their results. They took minimal action, allowed the youngest to remain in school w/o masks, and only canceled large events. We are now starting to see the all-cause mortality stats and they are proving Sweden's approach minimized the most harm.
Do you have a source that Sweden minimized the most harm (and the definition of harm in this case)? I’m not saying this is wrong I just haven’t heard of this fact before and I’m interested in reading the study for myself. Thanks!
I think the single study that supported cloth face coverings of no particular standard of performance was a mechanistic study that depends on the belief that respiratory illness spread is a direct function of the distance water droplets of an arbitrary threshold size travel from a simulated sneeze. Which, of course, is so obviously true it needs no supporting evidence.
> is a direct function of the distance water droplets of an arbitrary threshold size travel from a simulated sneeze. Which, of course, is so obviously true it needs no supporting evidence.
Except it turned out to be false, the primary mode of transmission for sars-cov-2 is aerosols that can spread throughout a room (hence the need for good ventilation), not droplets that quickly fall to the ground (which was what social distancing and masking was predicated on).
The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.