2nd shot yesterday as well. I got used to shaving/shearing my locks off during deployments (heat and limited shower facilities) so now my wife uses the clippers every month or so. I’ve reached the age where I’m built for comfort, not speed so looks aren’t so important. Back to the breaking thread.
It sounds like your observations have all been outdoors, which is not a good way to judge mask-wearing rates. Ventilation or the lack thereof is quite possibly the biggest single variable in whether or not somebody gets a significant dose of the virus from an infectious person. I religiously wear a mask every time I go into any store, church, etc., but I don’t wear a mask outdoors (unless I’m walking between my car and a building that I’m going into or have been in), because the risk is so much lower.
Well, it’s a perfectly good way to judge mask-wearing outdoors. Which is important, especially here in the city where the sidwalks are often crowded and too narrow to get six feet away from anyone. And especially important where crowds are gathered.
As for the packed bars and restaurants in the more fashionable parts of Brooklyn, I observed that from the street. In Red Hook, especially, the bars were as crowded as they were pre-pandemic. Not a lot of masks in sight, either. After all, everyone was drinking.
In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, there are no masks. Indoors or out. None.
I’m not sure parents of young children are going to keep their kids isolated for another year, nor am I sure it’s the right thing to do: Dr Fauci says children should not play together without masks until they are vaccinated | The Independent
128,839,816 total cases
2,816,997 dead
103,969,784 recovered
In the US:
31,097,154 total cases
564,138 dead
23,586,796 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Hungary:
In better news: A study of kids 12-15 found the Pfizer vaccine safe and effective, with similar side effects and similar levels of neutralizing antibodies formed as in the previously studied 16-25 year olds.
In worse news, I’m listening to an NPR article about covid surging in India, with multiple nasty mutations affecting people who recovered from covid a year ago, of i caught that correctly. Yikes!
Great to see the optimistic scenario seems to playing out in regards to vaccines stopping transmission of the virus (as opposed to just stopping symptomatic disease).
Her comments seemed to be in reference to a CDC study released earlier on Monday that examined Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines and found that in real-world conditions, they reduced the risk of infection by 90 percent two or more weeks after the second dose was administered. The CDC said the study demonstrated that the vaccines “can reduce both asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.”
Link to the study:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Vaccines.html
Results showed that following the second dose of vaccine (the recommended number of doses), risk of infection was reduced by 90 percent two or more weeks after vaccination. Following a single dose of either vaccine, the participants’ risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 was reduced by 80 percent two or more weeks after vaccination.
This just seems tone deaf to me. Is this recommendation based on strictly stopping the spread of COVID-19 or a holistic assessment of risk/reward to children in the aggregate? I just don’t see most parents willing to do this for another year, especially given the risk profile of COVID-19 in children.
It may be that Dr. Fauci is reacting as an epidemiologist.
Right now, there are no vaccinated children. So, while children are at low risk of the effects of COVID, they represent a pool of vectors passing the virus within the population, potentially creating new mutations to emerge as variants, possibly highly resistant to current vaccines.
With the recent encouraging results of vaccination studies on children, this may change and then I would guess Dr. Fauci’s advice would change.
But it doesn’t say to keep your kids isolated, it says that your kids should wear masks when playing with other kids outside their bubble.
I certainly don’t think most parents are planning on isolating their kids. Heck, I think most are planning on sending them to school or daycare.
The rising trends of daily reported cases (7 day average) seems to have reversed in the past couple of days, without reaching a new record high.
With one exception. For the first time in months a state hit a new record daily high – Vermont as of Sunday March 28 hit a new daily high of 180 cases.
Of course, it’s only a touch higher than the previous high of 173 they hit back at the beginning of January, and that number would’ve been lost in the noise of the cases in, say, New York. and it went down after the 28th. But it’s still a step backwards.
In bad news.
France:
I think the logic is that the ability to guarantee kids below a certain age wear a mask and keep it on is severely limited.
All my friends have had their kids in masks. Kids are pretty adaptable. I guess the 5 year olds are better about masks than the 2 year olds.
But it started with a friend asking all her friends to post photos of themselves on Facebook wearing masks, to normalize it for her toddler.
I think 2 years of socializing without facial cues is going to screw some kids up for a long time.
Presumably they are getting plenty of unmasked time with parents and siblings to learn social cues.
A few hours a week masked in a playgroup won’t cause grave harm.
That’s as good as learning with your peers? The practiced faces of your authority figures is the same? I would not presume that.