I agree with the thread trend here - once vaccinations are more widespread, especially in vulnerable populations, the public health cautions will start to ease. The very population that is filling-up hospital beds, ICU units, and morgues is one of the first to receive the vaccines, and I expect trends in each of those 3 indicators start to decline as we head into spring 2021. With hospitals and morgues not being flooded with COVID patients, restrictions will also start to ease, even if testing shows the pandemic is still active.
However, I don’t really agree that in one or two summers we will be back to the same place as summer 2019. Masks may or may not be worn - maybe it will be optional, but in the before times masks in the US simply were not seen in public. As debated in other threads here, handshaking will likely be curtailed and elbow bumps will be more accepted, whereas no one did that in 2019. Maybe, finally, adults will wash their damn hands more often. Activities like travel and attending sports events and concerts will resume, but you may have to show some proof (card, phone app, etc.) that you were vaccinated for COVID (and even better for other vaccines).
I hate the masks, too, but my circumstances do not require me to wear one much because I don’t have to come in contact with anyone and only choose to on few occasions. My life as a single retired person can’t be compared with married-with-kids people who still go to work in the Outside World. Not sure what you were getting at.
I think mask wearing will be quite common, because its been shown to have a very positive effect on suppressing the flu and other respiratory disease. I expect, at least in the sane non-US world, there will be a strong campaign for seasonal masking and social distance protocols to be taken up as flu season comes around.
The US will continue to fail in finding a comprehensive universal health care system, and the costs of long-Covid will be projected to cripple its economy. The cost-cutting will hit hardest those industries and areas that were most responsible for non-compliance, and militia craziness will increase, fuelled by a number of crazies who think they can repeat what Trump did.
QANTAS and some other airlines are saying that they will require proof of vaccination to reopen international travel. With say 50% rates the US will increasingly find themselves on the outer as to relating to the rest of the world. The real diminishing in its global standing that Trump, and the behaviour of many of its citizens gave it, will continue with the long-term effect that its cultural capital - Hollywood, celebrity culture, fashion, assumed leadership of the free world - will continue its shift until it becomes the Brazil of the North.
You will continue to reap Trump’s failures for several decades.
I have to say I think mask-wearing will virtually disappear by June or so of 2021. I mean, right now, today, mask-wearing in many places is near zero. It’s certainly not going to be more common when more people are vaccinated.
I’m just saying that your OP predicted masks being normal for years and I am pointing out that people that for married-with-kids who work in the outside world, masks are a much greater burden and so are less likely to persist.
It’s my understanding that mask wearing is common in some Asian countries but it’s main purpose is make it socially acceptable to go to work sick. I’ve seen no one touting how these countries get less respiratory illnesses. My gut tells me, that would have come up over the last few months if true.
Why does everyone always focus on masks? There are a heck of a lot of responses to the pandemic, and most of them have negative side effects, and some of them, I’d argue, are overreactions with side effects worse than the disease… but masks are pretty much at the bottom of that list. I wouldn’t mind continuing to mask up for years, if that’s what it takes to get rid of the other restrictions.
That said, it probably won’t be necessary. Just a few million vaccinations in this country would be… Well, not enough to end the pandemic, but enough to make it a lot less of an issue. For people outside of the high risk groups, COVID is a fairly minor disease. So once you’ve vaccinated all the high risk people, you’ve crossed a major threshold. That’s, what, a couple of months from now? And it’s not like the vaccinations will stop there, either. 40-50% vaccinated will mean a much slower spread, even among the unvaccinated.
Well, “masks” are a good stand in for closing schools, restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, movie theaters, etc. What we’re saying when we say “we’ll stop wearing masks” is not that we’ll sit at home without masks on, but we’ll be “back to normal without masking.”
Well I guess we can spell it out a little nore. Do you think any businesses or activities will be restricted this time next year? I do not. Bars/restaurants definitely open by summer. All those idiot kids can be idiots next Memorial Day without being shamed for killing grandma.
A newsy discussion of impacts on flu deaths and cases in Australia in 2020 here.
Or for data-nerds you can look at all the graphs in here - Australian influenza survey report 2020 [current issue to end of Nov.]. Contrast the 2020 red line with previous years.
To be fair, Australia generally relied on social distancing rather than masks until the latter part of the year but they were required in diferent stages of the lockdown in some states in particular situations. Mask use has dropped fairly dramatically in the past few weeks, but we have had 1 locally acquired case in the past week nationally, so there is an element of complacency.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong but a text search does not find the word “mask” in that first article. Seems to mention every mitigation measure but masks.
Haven’t you been paying attention to the news? There are people who aren’t wearing masks NOW.
Methinks that you don’t know very much about human nature. As soon as the weather warms up, and people start feeling the Spring-induced good feelings, masks are going to start flying off.
But my point is that we may well be “back to normal with masks”, with people going bowling and to movie theaters and so on, just like they used to, except wearing masks while they do it. In fact, in a sane, sensible return to normalcy, that’s exactly how it would go, because you naturally want to do away with the high-impact restrictions before the low-impact ones. Eventually we’ll get rid of the masks, too (except for people with active respiratory diseases, and people who want to make a fashion statement with them), because yeah, they are a bit of a nuisance, but ask the owners of those bowling alleys how “a bit of a nuisance” compares to the loss of their livelihood.
I’m pretty sure every high up public health official says distancing is more important than masks. So no, opening up movie theaters with masks is not the order of reopening.
You’re right. This is a regularly updated document. An earlier version of it or something with a similar title did have a long section on social distancing and masks and so on, but I couldn’t be arsed looking for it.
Instead, some much easier to find commentary on the change in mask usage in Australia just to close off this issue. And to be clear, the intent was masks as part of a suite of measures, not as the silver bullet. Masks were initially discouraged because of the supply issue, and because the community rate of infection was so low.
June 2020 - medical authorities stress social distancing is the thing, masks only in specfic circumstances
Distancing might be more effective than masks, but it’s a question both of benefit and cost. Distancing has all sorts of negative side effects, some of them quite severe, so it should only be used when it’s providing a correspondingly-large benefit. Masks, however, have only very slight costs, and so it takes only a very slight benefit to justify them.
As we get people vaccinated and bring the pandemic under control, all of the mitigation efforts will decrease in the benefit they provide. For every one of them, there will come some point where the benefit is less than the cost, and that’s where we should end that mitigation technique. My point is that, since the cost of distancing is so much greater than the cost of masks, that point should come earlier for distancing.
At least, if people were rational about it. But with the way that masks have become this big important symbol, they probably won’t be.