And that’s key, IMHO. Wear a mask or ten, but don’t advocate everyone else wear a mask to suit your preferences.
Cite?
The CDC’s communication has been terrible, but what they said at the start of the pandemic wasn’t “masks are worthless”. They said, “you are unlikely to catch covid, so you don’t need to wear a mask unless you or a person you are caring for has it. And please don’t hoard them, because there’s a shortage for health care workers.”
I have never said, “follow CDC guidelines”. IMHO, the CDC discouraged mask use when they shouldn’t have, and was extremely slow to accept the rather obvious evidence that covid was airborne. I note that East Asian public health authorities were much quicker to recommend masks and ventilation (partly because they had an easier time politically doing so, as they never had critical shortages of masks) and that those countries have had enormously lower covid mortality rates than the US. Yes, China is probably lying. But South Korea, Vietnam, Japan… It’s a real difference, and it’s because they took realistic precautions and we didn’t.
You haven’t said it, but many people at various levels of government, the media, and on this message board, DID.
Right. Conservatives were mocked. Follow the science. The people at the CDC know what they are talking about, we were told like school children why we should do or not do a certain thing. Now, when the CDC has stopped recommending masks, the left is going crazy at the CDC and demanding that they keep mandating stuff.
And again, the CDC has stopped recommending that everyone routinely mask indoors. They still recommend that people who are older, immune compromised, or live with people in those categories wear masks. (That’s a large fraction of folks on this message board.) They still recommend masks on public transit.
They ORDER masks on public transit. Let’s not be 1984 about the word choice.
And, again, that is part of the terrible messaging. Why can people go to dirty bars or baseball games or other public gatherings but once they get in a subway car, they should mask up, and then congregate at other places. If this stuff wasn’t so facially (hehe) silly then people would be on board.
At the moment, they are simply recommending it.
And the difference between public transit and a bar is that it’s not crazy to tell immune compromised people that it’s unwise to go to bars because the risk is too high. But it’s pretty shitty to tell them, “it’s unwise for you to go anywhere, because it’s too risky to step on public transit”.
It’s not just about you, and what risks YOU are willing to take for yourself. It’s also about whether you are willing to accept a minor inconvenience to protect those who are more vulnerable than you. (Or who value their health more than you do.)
IMHO, “like children” better describes many people’s responses to guidelines from the CDC and other authorities: “You can’t tell me what to do!”
Perhaps people were/are projecting their own issues with authority, influenced by their personal experience with the authority figures in their own lives.
This should no longer be the message to immunocompromised people regarding COVID risk. Even on mass transit, on airplanes, etc. individuals can effectively protect themselves as necessary – see post #123 above.
And to add to this, to those who have the appalling gall to compare mask mandates to the holocaust, I won’t disagree with you but I will invite you to convene a bunch of focus groups with holocaust survivors and ask them:
- would you rather be in a ghetto in Poland?
- if you were given a choice between being in a concentration camp or wearing a mask, which would you choose?
- would you rather be a forced labourer, or wear a mask?
Just curious…
I can just imagine the reunions they have these days:
“Well at least we didn’t have to wear masks, and we have these really cool serial numbers tattooed on us.”
As long as we don’t need to do anything crazy like eat or drink en route, anyway. Good thing I don’t have in-laws living overseas anymore.
Two way masking is always safer. If you rely on public transit, you have a ton of exposure from public transit.
I’m having an endoscopy soon. You can’t wear a mask while someone shoves a tube down your throat. The doctor requires me to get a (negative) PCR test immediately before the procedure.
Doctors are still requiring patients to mask, when possible, as well as wearing their own mask.
Wearing a mask on public transit is such a tiny imposition. And it could save a life. I suggest you voluntarily do it as long as the CDC recommends it, and perhaps a bit more. Watch your local covid stats.
What do those case numbers actually mean now though?
Are they a problem? Will that level result in health care problems? Are they comparable to a similar absolute level from other points in the pandemic?
I suspect not. I don’t think the numbers actually tell us anything at all useful in the way they did previously.
In the UK we still report numbers admitted to hospital with covid, also those in hospital, in ICU and deaths. Trouble is, a good 60-70% of those figures are just people who happen to test positive for covid at some point in the previous 28 days and the virus is not the reason they are in hospital, nor why they die.
I think the time is fast approaching where we’ll be dropping the reporting of figures, they’ve ceased to be meaningful.
Especially since so many people are testing at home now, and presumably not reporting to the CDC, we really should focus on hospitalization, ICU use, and (sadly) deaths.
I wish we had better data on long covid. Yes, we learn (a few weeks later) how many of those people need to be hospitalized. But
We have little idea how many developed cardiovascular disease
studies from earlier in the pandemic showed that recovering from covid doubled your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease in the next year. Is that still a good estimate?
We have little idea of how many develop type two diabetes.
Again, studies showed a huge increase in people becoming diabetic, but they were based on earlier strains of covid.
How many will have reduced brain function?
Covid kills brain cells. That’s one of the reasons “dementia” is a risk factor for death, because if your brain is on the edge, it will knock it over. But i have a friend who didn’t even get very sick but who’s retiring early because she can no longer do the hard parts of her job. A big study out of the UK showed modest but statistically significant decreases in IQ across a huge swath of recovered covid patients. Various studies that scanned brains showed visibly fewer living brain cells.
So, we just don’t know what those numbers mean. I still find them scary.
All the good studies show that more serious cases are associated with a higher risk of whatever bad outcome they measured. So I’m hopeful that vaccinated people who catch omicron have better chances than the middle unvaccinated people in the studies i referred to. But several studies have found that vaccination reduces the risk of long covid (if you catch covid at all) by no more than 50%. And now that vaccination doesn’t much reduce the risk of “catching covid”, what does that mean for long covid?
Those are all lagging indicators, and i want to know what precautions to take. I’ll be mostly looking at sewage data going forward, i think.
I still like the Vietnam/draft comparison, because that actually was an egregious violation of our basic rights perpetuated by the US government, and for an extremely shitty cause.
And the same ideological group that’s protesting COVID restrictions, and a lot of the older MAGA’s themselves, were in favor of that policy, and that extremely shitty cause and called those that were against it unpatriotic America hating chickens. And now they, and their children and grandchildren, are pulling all this totally fake outrage over a government policy that requiring their children to get a shot, even though 50 years ago they were fine with the government requiring their children to get shot.
Precisely. Of the people I know who had COVID and survived, none were hospitalized - for COVID. But one is now dead now (of liver failure - she was healthy before she got COVID, but was in and out of the hospital for a year afterward until she finally died). Another, who is maybe 30 years old and was healthy until she got COVID, is still having problems walking up the stairs to her apartment more than a year later. A high school friend developed asthma out of the blue post-COVID and missed several weeks of work. Others still have issues with fatigue, concentration, feeling out of breath, etc. And that’s before we even get into the long-term issues like heart disease or diabetes.
If some people think I am being a tad neurotic, so be it (and my doctor thinks my concerns are completely reasonable). I’d rather be neurotic than dead, or even diabetic if it could have been avoided by holding out a bit longer.
If masks don’t work, I’d probably be dead now. I’ve done an awful lot of welding, and my P100 respirator has done a great job of keeping really toxic smoke particles out of my lungs.
You should read up on air filtration, because right now you don’t understand how it works. Your mental model of how an effective air filter works appears to be one in which all the holes are so small that the particles of interest can’t fit through them. If masks worked like that, you wouldn’t be able to breathe through them; there would be far too much resistance to air flow.
Have a look here:
A mask - I mean one that’s been designed for filtration, not a goddam bandana from Target, or a fashion-friendly mask some Etsy vendor made out of pretty material from the sewing store - is made of fibers that hang onto particles after those particles crash into them, and the gaps between those fibers are a good deal bigger than most of the particles of interest. As the air weaves its way through the mask, big particles run wide on the turns and slam into the fibers; tiny particle are better at tracking with the flow, but they are electrostatically attracted to the fibers so they get grabbed as well. The hardest size of particle to filter happens to be about 0.3 microns; they have enough mass to help them dodge electrostatic attraction, but not so much as to completely prevent them from following the flow and going around the fibers. This is why filters are specifically tested with 0.3-micron particles. So an N95 mask that has been tested and found to remove 95% of 0.3 micron particles actually filters larger and smaller particles with even greater effectiveness. This includes bare viruses (SARS-COV2 is about 0.1 microns across) and larger droplets of saliva and mucus (10s and 100s of microns) that contain viruses. Want better filtration? add more layers of the same material, and improve the seal against the wearer’s face. Want a cheaper, more comfortable mask? Ease up on the sealing requirement and go with fewer layers. Note that whether you’re talking about a surgical mask, an N95 mask (95% at 0.3 microns), or a HEPA filter (99.97% at 0.3 microns), they all use similar materials and work via the same physical mechanisms; it’s just a matter of degree.
Hopefully you now have a better grasp of how masks work, and understand that viruses cannot pass through every kind of breathable material.