Looking at the state data, it is hard for me to tease out many differences from state to state for Omicron, looking at cases only. They all seem to rise and fall about the same. So maybe masks don’t matter as much.
The reason that they might not matter as much is that you need to look at opportunities. Suppose Omicron has 100 opportunities to infect you as opposed to 5 or 10 with OG Covid or Delta. You need to block ALL 100 to avoid getting infected. The chances of successfully doing that are much lower. I am just making up numbers there, but you get the idea. For the strategy to work, you need to have it work 100% of the time, and changing circumstances can drastically lower the odds of that happening.
My mother is also in memory care, and Omicron went through her facility. She is vaccinated and was asymptomatic. But the residents don’t wear masks in the facility. That is their home, they would need to wear them 24x7.
Another factor - here’s hoping a vax is approved soon for kids under 6. Tamping down those little disease vectors will hopefully notch the #s further down.
I suspect there’s a lot of truth to this. On the other hand, my mother recently died of covid, and between the four children, we were with her pretty much 24/7 towards the end, and usually a few of us were there during the day. And she was infectious (it at least, strongly positive on a rapid test) up until the day she died.
None of us caught COVID. We are all a little surprised by that. We’re all vaxxed, but we also all wore good masks. I believe the masks made a difference.
(And yes, we all wore masks for longer than 12 hours at a stretch during this time. So I do have personal experience with wearing a mask all day.)
I just found out a woman I know was in the hospital for 5 days, very sick with COVID. She’s home now, doing well from what I hear. The day before she woke up sick I spent time with her at work. We were both masked. I do not believe in god or a higher power, but I believe in masks.
I would say they don’t want it gone, they want the mandate to continue and people ignore it; or t the very least they want it to continue but they get to ignore it to make a political point. If the powers that be remove the mandate because it’s time to go back to normal, then it proves they were wrong all along.
What I think it is challenging for pro-mask folk to really get their heads around is that today’s Covid and its danger to a vaxxed/boosted person is vastly different than what we had 2 yrs ago, or with Delta.
I’m not saying la-la-la, everything is back to normal, the anti-maskers/vaxxers are/were right all along. But in this long process during which responsible people have tried to make responsible decisions, it is yet another new challenge to tweak our current perception to decide what we NOW feel is safe and acceptable.
I have no problem “getting my head” around that. What the anti-maskers have trouble getting their head around is that, it’s not just about COVID any more. See my post from earlier in this thread. COVID forced us into a real-world clinical trial on an unprecedented massive scale, and it’s proven beyond any reasonable doubt that routine masking can, and has, limited the spread of infectious diseases like influenza. And influenza is just the easiest one to prove, because we already had a robust system for reporting cases prior to COIVD times.
Anecdotally, there’s evidence that the common cold has been significantly reduced as well. I used to get a cold 2 or 3 times a year in a typical year, but I can’t remember the last time I had a cold, it’s been so long since I had one.
Masking clearly isn’t as effective against COIVD, and may be even less so against Omicron, but it clearly does have an effect.
But again, completely aside from that, moving forward, encouraging masks during cold and flu season would have a huge impact on saving lives every year. But we’ll never have a serious conversation about that, because every time we try, some maskhole will start shouting about the Holocaust or some stupid shit.
And personally, I appreciate not feeling like shit for two weeks from the common cold, even though I’ve never worried it would kill me. Wearing masks is worth it to me to reduce that risk.
I will follow the law, and this will be dependent on conditions. I have not hesitated to eat in restaurants or attend the gym when possible. I am okay wearing a mask if it realistically helps or is required.
It isn’t as simple as that, many things have changed over the last two years that have reduced the prevalence of certain infections and it would be misleading, or incomplete at best, to claim that masking is the reason for that reduction.
It is one of the social changes that has likely had an effect but the size of any effect is uncertain.
What other changes do you think likely to have affected the incidence of colds and flu? Surely not vaccination. Fewer people on the subway? That affects a very small fraction of the US population, and we’ve had a huge drop in flu. More general awareness of the risks of spreading bugs? I’m in favor of continuing that one, along with masking.
Social distancing for one, but that one isn’t nearly as controversial. It will also be much harder to continue once things are back to normal. You can’t social distance on a rush hour bus, but you can wear a mask.
Work From home probably also had an effect, but only on the people who could do that. Influenza is down for everybody, not just WFH folks.
ETA: We’ll also be running a giant field trial of this, anyways, once mask mandates are lifted. There will be people like me who have decided to retain masks as I’ve discussed, and others who will ditch them as soon as possible, and never wear them again. I’d love to see some public health geek doing a study comparing influenza between those two groups over the next few years.
That’s not surprising; removing some people from routine contact with others lowers the frequency of contact among the remaining population – the former are much less likely to be infected; the latter get a smaller but still significant risk reduction.
But in that case, you’d expect reduced influenza, but still some influenza.
If you look at the site I linked earlier, influenza in Canada has been virtually zero for two years in a row now. That’s far too great an change to attribute to just having fewer people on busses and the like.
I’d also like to study the differences on a geographical basis. We all know there are some places that are more pro-mask, and some that are more anti-mask. I expect the current pro-mask areas will tend to have a significantly higher percentage of people like me, who intend to retain masks under certain circumstances.
So, in addition to a general decline in influenza, I predict that that decline will be uneven. A greater decline in pro-masks areas, and a lesser decline anti-mask areas. I bet, if we could get good enough data, you could even plot the change in influenza as a function of the percentage of people wearing masks, to show that more masks equals less influenza.
The big change in social distancing was not on busses, it was so many schools going remote. No where else crams so many people into such small spaces for such a long period of time, who then travel to so many different households.
I’m sure masks are also a big part of the change, as well. But social distancing changed the schools more than anything.