It wasn’t just masking. You’d have to account for all the things we did differently for several years, such as working from home, avoiding crowds, and a host of other things. Theoretically, it wasn’t masking at all. (Not my position. I’ll give masks part of the credit)
Yeah, that’s true.
And I don’t want to go back to hiding in my home 24/7. THAT’S incredibly costly. I feel like masking is a really cheap intervention, so you don’t need a ton of benefit for it to win the cost-benefit analysis.
Essentially the point I made a few posts ago, about the difficulty in isolating the impact of masking, and just masking, due to its correlation with other mitigation activities.
(Not a direct response to what you were saying:)
I’m totally open to a masking requirement during flu season if the numbers are there and if we have a true public discussion about it beforehand.
(Direct response:)
As to whether masking is “cheap” or not comes down to personal opinion. It was a significant burden for me as an interpreter in a steel mill to wear a mask and have others wear a mask. The humidity in Mobile was such that it was a constant struggle to keep my glasses from fogging up, and it was genuinely dangerous to walk up and down stairs and around the mill with fogged-up glasses. And since safety glasses were required PPE in the mill, everyone dealt with this all of the time. We had defogging spray that worked sometimes, not other times. Sometimes a kind of equilibrium was achieved, and I could breathe heavily, whatever, and my glasses were clear. At other times, I was wiping them off every few seconds. It sucked.
It was a burden for me for others to wear a mask because it made them harder to hear and impossible to lip-read.
fyi, if your mask seals properly over your nose, there should be minimal fogging. I wear glasses. I almost never have fogged glasses. I can bore you with details as to when my glasses do get fogged, but the bottom line is that you could have solved that with better and better-fitting masks.
Anyway, I’m not arguing for a mask mandate. I am explaining why I, and perhaps those two Japanese people you met, wear masks. It’s cheap (for me, and probably for those Japanese folks who grew up with masks and know how to wear them). The benefit is extremely hard to measure precisely, but there is now tons of evidence that masking prevents covid and flu. So I plan to continue masking.
I had a co-worker back then with hearing issues. She complained about that, too. Can’t blame people who suddenly find communication that badly hampered for being unhappy about it.
I don’t doubt some masks are better than others for this, and maybe some solve the problem completely. But I had pretty basic masks the company gave us, and I pinched and adjusted those mofos every which way, and I never achieved a whole lot of success. Nor did I know anyone in the mill who claimed to have found the secret.
The Japanese people probably had rules from their employer they had to follow while in the US, or they made their own calculation as to how people back home would react if they got sick while in the US (i.e., if I wear a mask while in the US, no one can blame me for anything, but if I get sick, then I would be blamed). Plus, there is the pressure of doing what others are doing (i.e., “I can’t take my mask off unless he does too”).
Or, maybe they didn’t want to catch covid. I tried to hire a Japanese guy for next fall, and he told me he wanted to do the thing, but not yet, because there was too much covid in the US, and people in the US weren’t masking or otherwise trying to mitigate the problem any more. No one would have told him what to do, his unforced choice.
We’re all looking at deaths as the single metric for the utility of masks, but there’s a growing body of evidence that Long Covid is a risk for a significant percentage of people who get Covid, including with mild or asymptomatic cases. This is still a novel virus, and research is far from complete.
I prefer to lower my personal risk as much as possible, and I’m doing what I can to lobby for improved ventilation in public spaces, since universal masking has been abandoned (and is, as has been noted, impractical with the level of popular resistance at this point).
I am also more worried about long covid than immediate death from covid, and also more optimistic about improving ventilation than any other mitigation measure, except maybe improved vaccines.
Jeez Louise.
This was a NOVEL coronavirus. For most of 2020, we were all in the dark regarding just how bad it was. Including public health officials. We knew it was deadly, we knew it was contagious, but nobody was at the point of quantifying it as you would like. And just when we thought we might be getting a handle on this thing, another wave would come along and kill literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Sure, give the current CDC chief a time machine to go back 3 years in time, and s/he might be able to do that. It’s amazing how much clearer and easier everything looks in retrospect.
Anyway: I wear a mask indoors among strangers, which means mostly stores and stuff. Why? Because few of them are masked, and I don’t know what the hell they’re sick with.
This past fall, my son was in a play put on by our local theater group, and as good parents, we were helping out however we could. So this was even a semi-trusted group we were around. And for the first time since the spring of 2020, we got a bit careless with the masks while helping out. And we both got Covid. My case was pretty mild, but my wife was easily the sickest I’ve ever seen either of us, including the time she had pneumonia, and both of the times I had influenza. Basically spent a week and a half either in bed or in her recliner, most of the time too wiped out to even read or surf the Web.
Neither of us wants that to happen to either of us again. And this was the safest winter since this pandemic began. So I’ll be masking up for a good long while, I’m sure.
Back in the spring of 2021 when we were able to get vaccinated, I said at the time that I’d stop masking when fewer people were dying of Covid than were dying from motor vehicle accidents. (I believed at the time that that would happen within a year, if not sooner. Oops.) During the past nine months (chose that period of time to specifically exclude last winter’s wave, so this is our New Normal), there have been 110,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. (per Worldometer). So that’s about three and a half times the motor vehicle death rate. So by that metric, yeah, I’ll be masking up at the store for quite some time to come. As if my wife’s recent experience wasn’t enough to convince me.
If everybody got vaxxed and boosted, and wore masks when sharing indoor spaces with strangers for the rest of this year, there’d be barely any Covid next January. You’d have little local outbreaks, and people there could mask up to stay safe, and that outbreak would be shut down, and by and large we wouldn’t need masks anymore outside of the local outbreaks. That would easily save 100,000 lives this year, and another 100,000 next year, and probably the year after too.
And you know what? If the CDC head said that, it would have zero effect. We’re three years into this, and everyone would commence to do what they were doing before he turned their head. There are tens of millions of Americans who believe that the vaccine is more deadly than the disease, and now they’re becoming anti-vax in general, not just for Covid. That CDC official isn’t going to change their minds. And plenty of other people have decided they’re tired of masking and will just say “oh well, what the hell” and live with the risk.
I’m not ready to do that. Can’t say when I will be. Not this year, that’s for damn sure.
It can be done, and it could have/should have been done. Telling an MBA that something can’t be quantified is like telling a biologist that a sample can’t be put under a microscope. If I had iffy numbers but had to justify a new venture, etc., I’d use the numbers and make it clear how shaky the numbers were when I presented them.
I’m not just saying this to slap someone’s wrist at the CDC. Using one’s best numbers makes it clear that one is taking cost/benefit analysis seriously (which one should), and it also helps communicate to the public why you are doing what you are doing, which can serve as a motivation to comply.
Further, over three years have passed, and I don’t even anything in the media in the form a retrospective take on what has worked and what hasn’t. That’s bad. (I found the cite with the 87,000 figure, but this kind of thing has not been broadcast with any effort.)
It should but I am not seeing much in the way of retrospective reflection. Not even much from the Right, who are in a position to criticize past efforts by looking at the numbers. (The Right is lazy, though; criticism usually takes the form of vague statements anyway.)
I’m sorry to hear this. It is indeed an asshole of a disease. I think I had it in October/November. I never felt too sick to go to work; it seemed like a mild cold on work days (without even much in the way of symptoms that would encourage me to stay home). But on my days off, I just didn’t have the will to do anything except lie around and drink wine. (In past cases, I felt much worse than that.)
I don’t think the stats back that up. If 110,000 people are dying of covid per year in the US, then it’s not as though 100,000 of them would be saved via masking.
I think if it could work, then they would have the duty of proposing a solution. As I said, I would support strategic masking during flu season, etc., if the numbers were there.
It’s true that a lot of people are stupid, but covid seemed almost designed to create the kind of conflict we’ve experienced around it. It’s both a mild disease and a monster, and mitigation methods such as masking and vaxxing haven’t worked in the black-and-white way that we have come to expect from technology. It also came at almost precisely the wrong (right?!) cultural moment so as to foment the most conflict.
And not just Americans, either. I am working on a green card case right now for someone whose case has been pending for 3+ years; she got all the pre-COVID required vaccinations needed for a green card when she originally applied, but now her medical exam has expired because her case has been pending for so long and she needs to get a new one. Now she suddenly has “religious objections” to getting the COVID vaccine now that it’s required.
Which means we are going to have to file a vaccination waiver request, which may or may not be approved. She has provided a detailed explanation of how although she got all the previously required vaccines, Jesus has made her see the error of her ways and she won’t get any new ones. (The attorney working on her case is going to have to ask her about things like whether she has gotten seasonal flu shots the past couple of years, which will certainly weaken her argument if that’s the case.)
I can’t say I will be sorry if her choice is “you want a green card? Get the goddamn vaccine.”
“Well sure, if everyone masks up, we might save 10,000 lives, we might save 400,000, who the fuck knows?”
I guess that’s quantifying things, for some very loose definition of the word. But it’s not what most people would call it. And that’s where we were for most of 2020.
it also helps communicate to the public why you are doing what you are doing, which can serve as a motivation to comply.
In 2020, we were doing it to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, so that not only would there be enough ICU beds for Covid patients, but also for anyone else who was sick enough that they needed to be in an ICU.
THEY TOLD US THAT AT THE TIME. THAT WASN’T SERIOUS ENOUGH TO GET YOUR ATTENTION? A BUNCH OF MEANINGLESS NUMBERS WOULD HAVE MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE TO YOU?
Whatever, dude.
I don’t think the stats back that up. If 110,000 people are dying of covid per year in the US, then it’s not as though 100,000 of them would be saved via masking.
I said, “in the past nine months.” I didn’t feel I needed to do the math for Mr. Quantification to extrapolate to a year.
I think if it could work, then they would have the duty of proposing a solution. As I said, I would support strategic masking during flu season, etc., if the numbers were there.
No, you’re an outlier. Very few people are as data-driven as you present yourself as being. Also, few people are even listening anymore.
Indeed. The consensus was that the U.S. basically didn’t have a flu season over the 2020-21 winter. One line of the virus apparently went extinct as a result.
At this point, most countries have given up trying to mitigate the danger and want the public to get back to working and consuming. But look at how the rich and powerful are dealing with it.
World Economic Forum: Here Are All The Covid-19 Precautions At Davos 2023 (forbes.com)
So, yes, I still take masking seriously. No real effort has been made to make public indoor spaces safer. And probably won’t be until we suffer another respiratory pandemic or two. I will continue to wear a mask in businesses and eat out on patios. And we are just starting to learn what the outcomes will be for people who are infected over and over again.
I’d rather not find out for myself.
Yes, you are an outlier.
I’m an actuary. My job is to quantify unknown stuff. I joke (and it’s not just me, it’s an industry joke) that i lick my finger, stick it in the wind, and pluck a number out of the air.
Sometimes i can say that i think there’s a 90% chance that something will be between $1m and $5m, and my best guess is $1.5m. That’s something executives can work with. But even so, if it comes in at $4m, they’ll be pissed. And they are highly sophisticated. That kind of answer just doesn’t cut it for popular consumption. There are hard numbers that say the booster reduces your odds of being hospitalized by 90%, but Joe knows someone who caught covid a week after getting the booster, so the booster doesn’t work.
Like Davos, I require a negative covid test to visit me unmasked. And like Davos, i have upgraded my home ventilation (i turn on the whole house fan that is designed to work with the AC. It pumps everything through a HEPA filter) and I’ve also added spot filtration in rooms where guests gather, a pair of high volume portable air filters.
I also don’t have a lot of guests these days.
Although I am not as religious about it as I was a year ago, I wear an N95 mask almost all the time I am not in a private home. It’s mostly COVID, but it’s not all COVID. I have a job where I am within a few feet of a customer for more than 30 minutes on a regular basis. Before the pandemic, I had a cold all the time in the winter. I have not had a cold since January 2020. I also have bad seasonal allergies and used to take Claritin every day all year round. I have not taken Claritin since 2020. And it’s a minor thing, but I like that I don’t have to shave every day anymore. I’m not planning on letting go of the mask any time soon.
Part of why I’m still doing it is that it doesn’t bother me to wear the mask. My workplace is on the colder side, which helps. If you’re wearing an N95 properly, you shouldn’t have eyeglass fogging at all.
Aeschines, I’m a little surprised that you don’t think 87,000 lives saved is an impressive number. That’s a LOT of people. It’s almost twice as many people as will die in car crashes this year in the US.