I just returned from dinner out. Wife & I went to an Outback. Ordinary middle class restaurant in an ordinary middle-class suburb. I wanted a cheap but OK steak and they’re a decent source for such. As research for this thread I took a careful look around at the staff and customers.
We arrived at ~6:30pm. About 2/3rds of the seats at the bar were occupied. About half the tables were. Over the course of our meal the place filled up more, to about 2/3rds full overall. We were seated near the entrance so I got to watch everyone come and go. Probably 150 people total, coming, going, sitting, or working. This was all indoors, despite this being in South Florida where outdoor dining is common. A few family groups with 5-10yo kids, a few elderly using walkers, a LOT of 60-somethings like ourselves, and plenty of every other age in between. A couple of multi-household gaggles of 8 or more, and a lot of couples or pairs of couples. So far, so very ordinary.
I saw exactly zero masks. I took careful inventory all around the room. Not one on any greeter, server, bartender, or busser. Not one on any patron, young, middle-aged, or old. Some of the real oldsters looked pretty raggedy. I didn’t see anyone with an oxygen concentrator although I expected to. I did see multiple folks using walkers. Zero masks. Not just zero while sitting & eating. Zero while walking in or out. Simply zero.
Evidently a lot of people believe they can live this way without undue risk.
To be clear, I’m not making a statement about the efficacy of masks. I’m making a statement to the topic of the OP, whether the current COVID situation warrants extensive (or any) personal protection measures beyond vaccination. It’s evident this crowd of more or less randomly selected folks would answer that question with a resounding “no”.
I’ve been a huge advocate of masks and ventilated spaces as I thought they’d be the way to have some parts of our lives back. I started shopping with a mask and dining outside pretty early on in the pandemic. Since the vaccine came out, I started venturing out without a mask depending on case/hospitalization trends.
Since I tested positive for covid last summer, I stopped wearing a mask all together even when I teach.
I figure that since I’ve been infected by BA.5 and been boosted in November with the bivalent booster, my chances of getting seriously ill is pretty low.
There are only two cases where I now wear a mask. First is when I visit my Dad because he’s 86. Even then, I take it off to eat as long as I keep my distance and turn on our room ventilation. Second, is when I’ve caught some kind of respiratory bug (which happened in Jan). I tested negative for covid on the antigen test but those can give you false negatives. Whatever it was, I think it’s polite to not be coughing all over everyone. I just wear a comfortable surgical mask.
BTW, the discussion of ventilation is quite important, I think. I did a big project for a Japanese company on their ventilation and air purification systems. The level of tech available is very high, whereas implementation in the US (and most of the rest of the world) is very low.
HVAC systems are slapped into houses without any thought given at all as to how air pressure will be affected in each space or how air will flow between high/low-pressure rooms and areas. If done right, all of this would be studied and the airflows adjusted as needed. Further, air purification systems would be built right into the HVAC system to keep air in the house quite clean and comfortable. It’s difficult to do well, and I’m sure it’s expensive, but I think it’s something we should definitely be thinking about as a society.
Well, you can’t very well eat with a mask on. Go to the grocery store if you want to see what fraction of people are still using masks. But I agree with your main point, which is that lots of people are comfortable going maskless in public these days. I just happen not to be one of them.
I was at a square dance last night that was mostly masked. One woman said, “I love my mask, I’m never going to stop wearing it. Remember when I was being treated for breast cancer, and I caught pneumonia at the hospital, when I went in for a procedure? If I’d worn a mask, I wouldn’t have. My lungs never did recover from coughing for a month. I wish I’d been wearing masks then,”
My “I like my mask” story is that I was able to be with my mother from when she caught covid until it killed her (about 2 weeks) and she was infectious that whole time (according to the VERY bright line on her antigen tests) and neither I nor my similarly-masked siblings caught covid from her. I was there for hours almost every day. I was able to hold her, and hug her, and sit in her bed, and comfort her, and I didn’t catch covid.
Oh my God, yes. That seems like the largest opportunity we have to reduce the risk of all respiratory diseases in the US. The one restaurant meal I’ve had in the last year was at a place that advertised that they had upgraded their HVAC to improve ventilation to meet some named standard that seemed, when I made the decision to eat there, pretty decent.
Aeschines has made multiple statements about mask-wearing not being supported by a sufficient “cost-benefit ratio”.
What that indicates to me is a concession that lives are being saved, just not enough of them to suit him (similarly, the permanent complications including long Covid that are being avoided due to people wearing masks are evidently insufficient in number in Aeschines’ view to matter).
I find it hard to believe that many people view the situation in a similar light. I could be wrong; there are plenty who oppose childhood Covid-19 vaccination on the grounds that too few kids die of Covid-19 to matter. The cost-benefit ratio rears its head again. 1600+ childhood Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. plus many thousands more hospitalizations, ICU stays and who knows what long-term complications?* Not enough benefit to justify the “cost”.
I don’t wear a mask all the time in public anymore, but do so in crowded locations. I’ll probably keep doing so indefinitely, at least during seasons when Covid-19 and influenza are especially active. It’s an annoyance to wear a mask, but tempered by the thought that it may be annoying to those who apparently have a bizarre need to control others.
*when taken on an annual basis since the start of the pandemic, Covid-19 deaths in children significantly exceed annual childhood deaths from measles in the U.S. in the early 1960s, just before measles vaccine came into use. I don’t recall people opposing measles vaccine at that time on the grounds that the cost-benefit ratio was unimpressive.
I think you’ll find that statement to be at least somewhat inaccurate if you look at my posts.
I certainly think that the cost/benefit relationship was undersold both before and after the intervention.
I also said that 87,000 deaths prevented seems low, though I did not go on to say that it wasn’t worth it.
I also think it’s difficult to calculate the cost/benefit ratio for covid because it ends up apples and oranges: everyone has to put up with masking (a somewhat abstract and difficult-to-quantify and -value cost: annoyance, discomfort, inconvenience) to save lives (more easy to quantify but also difficult-to-value benefit, since life can be seen as having infinite value, etc.).
If a similar pandemic were to strike, I think we should mask up, at least until we get a handle on what’s going on.
Ah, so your gripe is solely that the CDC and other public health professionals early on in the pandemic couldn’t or wouldn’t quantitate the exact number of lives expected to be saved by wearing masks so as to satisfy data-driven MBAs and business executives? And that complaint, as well as the hostility you’ve expressed in this thread towards the idea of others continuing to wear masks and complaining how “absurd” it is, doesn’t reflect an attitude that the “cost” fails to justify the benefit?
“Universal mask use could save an additional 129,574 (85,284–170,867) lives from September 22, 2020 through the end of February 2021, or an additional 95,814 (60,731–133,077) lives assuming a lesser adoption of mask wearing (85%), when compared to the reference scenario.”
Now, one can take issue with projections like these on the grounds that models are inexact and criteria debatable. But it would be ludicrous to claim that corporate executives (with or without MBAs), on the other hand, always present accurate numbers when making business forecasts and have a great track record when predicting the future.
*what’s an MBA to do when it’s so hard to put a dollars-and-cents value on lives saved?
You know, the people who make building codes, highway rules, etc. do routinely put a cost on lives saved. For that matter, insurance companies routinely pay a dollar value for lives lost through negligence. Last time i looked into it, it was about $2m per life. It’s probably more now.
Of course, it isn’t a single fixed amount. For negligent deaths it depends on the age, health, and earnings potential of the victim. And especially when juries are involved, it probably depends on their race and physical attractiveness and such. And some regulations written in the wake of a single horrific accident cost vastly more per expected life saved than others with less media attention and better corporate lobbyists working the other side.
But over all, our society (and all cash-based societies) does assign dollar value to lives.
Requiring public health agencies to come up with a neat dollar figure every time they make a lifesaving recommendation, otherwise doubters won’t take them seriously, seems highly impractical. When we’re talking about measures with direct economic costs like business closures, then the political leaders who make such decisions along with economists can decide when and if dollars saved trumps lives saved.
How about a poll on the exact cost of the inconvenience incurred by Aeschines every time he has to ask a mask wearer to speak more loudly? Then we get into how to place a value on the sense of annoyance felt by someone who resents seeing others wearing masks he feels are unnecessary. $0.30 per instance? That really can add up over time.
The CDC could have a special department just to crunch those numbers and keep the MBAs happy. But that’s not their mission.
I could respond to Jackmannii in detal, but I think I would just be reiterating my previous points.
But with respect to this point:
This is true, and I never said otherwise. But decision-makers in a company could never make a major decision *without quantifying at all", nor would they make an attempt to sell their ideas and proposals without numbers.
I think the CDC and governments in general did a very poor job of conveying costs and benefits to the public. It seems like a basic point that people here just don’t want to recognize.
I think that’s because “saving your grandma’s life isn’t worth the cost” is never going to go over well. Nor is “there’s not much we can do since people seem determined to rail against the science.” Nor is “we’re doing our best but also making it up as we go along, though maybe a few months behind the frontline scientists.”
Delivering bad news or hard truths doesn’t get people re-elected.
…decision-makers in a company don’t have to play the same high-stakes game that a public health team have to deal with during a global pandemic that has the potential to kill millions.
Decision-makers in a company have it easy. They just have to optimize profits without breaking any laws. Easy.
We don’t put Decision-makers in a company in charge of pandemic responses. Because we would be hearing the same things from them as we are hearing from you in this thread. We are three years into the pandemic and I bet many decision makers in business get annoyed that other people are masking. Can you imagine the decisions they would make if you were in charge of the pandemic response?
Seriously, totally seriously; if I knew that my wearing a fucking mask for a year would save the life of a kid in Newark, I’d wear the damn mask without a second thought. And I’ve been to Newark.
I think the CDC did a terrible job of conveying costs and benefits to the public, but the quantifications you seem to want would not have been any better. Very few people comprehend the difference between “10,000 people will die” and “1,000,000 people will die”. What people understand and care about is: will i die? Will my kid die? Will my mother die? Will the lady down the street die? Will i be hospitalized? Will i lose my sense of smell for good? Will i be out of work so long i lose my job?
Those are the considerations that move people to take action. Not a big number that’s hard to understand.
