I don’t agree. I think saying, “This will save 100,000 lives”–and getting that message out there–can be effective.
It’s not just a message for individuals, however. It’s also to prevent doubters from saying, “They aren’t even saying this is going to save anyone.” It gives people on the news a figure to work with. Etc. It can be used in adverts that make an appeal to saving “grandma,” etc.
I agree that people worry more about the kinds of things you said, but it’s not an either/or proposition.
For some people, maybe. I suspect that many people are much more concerned with their personal sphere, as @puzzlegal notes, and little moved by a description of what could happent to “other people.”
Also, a lot of the people who refused to wear masks (or get vaccines) are those who have been trained to distrust scientists and other “smart people.” A hard number like “will save 100,000 lives” would have done very little to change their minds or behaviors, IMO, because they would have little to no trust in whatever authority provided that number.
For those claiming that a recent Cochrane review “proves” that masking doesn’t work - not so fast.
We had nearly daily updates about the actual numbers of people being killed, and that didn’t do much to sway the nay-sayers. Why do you think they’d be any more moved by a speculative number?
I haven’t read this thread this week, so missed the Bob_Blaylock drama, but there’s a lot of people like him out there, who even now can’t see the reality in front of them. That’s the hill you’re trying to climb.
I’ll gently suggest the “can’t” is really “won’t”.
Not that there’s a practical difference; folks like that won’t change their mind except at the point of a gun and even then will only comply while the gun is pointed at them.
I think this speaks very well of you as a person.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, this level of empathy is not universal, and quite a number of people in our society are willing (or even eager) to let bad things happen to strangers rather than change their behaviour or outlook.
“This behaviour will save 103,425 lives” doesn’t resonate with everyone. Look at the television appeals to save starving children with just (low dollar-amount) per day / month / year—now, in the case of television ads you can question how much of the money spent on charity would actually reach the intended beneficiaries, but I don’t think it’s a completely false analogy.
Well, that’s something we’ll probably never know for sure, but I have a hard time understanding some random guy on the internet being so involved in deliberately creating a counter-factual claim like that, when they’re conscious of the fact that they’re lying. If it were someone like Alex Jones, who is known to profit off counter-factuals, it makes sense. But this? Anyone who is that clearly emotionally invested in calling everyone else idiots because we don’t believe that COVID is a hoax clearly has something else going on.
I mean, there are at least semi-legitimate reasons for not masking, or concluding that COVID isn’t as big a problem as others think, but he just washes over all that. If he were deliberately trying to downplay COVID, why not use an argument that might actually work, instead of leaping all the way to “You’re idiots who believed lies by a government that wants to enslave you!”, when we’ve all seen the numbers of people hospitalized and killed by COVID?
From what I’ve seen over the past three years, such individuals tend to believe that the COVID numbers are either highly manipulated by the government (e.g., “a person who had COVID died in a car crash, and they count that as a COVID death”), or just flat-out created out of whole cloth as propaganda, and that “COVID deaths” were either deaths from other causes, or deaths that didn’t actually happen. They truly don’t believe those death and hospitalization numbers.
Or, to get back to the OP’s question: “you’re trying to use logic to argue someone out of an opinion that they didn’t use logic to arrive at in the first place.”
So, that’s “can’t see reality” as opposed to “won’t see reality”. Stupid, but stupid in an understandable way.
Numbers, hell. My MIL’s dead body had to sit in cold storage for weeks because there were so many covid deaths they didn’t have capacity to cremate it. That would have to be a pretty massive conspiracy with an awful lot of people (whose financial interests lie elsewhere) involved in cover-up.
Yup, with a healthy dose of “I do my own research to come to my own conclusions,” as well as a dose of Dunning-Krueger effect.
And that’s another factor - he’s arguing against people, a lot of whom have had personal experiences such as yours. If he were doing this deliberately, he’d have to know there’s no chance of you buying his bullshit. He’s still trying to sell it to you though, because he really believes his bullshit.
Healthy 65 year old.
I stopped masking April 2022.
I have had all of the vaccinations and boosters. Last booster was in September 2022.
Never stopped living my life. Continued to work and travel as I always have.
My family lives about 4 hours away in Virginia and I go there several times a year. Plus I travel as a hobby. It keeps me motivated.
No medical concerns except for chronic back issues and I take .25 mg of medication for a slightly off thyroid.
Apparently I caught Covid in January 2023.
Ended up with bilateral pulmonary embolisms in February and have been on blood thinners every since. The PEs were very painful.
I am prescribed Eliquis which makes me very tired and I am experiencing a bit of concentration difficulty. Not much but enough to bother me.
I was going to retire May 2024 but I might decide to stop working earlier.
Since I had a DVT/PE thirty years ago following bunion surgery I am now on them for life and have to wear compressions socks especially when I travel.
So it did mess me up quite a bit out of the blue.
I’m boarding my first post covid plane in a bit; I’m wearing a p100 mask
After having gone two and a half years without catching Covid, including a year of singing with a choir of fully-masked and fully-vaccinated singers, our choir dropped the mask requirement in September 2022. I decided not to risk singing with them under those circumstances. My partner decided to continue singing with them but wearing a mask. At the first rehearsal in September, my masked partner stood next to an unmasked singer who – as it turns out – had Covid with mild symptoms. My partner caught Covid, and of course I caught it from my partner, since we have never seen a need to mask in our own home. The two of us spent two miserable weeks suffering from Covid, and I never want to experience that again. And according to some of the medical journals, we are both now at higher risk of all manner of lifelong complications including heart disease and a delightful panoply of other possible physical and mental problems. And if we catch it a second time, we will be at even higher risk. We continue to mask up indoors when more than a few other people are around, and yes, maybe we always will. Call me absurd, go ahead. I’m so sorry that it upsets you not to be able to see the lower half of my face.
When it comes to relaxation of pandemic control measures, some people are positively gleeful about abandoning them (assuning they ever followed them in the first place).
Take Gabrielle Bauer of the Brownstone Institute*, who in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed castigated the “expert class”:
“With their blinkered focus on a virus, they failed to consider that most of us want more from life than avoidance of illness. We’re even willing to tolerate getting Covid to get to the good stuff. Imagine that.”
“To paraphrase George Costanza: We’re back, baby! We’re flying in planes and jostling each other in crowds and offering our friends a lick of our ice cream cone, and there’s nothing the doomsayers can do about it.”
So while you slave drones are being led by the nose by Anthony Fauci, her inspiration is…George Constanza.
Party on!
*members of the Brownstone Institute were behind the much-ballyhooed Great Barrington Declaration. Bauer has claimed that Covid-19 is a tipping point in the march toward totalitarianism.
I’m on vacation in Italy and was in the Sistine Chapel about an hour ago. It was crowded, hot, and humid. We were in masks, probably 1:100 were masked.
This morning I went to my PCP for a checkup. Typical doctors’ building, 3 floors with 10-15 small practices per floor. Knowing my doc’s preferences I put on a mask to go into the building & kept it on except when she was eyeballing my mouth & throat. She and receptionist were masked. Her back-office admin person is in a separate room but with an open door to the patient / exam areas was unmasked.
Zero of the people I saw in the parking lot, zero of the deliverymen I saw in the lobby, and zero of the patients, zero of the elderly, nor any their care-givers I saw in the building common areas or elevators going up or down were masked. Just me.
I’ll be curious to see how @AHunter3’s recent airline trip went and what he saw of the public and the workers there.
We’re required to wear masks in heath care facilities still (Washington State). Including things like massages. It’s the only time I wear one these days. (some courthouses still require them, but it’s pretty rare now)
I had my annual physical yesterday (more on that in a different thread). Instead of the usual layout, there was a central reception area on the fourth floor feeding all the doctors and phlebotomists.
When I entered the building on the ground floor, the receptionist told me to sanitize my hands and take a new mask (heavy surgical, not N95) from a dispenser and put it on.
In the building everyone was masked, except for those inevitable fuckwits in the waiting area who pull the mask down so it doesn’t cover their nose.