But wait, now you have me thinking, what if speed limits, traffic lights and all that other stuff were optional? Shouldn't they be? I mean, if I want to risk dying in a car accident, that's my business, and if others are concerned about my reckless driving, isn't that what their own seatbelts are for? I'm not forcing them to drink behind the wheel, why should they force me to not drink? Bottom line, if they want to live in endless fear of me and other freedom loving drivers, I won't stop them, they can just stay off the roads for all I care. So why should there be any safety mandates...for anything? My state governor should follow in the footsteps of DeSantis and Abbott, and make it illegal for localities to even impose speed limits.
If it was, attendance at bars, restaurants, shows, etc. would not fall off a cliff when imposed.
Of course it is, I have been wearing mask for 2 years now. And I am wearing glasses.
Is washing your hands too much to ask too?
> If it was, attendance at bars, restaurants, shows, etc.
That was due to social distancing and lockdowns, not masks.
The masks? they made everything worse. They're incredibly bothersome to wear when its hot and humid, they induce psychological pressure on you via the feeling of being "smothered," and make every social interaction much harder to understand making each interaction more tiring to be a part of. It's equivalent to being in a Zoom conversation where you can't read all the subtleties of somebody else.
That's not even mentioning the blue collar labor force which has to wear these for 40 hours a week. My friends who work as waiters, bar staff, etc. still have to wear them during the day. The last thing they want to do when they get off work is to continue wearing them.
(all of this is relative to NYC, which had a ~31% closure rate for small businesses)
I understand some people here, such as yourself, don't think the masks are a big deal. But to the vast majority of the populace, they are a burden so bad its worth _moving cities and states to avoid_.
For (too) many people washing hands is indeed too much to ask...
> For (too) many people washing hands is indeed too much to ask...
This. This is why Covid is here to stay.
What is the mechanism for this harm?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6694...
I for one feel it massively reduces the quality of my interactions and trust in people. I find it much harder to communicate properly. The long term consequences of this are not taken into account.
And I'm vaccinated, everyone in my country who wants to be vaccinated is. Why should I reduce the quality of my life for people who made a choice and took a risk? I actually don't mind that they made this choice, it's their risk. But don't destroy my quality of life for people who knowingly are taking a risk on their end.
Vaccination isn’t a magic talisman against infection, or against illness if infected, or against transmitting the disease if infected. It reduces the likelihood of each, all other things being equal, but it isn't a guarantee against any of them (and is less so against Delta, “Delta Plus", and apparently Lambda than other strains so far.
Masking further reduces both inbound and outbound transmission, and is just a basic precaution.
Long before covid mask wearing has been an insanely common thing to do when you're sick.
Masking in flu season isn’t uncommon in some parts of the world, and it was a lot more common during the 1918-1920 pandemic, so, “humanity” as a whole is not a constant.
Cultural variation aside, different respiratory viruses have different combinations of infectiousness and deadliness and responses to various countermeasures, so their are rational reasons the reactions to each, given a constant utility function, would differ. The common cold, the 2019 seasonal flu, the 1919 pandemic flu, and COVID-19 are all very different things.
Also cold/flu cases are way down due to people masking up and cleaning hands.
A lot of people complain about seatbelts being uncomfortable during driving, and yet its a law to wear them. Why?
Oh yes, I too take sick leave when I have runny nose until its gone
What does this mean? It means we are all going to get covid. Repeatedly. It is a new seasonal illness that will be with us, absent some magical technology. It is (or will be) endemic.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/what-will-it-be-l...
The point of the vaccination now is the same thing as always, to minimize the impact on society. Less hospitalizations and death, less days of our life spent ill, less misery.
People 100% should still get vaccinated, it is deeply stupid not to. It is particularly important the next several months as delta rips through the remaining unvaccinated population (which include those that can't, including under 12 year olds), because we want to avoid filling up hospitals and making our health care quit. For the same reason, we should wear masks and maybe try to reduce the time spent breathing each others air a bit. But the only ones that should live in fear are those unvaccinated that have never had covid and probably the old. But managing fear is something the old has to do anyway, comes with age ;)
By small chance, you mean 0% chance, right? Variants were already spreading by the time any vaccines were available. There are also billions of people who will likely not be vaccinated within the next couple years or so.
However, in hindsight, with animal populations being able to get infected, I think it probably was zero, although that gets well beyond my armchair "skills" ;)
Do you support mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing for the rest of our lives?
To be clear: that means no mandates.
Get people vaccinated.
Or else we're going to wind up "flattening the curve" again until we finally burn through enough dead people that everyone is effectively either recovered or immunized and then the endemic burden should be an order of magnitude lower.
And hospitals only have so much throughput going through the ICU and into the morgue that they can sustain, which is limited by burned-out human resources, that have been strained and quitting during the pandemic.
If you want to totally let it rip and destroy the ICUs then you better drive really fucking carefully for a few months and hope you don't get a poor diagnosis of something or other fairly nasty. Have a bit of a chat with your appendix and make sure its feeling happy and doesn't blow up.
Repeating this line doesn't really work anymore. I vaccinated myself and my whole family months ago, my county has ~80% full vaccination rate, anyone and everyone who could and wanted to, got a shot already.
Yet, there are 90 million people in this country that don't give a shit and will not vaccinate. Worse, soon the vaccine will probably wear out, and then the whole country will have to be convinced all over again to get a booster shot, who knows how many times, too. And then there is stuff like TFA that says that although vaccines are the best we've got so far, vaccinated people still end up in the hospital.
So although I'll personally line up for any booster shots the moment they become available, the reality is probably going to get much more complicated than vaccinating everyone and moving on.
Why would they if they just recovered from covid?
Possibly set aside X number of beds for covid patients, the rest of the ICU beds are for everything else. Out of covid beds? Well you've gotta wait for someone to die and then they'll see you.
They chose to "not live in fear", they can live - and possibly die - with the consequences.
I'm unaware of that being the current issue though. It seems to me hospitals are overrun with COVID patients, most of them their due to their own unwillingness to get vaccinated.
I get a flu shot every year and wear a seatbelt when I drive. Not living in fear of either. Taking reasonable precautions doesn't involve living in fear.
> or are we going to collectively change our mindset from "Zero COVID" to accepting that COVID is just another risk factor in the world and move on?
Look at the places (e.g., much of the US South) with high resistance to protective measures and the current status of the healthcare systems. Are we going to accept that being a permanent or at least frequently recurrent state worldwide and accept the COVID and non-COVID deaths from exhausting ICU space, and the high burnout we’ve seen in the healthcare field? Are we going to radically expand healthcare expenditures to expand capacity and attract/retain people in the field with that as the normal condition?
Respiratory viruses peak earlier before Winter in the tropics (ie. the South USA) whereas they peak during the Winter in the North.
Southern USA will peak and fall, and then this Winter you'll see the same thing in the Northern USA. Its just the seasonality of colds/flus which has been known for decades.
Be prepared because this Winter seasonal peak will be blamed on a new 'variant', and used to push either new lockdowns/restrictions, or booster shots.
No, California has 97% and Florida has 93%; California also has higher age 18-64 and 12-17 vaccination rates [0], has a number of local jurisdictions that have resumed indoor masking mandates (including many school districts for in-person education, with many of those that haven’t adopted mandates having parent-option virtual academies available) rather than a state government attempting to prohibit mask mandates. Countermeasures are more than just vaccines.
But, in any case, you didn’t answer the question: Are you willing to accept the degree of healthcare overload and the effects it is having on healthcare workers as a permanent or at least frequently recurrent state and accept the COVID and non-COVID deaths from exhausting ICU space, and the high burnout we’ve seen in the healthcare field? Is your plan to radically expand healthcare expenditures to expand capacity and attract/retain people in the field with that as the normal condition? Or are you willing to see the same load with dwindling capacity?
EDIT: forgot the link.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...
We should make it easier for more people to do it (people that don't have sick leave or aren't sure they can take it and so on).
We're already burning out our primary care enough for some to leave the profession, or worse.
Just because COVID is another risk factor, it doesn't mean we stop taking measures against it. The flu's a risk factor, yet we take flu shots, and don't go out french kissing strangers who's coughing, sneezing and having a fever.
Please dont abuse the name of a strategy that was never implemented.
What governments did was 'keep incidence below X by means of lockdowns', and 'relax restrictions if incidence is below X'.
This is a simple control system that keeps the incidence at X. Not below X.
Unfortunately X was chosen via hospital bed capacity, so it was quite high, about 500 cases / 100k per week. High enough to generate mutants. With X=5, the same lockdown measures would have been in effect for much the same time (they'd have been started a few weeks earlier). Also, for very low values of X, you might have been able to get away with just contact tracing or travel controls instead of lockdowns, so the average lockdown intensity over time, under zero covid, could have been lower than what we had. The point of zero covid is to have less lockdown!
Anyway, the idea was to buy time until you get the vaccine. Zero covid was never intended to be an indefinite duration program.
This is what zero covid really means (low X). I agree with everything else you said.
When everyone starts realizing that vaccines and masks can't fully contain a spread, what's the next logical step to take?
Are people going to insist that you keep wearing your mask, take booster shots and live in fear for the next 50 years or are we going to collectively change our mindset from "Zero COVID" to accepting that COVID is just another risk factor in the world and move on?