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Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Saturday September 11, 2021 @09:17PM (#28497718)
The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks? You have a twisted logic, comparing terror attacks and follow-up global wars to the horrors you must be going through, masking up (or not) for the grocery store.
Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by rkk3 on Sunday September 12, 2021 @01:11AM (#28498770)
Personal attacks aren't welcome on Hackernews.

> The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks?

Of shutting down schools? of closing borders and separating families, which since you want to trivialize things I didn't bring up, a 3 year old in my family was separated from her mother for a year and a half.

I didn't specify wearing masks.. but no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day. They are at a time of critical development & learning to read faces, non verbally communicate etc. It may turn out to have a terrible price.

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Sunday September 12, 2021 @10:33AM (#28501506)
Several hundred thousand people could have been saved in the US if these measures had been taken seriously, early enough, compared to other first world countries.

Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu. (Edit: Washington had his troops in the revolutionary war quarantined, separated, and inoculated when small pox became a problem. ) We knew all that.

This weekend, we are mourning the tragical losses of a terror attack that cost the lives of 3000 innocent people. Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day.

If anything, we clearly didn’t do enough ‘safety-isms’.

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by rkk3 on Sunday September 12, 2021 @02:16PM (#28503453)
> Several hundred thousand people could have been saved in the US if these measures had been taken seriously

That is baseless speculation.

> Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu.

Where is the source? And that was a completely different disease, which had the worst outcomes for young people, so maybe taking pre-cautions for them made sense.

> Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day.

You should take your dogmatism & personal attacks to another forum, where it is welcome.

> we lose that many people every other day.

Tragic, but they are elderly, chronically sick and had a life expectancy of less than 5 years. Also tragically under accepted normal & non idealogical circumstances, we loose around 8,000 people a day in the US.

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Monday September 13, 2021 @07:11PM (#28518114)
With a world population of 7.9 bio, global COVID deaths of 4.55 mio, a U.S. population of 328.2 mio, and U.S. COVID deaths of 661 k, the U.S. has ~4.4% of the world population, yet >14% of the COVID deaths.

Even if the U.S. had managed to simply reach the average of the world of 0.058% mortality, i.e. competing against such beacons of healthcare and wealth as the Congo, the U.S. outcome would have been a mere 190k, i.e. 470k souls saved.

Unless you're suggesting that U.S. Americans are somehow inherently inferior to people in other countries, or that the health care system is the world's worst, one would think that the differences will lie in policy and different measures would have changed the outcome.

I'll leave it as an exercise to you to draw a fairer comparison, maybe by comparing to OECD countries rather than all of them.

Astounding, how generous you are with other people's lives. Dogmatism is overlooking the data and holding on to your misbelief. You will know more about that than I do, I am afraid.

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by rkk3 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:44PM (#28528151)
The dataset on Covid is so wildly incomplete to invalidate the objectivity of your entire argument.

> competing against such beacons of healthcare and wealth as the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had 1.23 deaths per 100k population from Covid [1]. Why do you think the US has 200x deaths per population than the DRC ?

> Unless you're suggesting that U.S. Americans are somehow inherently inferior to people in other countries

Yes people are not all the same, and those different factors effect outcomes. The US has a large populations that are elderly, chronically sick, urban, highly mobile etc, were tested for covid, etc.

Saying hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved in the US is highly speculative.

1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by chitowneats on Saturday September 11, 2021 @11:28PM (#28498386)
Some of us don't mask "just to go to the grocery store". That's HN software engineer privilege, 100%.

Many people, including little children, are expected to wear these masks 8 hours a day.

You have no idea what damage you are causing for the lower classes, the less fortunate, and American public school children.

Nor do you understand the effect this has had on the campaign for mass vaccination.

I can assure you this is significant. Minority enclaves in my city (Chicago), largely regard masks as "white people bullshit". I work in these communities.

It's not a stretch to see why they apply that same logic to vaccine mandates (even if the vaccines would be beneficial for most of their community).

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Sunday September 12, 2021 @10:37AM (#28501530)
Well, we are on HN, are we not?

Many people, such as doctors, nurses, certain manufacturing jobs wear masks for much longer stretches of time, for many decades already. They are fine, it works really well.

But you are right, I do not understand the effect of mask wearing on vaccination. Care to elaborate?

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by chitowneats on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:01AM (#28501767)
Pointless mandates (masks), where the vast majority of the burden falls on the lower classes, while the laptop class pretends to be hard at work while comfortable at home, tend to breed resentment and suspicion of legitimate public health policy and intervention.
Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:26AM (#28502015)
Masks are proven to be effective against transmission. Countries with early mask mandates suffered much less than countries without.

I still fail to see the extraordinary “burden” “hardship”, “sacrifice” of - wearing a mask as a proven way to save lives?

Would you feel better if there was some medal attached, maybe “Great Hero of the Fight against COVID”?

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by chitowneats on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:32AM (#28502072)
I'm not interested in virtue signaling, thanks. That's the only benefit that mask wearers get.

Quite amusing to me that you jump to that. It speaks volumes about what motivates you.

Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:48AM (#28502218)
Well you made it abundantly clear that the mere prospect of contributing to saving hundreds of thousands of lives means nothing to you, so I’m wondering what your motivation is to continue spreading your propaganda.
Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by chitowneats on Sunday September 12, 2021 @02:22PM (#28503502)
As an engineer, I'm not concerned with "mere prospects". I'm concerned with what is actually effective.
Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by nautilius on Monday September 13, 2021 @06:47PM (#28517914)
Wow, what kind of work do you do if you are unable to ever act without having 110% of the information? You can't be building anything, that's for sure.
Re:September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time by chitowneats on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:22AM (#28520559)
Very telling you responded to this thread but not the other.

Are you ready to finally admit you were mistaken about covid vs influenza mortality in children? And to retract your slanderous statements that I was "lying", "spreading propaganda"?

I know it's much easier to snipe at me with snide comments like the one above. If that's all that you're interested in, rather than a substantive discussion, well, that wouldn't surprise me given the totality of our interaction over the past few days.