I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
https://twitter.com/orwell2022/status/1486330027549544452
Sure, you can deny some people medical treatment if you want to reduce the load on the hospital by a bit but it does not go away!
I think people underestimate how big a number 5% of a population of most countries -- even small ones -- actually is, especially when compared against available health care resources.
But before you seek medical treatment we’ll just need you to fill out this questionnaire:
1. Have you ever had an alcoholic beverage?
2. Do you have a BMI greater than 18.5?
3. Have you ever eaten at The Cheesecake Factory?
4. Do you ride, run, or swim less than 40 miles per day?
Please understand that your answers may disqualify you from eligibility for healthcare. Thank you, Acme Excellence Health Partners.
Governments did.
I read that some politicians also choose to vacation in Miami, and without masks.
Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration.
We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs.
You can't help people like this.
Not surprising he'd perform basically any level of mental gymnastics to avoid that.
Ego-protective delusions are extremely common and most are motivated by far less than this.
Also you need to update your Sam Harris stats, its not 40% unvaccinated anymore like some outlets continue to harp on, check CDC numbers, its closer to only 20% of the population remaining.
[0]: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#ethnicity-gender-age
I remember reading here and elsewhere that early childhood exposure to germs builds a robust immune system.
While my kid doesn’t wear mask in his class but his school is following very strict cleaning procedures. So he hasn’t gotten sick as much before pandemic. Maybe that is good, definitely easier on us. Maybe we will always have higher level of hygiene now. Or maybe in future there will be a lot of young adults with underdeveloped immune system.
So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while still not getting enough exposure to actually make them sick.
I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data.
I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a place where we won't need masks all the time, and kids can resume their usual immune-system adventures. That might be less realistic than we might want. I don't know.
But they also do weekly testing. And did surveillance testing at the end of winter break, which kept about 15% of the school's students at home for the first week back because they had covid.
This statistic was also consistent with LA Unified surveillance testing after winter break - about 15%.
Before winter break, some parents of 2nd graders had an indoor, maskless, holiday party. Apparently all the kids got covid. Then gave it to the teachers - all 4 2nd grade teachers were out of school with covid the week before winter break. But from what our school's testing showed, it didn't spread beyond that.
I do know of a couple families who did seem to get covid from their school though.
We have caught about 3 things over the past ~year, but none of it covid (as far as tests showed) and all of them had obvious non-classroom links.
Two of them were sick friends. And the third was probably when our 3 year old licked a trashcan at the zoo.
I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.