Risk mitigation is not my priority. If it were, I'd never ride my bike again, even with my helmet. I'd never go kayaking, or rock climbing. I wouldn't swim in lakes, and you'd never catch me in the ocean. If I were preparing for the worst, I'd go everywhere with a tourniquet in my back pocket, keep a few thousand dollars cash in my shoe, and get myself vaccinated for rabies right now. I have no intent to do any of these things, because such fretting every possibility is no way to live.
No one's asking for everyone to hide in their houses forever, we want increased testing, contact tracing, and mechanisms for community protection that kick in when cases start to rise, not after they've reached critical mass. Think of these like the swimming lessons you took and laps you did in the pool before you moved on to the lake.
Are there some risks I choose to mitigate? Of course. But there are maaany more risks that I choose to ignore. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions on which risks they want to tolerate and which are intolerable. Which leads to my next point..
>No one's asking for everyone to hide in their houses forever, we want [...]
Everybody has their own set of 'common sense' desires, but virtually none of those desires is universal. Using the 'royal we' to implicitly upgrade your personal desires to the desires of society in general is a tedious rhetorical trick. As for general population trends, covid mitigations were quite popular for the past two years, but with every day that passes more and more people stop caring. Go outside and see it for yourself, mask usage is dropping off a cliff even in the progressive west coast city I call home. There will come a day, soon, when wearing a mask will make you the odd one out.
During flu season? Of course. As well as soon any cold symptoms were felt. My institution would also issue stay-at-home recommendations during flu outbreaks.
In the US and much of Europe. In other countries they absolutely were the norm. I'm not advocating for permanent mask wearing, but I absolutely DO think we should have shown more concern for others prior to Covid. It drove me nuts how many people would show up to work with "just a mild flu" or "just a cold" with no concern for the likelihood they might pass it on to others.
Only ever for people who actually felt sick. Not for all people by default regardless of how they felt. If I'm wrong please correct me, I'd love to know of this land where wearing surgical masks was the default expectation of everybody all the time.
I'm from the US and have spent limited time in other countries, so I can only really judge based on what I've read, but it was my understanding that masks where common in a number of countries pre-pandemic, mostly the denser areas of Asia. Certainly I had seen plenty of pictures of crowded subways and walkways with far more people wearing masks than one would expect if only the sick were wearing them, and the above article, written in 2016 seems to confirm that impression.
It's worth noting that if your only wearing a mask because you feel sick and have decided to go out anyway.... Well your doing it wrong. Everyone understands that a surgical mask is not a highly effective barrier against the spread of a virus, be it cold, flu, or Covid. What it DOES do is help keep those little moisture molecules to yourself such that if your unknowingly packing one of these viruses you somewhat reduce the chances of spreading it. Even a small percentage reduction in spread when amplified across a large population can have a huge effect on the total number of cases.
When your symptomatic, and thus most likely to be contagious, just stay the heck home.
Only because we live in a “me” society and not a “we” society. If we were sensible, masking up would be normal when one has a cold/there’s a local flu outbreak. So much illness and lost productivity would be easily avoided with a minor change in expectations and behaviour.
No because those flu viruses were not novel, or as deadly.
When there is a large degree of uncertainty (like a deadly novel virus), I personally tend towards caution and am fine being too cautious rather than not cautious enough. If you don’t, that’s fine and that’s your choice.
The lifestyle examples you give are too simplistic. I’m willing to bet you’re willing to ride your bike on some roads and not others, or swim at some beaches in some weather conditions and not others. To act like you never assess the situation or act in a way that mitigates your risk is absurd. I bet you wear a seatbelt on occasion and look both ways when crossing the road. Those are risk mitigation techniques.
That information always lags reality. When/if the next deadly flu strain emerges, it will have emerged before it is discovered to have emerged. If you're not planning for this scenario, are you really planning for the worst case? You could be Patient Zero for Spanish Flu Part Two, with your preemptive masking being the difference between global disaster and nothingburger.
No, I was being a little loose with my language there. I didn’t mean the literal worst case of being patient 0. I agree that I don’t plan for that. My personal risk tolerance is higher than that.
I meant the more colloquial worst case of hearing about a deadly virus spreading rapidly in the news and then deciding to react with an abundance of caution once it seems probable that my community will be affected. Then I’m fine playing it safe.
Just like I would with any other forecasted threat from Mother Nature like a fire, hurricane, blizzard, etc.
The more certainty it’s going to affect me + the greater uncertainty of the short & long terms effects = the greater the caution.
So in 2020 when I was highly confident COVID would infect my community + there was very little info about how deadly it was = I was overly cautious
As more info came out I became less cautious.
We started wearing masks because covid actually existed, not because we feared that it might one day exist. Fear of hypothetical future covid strains is an example of the later, not the former. I'll consider fearing them once they actually exist, just like those hypothetical future flu strains.
Taxes, military, traffic laws, etc.
I have come to realize I was wrong.
If we humans always prepare for the worse, then indeed we will always be terrified. There is no way for us (I know for me) to decouple the nightmarish scenarios I ingested and prepared for, from my emotions. I want to be Spock [0], but I am not. I cannot be on the edge 24/7. I did that for decades (for work & life), it kills me and everyone around me. There is no way to enjoy this great world we live in.
So, what do I do? I try to find a "good enough" preparedness for me personally, and my family. Where is that "good enough" for me? It is just a touch more than the average preparedness. I do not have a bomb shelter, but I do have a "breakdown box" in my vehicles; I do not have hidden caches of food, ammo, household needs, but I have a well stacked pantry; and, so on.
This might be worth reviewing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
These COVID threads are almost always garbage, but we can't make them better by throttling people for writing snarkily; if there's something of value to take from a comment on these threads, everyone will have to do the work of mining it out.
Regarding the flu - indeed this was expected to be the next pandemic, but the lowly coronavirus got there first! Should there be a deadly flu outbreak, or even another coronavirus, I hope our response will be less politicized and more effective.