Re:Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne
by gurkendoktor on Thursday April 07, 2022 @08:29AM
(#30943559)
I disagree. The appeal to solidarity w.r.t. masks would never have worked because a tiny minority of scalpers can ruin it all. But the white lie didn't work either, so it seems like the worse option regardless.
Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?
(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)
Re:Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne
by blub on Thursday April 07, 2022 @07:17AM
(#30943015)
The government and hospitals don’t source masks from the local store or amazon. They can also force companies in a crisis to sell only to them and ban exports.
If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.