It's the proverbial ball of string for those that don't want Covid to ever end.
The people that still wear N95 respirators at work or to the grocery store that stare everyone else down as if we're the mental ones.
You don't seem to realize that people have different life experiences than you.
It's almost like there's a serious and highly infectious virus still circulating. Perhaps one that has a reputation for seriously harming or killing immunocompromised people.
>When is it going to end?
Better question, why do _you_ care when _others_ decide to stop wearing a mask?
This is like a non-asthmatic person criticizing someone with asthma for living in fear by carrying their inhaler in their pocket. When is asthma going to end? Surely they can't just carry around an inhaler for the rest of their lives, right?
>They cannot continue to live the rest of their lives in fear, it's debilitating to their mental health. However social media has enabled this behaviour.
Yet you're here on social media stressing about other people choosing to wear masks. Honestly for many people it's second nature at this point. Other countries like Japan had people wearing masks in public long before 2020.
2. The asthma analogy is irrelevant.
3. Societies in east Asia wear masks when they're sick; to prevent the spread of illness. Somewhere along the way this narrative has changed to it being a magic invincibility cloak and credited to Asian society, which it never was.
2. It's not, you just don't want to accept it.
3. Would it surprise you to hear that people are still wearing face masks for that same reason? Your "magic invincibility cloak" is a strawman argument that nobody has ever made.
The issue isn't that others are still wearing masks themselves. It's that they're trying their hardest to force the rest of us to wear masks still. E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582836
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-california-mask-m...
There was no reason to end mask mandates. None. Except a few loudmouths the entire world have caved to.
We have seen how cheap DIY filter boxes are. There is no reason not to have one in every classroom and workplace. And yet.
I am desperate enough to experiment with a Cleanspace Halo, the smallest positive air pressure respirator there is to be able to go among people. If no one else is willing to provide clean air, I need to filter my own. It's bloody ridiculous but what can I do?
They’re running three beefy HEPA filters at all times in one room, this isn’t politically motivated or an attempt to ignore the problem.
Do something instead of playing Bush on that bloody ship under the banner Mission Accomplished by declaring the pandemic over?
I don't expect to ever go into an ER or pediatrician's office without one.
It very quickly stopped being about finding what is a reasonable policy to just a stupid culture war fight over all masks all the time vs any masks anytime are communist police state designed to make your child gay.
Just dumb dumb dumb.
Even in places that handled the pandemic fairly well like NZ their mask policies were kind of silly.
My peeve that I will never stop being angry about is we knew from quite early on that COVID was airborne and surgical masks were not very effective. But public health authorities refused to communicate this to the public. They did not make an effort to make people aware or to issue N95/KN95 masks and update the policies to reflect more balance about which places it’s optimal to mask vs not.
It was just left to individuals to work it out on their own.
(The trick of N95 masks is that they have a charged electret layer in the middle. That will capture particles smaller than the holes in the mask. It's not like an HEPA filter, which is purely mechanical.)
The idea that only deaths matter is part of this narrative.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-04-01/covid-accep...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Unlike your study from November 2020, this one is from January 2023.
That's why this really simple thing became so controversial. I mean, if a virus sticks to droplets then it's better to put less droplets into the air. Masks do that. Easy? Should be.
As for what mask do, if it was that easy, there wouldn't be the need of so many studies. But that is not even the claim here. The article says mask mandates make no difference.
Even if we assume that masks work, people wear them wrongly, they reuse them instead of using clean ones, fidget with them and then touch other parts of their face. There are plenty of reasons why a mandate could not work.
> The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions
Source: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
They asked people to wear masks, and they didn't wear masks, so they had trouble concluding things about masks.
This New York Times article prompted the Cochrane review to issue a statement:
> The Cochrane Review 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' was published in January 2023 and has been widely misinterpreted.
Source: https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...
https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...
> Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.
"It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses."
Right. Isn't this the situation if you wear a mask? What does this have to do with other people?
y'all just want us to die, right?
There is a lot of money going into making you believe what you believe. Next time maybe there won't be lockdowns because of this campaign currently being wrought and then many more millions will die. Someone will win perhaps but guess who. Hint: it ain't you.
And where is my freedom? Where is my freedom to live and not breath in your infected droplets?
https://www.bryanhealth.com/app/files/public/9a4cd902-5ffd-4...
give me a break. Yes wearing a mask helps me as well but nowhere near as if you were doing it.
Don't make me link the pee meme.
Us both wearing masks protects you as much as you wearing two masks. But even better, you can just wear an N99 or N100. Also you should consider P95 or Pxx because of the much nicer seal.
I don't understand why you need to get other people involved in this simple thing you can do yourself.
The recent progress of AI is a bigger concern.
Essentially, any problems whose solutions have the potential to alter the economic or political order are not allowed to exist. Much cheaper to sow division and obfuscate reality through the myriad well-established propaganda outlets.
However, my claim is that a lot of progress on these issues doesn't need to be very public. Telling the public to do a thing sounds like the last step of the process, after researchers have already found a definitive solution.
I also agree that researchers have a limited amount of resources! But I don't think that funding a research area is necessarily zero-sum. If a company or government decides to throw extra money to start researching a thing, research on other things doesn't stop. As an example, when the NSF provides more funding for research, the number of PhD students goes up, since there are more research grants to go around.