Yeah we handled the mask issue so poorly.

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.

While N95 masks actually work, most of the cloth masks do very little. But there was a huge shortage of good masks for the first year, and WHO was terrified of fights over masks if they recommended N95.

(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.)

It makes more sense if you view it as an extremely politically motivated decision to signal that we should stop thinking about COVID entirely.

Your theory sounds conspiratorial and lacking in evidence.

Ironic considering your comment.

What was conspirational in his comment?

The conspiracy of a conspiracy. ;)

Read any newspaper for the past year and a half that has been ceaselessly pumping out “COVID is over” think pieces while life expectancy is declining, excess deaths remain high (whereas before the pandemic they were largely static for years and years), and disability claims rise. It takes effort to ignore how much the consent is being manufactured.

Yes. It's called "acceptable losses".[1]

The idea that only deaths matter is part of this narrative.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-04-01/covid-accep...