Court rules for Florida governor, reinstates ban on mask mandates in FL schools
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening...
For better or worse, while we know properly fitted N95s etc work, it's starting to look like "casual" mask wearing (fabric masks loosely worn and taken off regularly for eating etc) is mostly just pointless hygiene theater at this point.
Florida only reports their numbers once a week now and they aren’t breaking them down by county. They look good because they decided data reporting was no longer important: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-d...
I guess DeSantis is taking the ostrich approach? Let’s hope this is just incompetence and not willfully trying to obscure their data. All we really know is that they keep setting records, eg record number of deaths this week https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-...
> China has already mandated N95s...
The part of China that the west should be copying is the "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat" approach of experimenting with policies to figure out which ones work in practice. Not the authoritarian systems underpinning the surveillance and control. More 1990 Hong Kong, less 2020 Hong Kong.
https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202109/03/WS61397ce6498e6a1...
No cloth masks seem to be allowed.
No one has ever proven that mask mandates worked for covid, and it has been more than a year that we know that places which had a mask mandate didn't have a different trajectory that place that did, or that mask mandate didn't change the trajectory of the covid cases. So this is common knowledge at this point.
But the same way the market can stay irrational longer than you are solvable. A useless measure can stay in place longer that we know it has no effect
Anyone who doesn't believe this might want to take a look at https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
So I don't think
> has been steadily improving ever since schools opened.
Is as truthful as one might think.
These outbreaks appear to be seasonal and come and go without vaccines (last year no one was vaccinated and the shape of the graphs was the same).
They also come and go without lockdowns. This is why the blog post encourages the reader (using satire) to find other mechanisms than Aquinas' prime mover theory.
More to your point, of course the mask ban had little effect in FL when it's on-again-off-again and challenged in courts. The situation is changing and confusing, so people will do what they want. The bigger factor is that covid is currently decreasing everywhere in the US as it has with previous waves.
Children in schools has never been a outsized contributor to covid numbers so school starting shouldn't be expected to have a major impact. (Children are getting covid in greater percentages because they are yet to be vaccinated.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-ar...
Cloth masks are Hygiene theater. The rules that allow cloth masks and neck gaiters and all sorts of stuff is all theater and are asking compliance for the sake of compliance.
N95/N99/k95 masks are not. These have effect.
Not wearing a mask at all, is non-compliance. But when the rules were changing (first it was don't wear a mask then changed to wear one), and when the rules about the masks aren't really protecting people by allowing cloth masks and gaiters, you're just giving those who already don't trust authorities in this matter more fuel for the fire.
>Children are getting covid in greater percentages because they are yet to be vaccinated.
And one wonders if that's a great idea
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
> The study suggests that the rate of CAE was 3.7 to 6.1 times higher among healthy 12-15-year-old boys than their risk of hospitalisation from Covid-19 in 120 days as of August 21. The rate of CAE was 2.6-4.3-fold higher at times of high weekly hospitalization risk, such as during January 2021.
> “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day Covid-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly Covid-19 hospitalization,” the study says.
There have been articles about how Florida recently switched to reporting deaths with the date of death, so it seems that it will continually appear that the rate plummeted recently. As time goes by, though, the graph will be filled in. Maybe people are being deceived by this.
>pointless hygiene theater at this point
You can be blasé about covid-19 and masks or not, you can be distrustful of all the random "experts" or not, but if you are, then it's "pointless theater" squared to spend time, money, and energy arguing, debating publicly, and fighting in court on exactly what we should do. It doesn't matter!
Basically the only place masks are a good idea is where the captive audience can't be vaccinated, which happens to be schools.
That is something you have choose to believe.
Given quarantine policies for exposures the easiest way to keep kids in schools is to make sure the adults around them are vaccinated and that they take precautions before then.
My state effectively hit zero Covid deaths too a few months ago and that was through vaccination.
However, I've yet to see a peer-reviewed, statistically significant study about non-medical mask use in social settings having a measurable effect. If you have any pointers, I'm all ears.
N95 masks are supposed to be more like a wall. Except nobody really wears those as the cost about $2 each and you are only supposed to wear them for 3-4 days with proper sterilization between uses.
Not many countries in the world would have a dispute between a governor, individual school districts, non-profit organizations and judges.
The US is a very non-ideal country, but it's a working one.
The US works because of the multilayer democracy process.
The combination of federalism and separation of powers in the US is slow, by design. It provides multiple layers of protection against bad ideas. It allows for the governance of a continent-sized country composed of 50 semi-sovereign entities, each acting as mini laboratories for good ideas that can spread elsewhere and to Washington DC.
To put another way, every one of the countries with a GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...>) higher than the US has a population smaller than that of Los Angeles County.
In many cases it definitely has strong democracy baked into it, much more than the faux-democracy presented in almost every other country in the world. But I wouldn't call it "working." The US has significant, deep-rooted problems from housing to safety -- and US foreign policy, even towards US citizens, is rotten to the core.
The US works despite it's multi-layer democracy, not because of it. All the parts that work aren't democratic.
I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I take the same concept and run it one step further up the chain as an indictment of government as it is practiced today.
For example, we gave the responsibility of arbitrating disputes in a just way to a single monopolistic entity and then become surprised when this entity provides less justice (harsher sentences for drug crimes, racial/gender bias, etc.) for a higher cost (effectively impossible to represent yourself, lengthy trial periods, arbitration process that take so long and cost so much that 'lawfare' is a common parlance).
Monopolies are bad full stop. It is simply harder to replace the governmental kind.
>The US works despite it's multi-layer democracy, not because of it.
I think if you say "we won't fund you if you mandate masks," the mechanism for mandating them probably isn't very relevant. Mandating masks via dress code policy is still mandating masks.
Also notably,
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035157226/miami-covid-19-dea...
"Carvalho said that among the 13 deaths, the majority of people contracted COVID-19 and died before the beginning of the school year. One person had direct contact with students, he said."
If we were dealing with some kind of hemorrhagic fever that spread like wildfire through all cross-sections of the population, sending dying people lurching into the street within a few hours of infection, moaning and bleeding from their eyes, there would be no controversy.
We wouldn't have antivaxxers making up all kinds of ridiculous reasons to avoid the shot, we wouldn't have state governors suing the President or vice versa, and we wouldn't think twice about yanking the broadcast licenses of any Fox or Sinclair affiliates who spread misinformation or otherwise spewed propaganda against best public health practices. We would have something to unite against, rather than something to further divide us.
But that's not what happened. The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately, and it "only" kills about 1% of patients. It is bad enough to bring out the worst differences among us, but not bad enough to make us set those differences aside.
If an enemy nation sent troops to our shores with orders to kill even 0.1% of our population, we'd all rise up to defeat them... but somehow a virus is different. The virus gets a free pass from 30%-40% of our population which is strongly (but admittedly not exclusively) correlated with a specific political party.
Makes no sense, but then, not much does these days.
2000 jumbo jets full of dead USians (and counting!) is below that threshold, which is sort of amazing to believe.
Human life is cheap to partisans there, apparently.
Are we sure about that? Scientific measures to control Ebola met with great resistance when they seemed to go against local cultural practices in Africa [1]. While cultural practices in the U.S. are different, I would expect some resistance here too.
> The bug is bad but not that bad. It "almost never" kills children, it targets "old" or "fat" people disproportionately
Interestingly these are demographics that seem to be somewhat over-represented in Florida given how many retirees move there.
Interesting analogy to choose on today of all days. 0.1% is 330,000. How about 0.001%?
Pedant alert: yes obviously they were technically non-state actors.
(this should not be taken to mean I judge[d] the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan justifiable or desirable, now or when they started)
IFR estimates are actually down to 0.1%, putting it on-par with the flu, but the flu is worse because it hits kids just as hard as the elderly.