America Has Lost the Plot on COVID
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV. The vaccine has a ~6x risk of myocarditis for her than COVID itself. Who does that protect?
We squandered our opportunity to open up months ago. The vaccine apparently DOES rapidly lose efficacy, as more data has shown, and one political party wants a booster subscription model and outright refuses to commit to any sort of end.
You are doing exactly what you're insulting. Some self reflection is in order.
He didn't though. Unless you do show off how much better you are at following The Rules on a regular basis. And yet you called him "borderline delusional".
So if you don't think the pandemic is over, you are on the wrong side of the "culture war".
> screaming about The Science, and narcissists showing how much better they are at following The Rules than you.
This could be Twitter people or it could be people wearing masks in public. You don't know what this person meant outside of the context provided here. Given how they think that all that remains is a culture war, I took it to mean people who don't think the pandemic is over, so they wear masks and continue to social distance (you know, because we want people to know we can follow rules). Regardless, it reads as though it was written to be intentionally inflamatory to people like me who do not think it's over, or, at least won't act as though it is until a plan is communicated. I think you know that it was inflammatory. So your reading of it to not not include me as its target of criticism is of no interest to me. If I said "idiots who respond to my comments" and you rightly pointed out that it's not nice to call people idiots, how would you respond to a third commenter saying "well, he's not talking about you, he's talking about idiots."
This simply isn't true in my state. We had a significant spike in COVID patient hospitalizations and deaths starting in August. This is attributed by public health experts to the low vaccination rate in my state. I'm not sure if you count them among the culture warriors or narcissists.
Vaccines rapidly lose efficacy when the virus they target has free real estate (vectors) in which to mutate. The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else.
Americans having to wear a cloth covering to keep their neighbors from catching something almost as contagious as measles is not a large ask, but here we are. It also protects against the flu and RSV since you're concerned about those—which is why the US didn't really have a flu season. Guess those couple hundred thousand deaths a year are preferable to masks when public outbreaks occur though.
What I don't understand is the rest of the world has figured this out? Go ride the subway in Japan and no one struggles with this, just westerners who think thatdoing the bare minimum to prevent illness, hospitalizations, and even death impede on their manifest destiny / freedom / constitutional rights / etc
The finger pointing game really has to stop considering anyone vaccinated can contract, get sick from, act as a vector/petri dish, and consequently spread the mutated virus. Unvaccinated as well.
>The laughably slow vaccine uptake in the US (while the rest of the world couldn't secure doses) is to blame there, not anything else.
Instead of attempting to blame unvaccinated vectors for the poor vaccine performance, why not blame the actual culprit - the barely tested (with only ~200 clinical trial participants), rushed (sorry, expedited) vaccines?
Cloth masks are so ineffective their effect is statistically invisible.
Demanding others take ineffective measures because you find them a great token of virtue is in fact a large ask.
> Our review of the literature offers evidence in favor of widespread mask use as source control to reduce community transmission: Nonmedical masks use materials that obstruct particles of the necessary size; people are most infectious in the initial period postinfection, where it is common to have few or no symptoms (45, 46, 141); nonmedical masks have been effective in reducing transmission of respiratory viruses; and places and time periods where mask usage is required or widespread have shown substantially lower community transmission.
> The available evidence suggests that near-universal adoption of nonmedical masks when out in public, in combination with complementary public health measures, could successfully reduce Re
to below 1, thereby reducing community spread if such measures are sustained. Economic analysis suggests that mask wearing mandates could add 1 trillion dollars to the US GDP (32, 34).
> Models suggest that public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high (39).
There’s plenty of articles to be found that say whatever you want. Broadly, you’ll find articles that state that models or theories suggest that wearing masks will probably work great and articles that say that in practice it turns out cloth masks are at most of very limited value, because you can’t say what they filter and they never fit well.
> The available evidence suggests that near-universal adoption of nonmedical masks when out in public, […] could successfully reduce R to below 1
The very clear fact that no country actually succeeded in doing this, even the countries like Japan where mask wearing is as normal as it gets, should be a hint.
What I do know is most of the time it's very, very easy to wear a mask. So maybe, if you have good reason to believe it helps, just do the easy thing even if you can't know for sure.
Plus the old story about how Schrödinger’s Japan that is the big example of masks working, also isn’t the example when it turns out they don’t work. Of course.
Aw, shamples. Good. Because it is deadly my parents and me.
You can fix your kids mood with an ice cream; You cannot fix dead people.
Historically, they made peace with the death toll of yellow fever (~5% fatality rate!) and they made peace with the death toll of malaria. Disease prevention is a relatively novelty in the US, historically speaking, and mostly secondary to war readiness (undermined by the Spanish flu around WW1 and polio around WW2). If it wasn't for the threat of foreign wars destroying the American way of life, the American society at large is indifferent to a high death toll from disease.
It's not clear whether this is a matter of high religiosity (because death is a goal and only the beginning of a soul's journey) or a history of dehumanizing a huge segment of their own population.
The vestiges of covid restrictions will still be floating around with patriot act clauses 20 years from now when 99% of people will not be quite sure what the exact origin was but they'll be used to it and 100% certain that things can't be any other way.
Let's just flag these as off-topic and move on.
If everyone was actually immunized, we would have hit Fauci's early number of 65% herd immunity months ago. What's the herd immunity threshold at these days.. 85%? 90%? Utter quackery.