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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing. The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those who haven’t, haven’t. Nobody asks about it and no businesses have any sort of mask requirements. Half of the people at the grocery store wear masks and the other half don’t. Everyone seems to be getting along.

Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was shouting at a woman to put on a mask, then was yelling at the same woman to leave because she refused to comply. I’m glad she didn’t see me because I literally didn’t think to bring a mask with me and needed to run to the restroom.

I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.

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> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.

No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.)

That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.

Yeah, that’s the joke

I appreciate you explaining that.. allow me to explain something to you.

The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion meaningless and honestly a little stunning.

> The parent statement was not literal

Correct. Instead it was agenda driven sarcasm, which while not forbidden on HN, adds nothing to, and always lowers the quality of discussion.

Rather than take the emotional bait and be sarcastic in return, the person who responded pointed out the misrepresentation that was behind the sarcasm, which is the most civil way to address it.

Their response was far more measured and constructive than the "take it to Reddit" response that the parent comment type usually elicits. There was absolutely nothing stunning about it - rather it was a standard civil response method in a debate whose civility has been lowered through sarcasm.

Pretty much the same story in South Carolina. Outside retail workers, mask usage in my hyper local area is about 2%. Life has been basically completely normal since June 2020.

I live in South Carolina as well, and I can confirm (I think you meant 2021 not 2020?). Most people in my city have been going about life as usual since ~ May if this year. Almost nobody wears masks. Everything is open. And guess what? We’re all good!

The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid.

There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/sout...

Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it

South Carolina has had a pretty high number of cases since mid year [1]. Higher than the late 2020/early 2021 surge which was before vaccination.

It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US.

South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding.

The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread.

That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

Being in BC, Canada sucks. I went in to an Apple store to buy the fully loaded MacBook M1 max, with 6000 dollars in my hand (literally). And was told to leave the store because my mask didn't cover my nose. I'm buying a Razer 15 now.

And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask.

And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?

If you don't understand by now that vaccines significantly reduce transmission, you just need to google "do covid vaccines reduce transmission". The top results are links to the CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, all saying that vaccines significantly reduce transmission.

Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you.

(P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)

You must be young.

> CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet

None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.

The Lancet you say?

“Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036

Study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

> Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.

You're leaving out the context: they can be just as infectious once they become infected, which is significantly less likely for those who are fully vaccinated.

Vaccines significantly reduce the transmissability of the virus by making it less likely for those vaccinated to become infected, NOT by making them less infectious if they are infected.

Where in South Carolina are you?

Lol it's nice that you can just send all the covid patients to the city to get treated and you guys can pretend covid doesn't exist

>I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.

In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.

I've noticed that, Waitroses and doctor's surgeries seem to be the last bastion of English mask-wearing. I wonder what the correlation actually is fundamentally? Waitrose's clientele are wealthier and therefore older and more concious of COVID?

It's virtue signaling

This gets thrown around so much now I automatically dismiss it as a lazy complaint.

> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.

Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.

Odd that you have forgotten it since Kansas, if it were it's own country, would have been a top-5 world hotspot for COVID deaths only 6 weeks ago. Is your memory really that short?

I've always found it strange that some Americans focus on politeness above all.

Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool.

It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.

He’s vaccinated, so it seems a little dramatic to be calling OP a bad person and that they suck.

A more charitable reading is that the people involved in OP's story suck.

That’s a misreading, because GP explicitly calls out OPs behavior as bad.

The vaccine protects you but still allows you to carry and spread a viral load. The mask protects people around you but not yourself but limiting the viral load that you can spread.

By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.

The vaccine drastically reduces your chance to spread the virus.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...

Vaccinated people still spread the covid and vaccinated people still get covid. Most of my friend group was infected when two vaccinated friends came up to visit. They said they were feeling sick but because they were vaccinated it was fine. I think everyone in the group but 1 person was vaccinated.

The idea that once you are vaccinated you don't need to social distance or wear a mask is wrong and is getting people sick. In fact a vaccinated infection appears to have the same viral load as an unvaccinated. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...

If I'm out in public, I wear socks everyday (well most), I wear a shirt, I wear pants. Its not much of a stretch to wear a mask out in public too.

Vaccinated people don’t take up hospital beds. That’s the resource that’s constrained.

Vaccinated people also have a lower rate of transmission.

Your first statement is categorically false. https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/vaccine/vaccine-breakthroug...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... (table 5 page 19)

Your second statement is categorically false. See my comment above... you know the one you responded too. It actually links to a study showing the viral load is the same. Or here is another study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Please stop spreading misinformation. Saying vaccinated people have a lower chance of getting covid is a true statement. However both of your statements are straight up misinformation.

No, they're not. You can try to split hairs and talk about how the rates are just lower, sure, but vaccinated people are not taking up beds (like the unvaccinated are).

Please take a look at the rest of the thread for sources that vaccinated individuals spread covid at lower rates than the unvaccinated.

Please stop spreading antivax FUD.

I didn't read the comment as putting the employee in a bad light.

I mean, I saw the “masks required in this county” sign, but I really needed to pee. I knew I was going to be driving through that county for about 20 more minutes, so I checked my car for a mask. I couldn’t find one as there’s no mask mandate in my area so I’ve stopped carrying a mask around. I then held my shirt up as best I could as a “mask” and made a bee line for the bathroom. If they’d had masks at the door I’d have been perfectly fine with putting one on.

I wasn’t making any judgment about the woman yelling at people, I’d be mad if I was being threatened with fines by the local government for having maskless people in my establishment too.

> I’d be mad if I was being threatened with fines by the local government for having maskless people in my establishment too.

Ha. Perhaps she was mad because she was at risk of being exposed to Covid all day long due to boneheads who were incapable of reading, or wearing a mask, and some of them turned around and gave her grief for it?

Sounds like she should be vaccinated

That could be it. But there's of course no way to know what the source of her neurosis is with no further information.

It may be a forgotten thing but the new federal mandates are coming that to work you must be vaccinated.

In California, except for wearing masks in retail establishments, everything has been back to normal for months. School has been full time in person, and traffic sucks once again.

I wouldn't call it "back to normal".

In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.

> e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask

Those restrictions are on their way out:

https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i...

> Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes.

Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place.

This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing.

Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.

I'm in Los Angeles.

That's on your school/county. None of those are mandated by the state.

Isn't the point of doing cardio work to be tired? To stress your lungs and heart? That's why extreme athletes wear masks while doing cardio... I'm sure a little surgical mask isn't as difficult as this:

https://www.trainingmask.com

That's not the main part of my comment.

Where are you in CA? Here in the Bay Area, at least East Bay, you have to wear a mask to go shopping. >90% of people at the parks are wearing masks, we can't go into the daycare to pick up our son and the nanny wears a mask all day, you can't sit in a restaurant unless you show your id and paperwork proving you have a vaccine. Heck, I see kids and adults riding their bikes or skateboarding without a helmet or any protection but they have their mask on! Not sure what "normal" meant to you before, but it's definitely not any definition of normal to me, unless you take it that we are going to be living with all of this forever.

> Not sure what "normal" meant to you before, but it's definitely not any definition of normal to me,

I'm in the East Bay, and most of what you have described - people at the park wearing masks, riding bikes or skateboards with masks, nannies wearing masks - are voluntary behaviors not mandated by any authority.

Why does it matter to you what measures others take to protect themselves from the virus voluntarily, and which is totally within their personal liberty to do? Does it offend your sensibilities somehow? Should they not be wearing masks to make you feel like things are "normal" per your definition?

The other cases you raise -retail, restaurant, and daycare - all have very specific risks either due to density or because unvaccinated children are present.

It is "normal" now because I can go shopping or to a restaurant, have a drink at my neighborhood bar, take my kids to school, fly somewhere on vacation, have a gathering in my house, attend public events (Halloween was huge in my neighborhood) - everything I did before the pandemic - with the tiny inconvenience of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when indoors in public.

Well, apparently Kansas is passing the buck to other places: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fi...

I'm in a very educated university town, and very few people wear masks here any longer in public.

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