A concept that took hold in the ’70s haunted everything from seat belts to masks
slate.com
slate.com
During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision.
We always need to reason under uncertainty. The correct interpretation of the scientific method would have led to the conclusion that COVID was likely to be transmitted via aerosols (e.g. due to sequence similarity with other coronaviruses, which are known to be transmitted via aerosols) and imposing mandatory masks (because this is a very innocuous intervention).
The evidence quality is roughly as poor as that for ivermectin, vitamin D, etc., except that it has become a wildly political issue, fraught with propaganda to the point that most people will vehemently insist that the evidence quality is higher than it is. It is therefore deeply ironic that Slate is arguing about risk compensation, while using NPIs as an example of the kind of safety behavior being deterred by discussions of risk compensation. Did any of those NPIs do anything at all? We never did proper randomized studies, so we really have no idea.
This feels like so much more propaganda: one side said that risk compensation is a thing, so now we must attack the notion, to ensure that $MY_PREFERRED_INTERVENTION is properly imposed on society. But nobody much cares if the intervention works...
[1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
People were washing their hands, using hand sanitizer, opening doors with crazy key-chains, basically not touching anything, wearing gloves, fist and elbow bumping ... when they really needed to not be breathing each others air.
There's simply no part of this pandemic that makes "the experts" look good, and it has utterly destroyed any remaining faith that I had in journalism. Now we merely have competing ideological factions, and their preferred sources of propaganda.
Yeah, the inability to call the "experts" out when they were clearly wrong and now the constant interviews with "the vaccine hesitant" ...
That sentence is about CDC messaging.
There would be people wearing dirty rubber gloves in grocery stores if they did it perfect.
But it was, and id, certainly contributing to it.
I think that might have played a role, yes.
A month ago, I was judgemental towards a couple who were "overly protective" about the virus. It turns out they did REALLY risky stuff, and they were "overly protective" to protect me.
Maybe the people in the grocery store with gloves have open wounds and don't want to spread infected blood around.
I guess we'll never know. But there sure are a lot of folks wearing gloves now who weren't wearing them before. And that's why I was sighing.
He says;
> Interestingly, in the only published cluster RCT to date during COVID19, surgical masks had an 11% risk reduction and cloth masks had no effect at all on the primary endpoint of symptom driven lab positive result
The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! Fewer than half of the people in the villages were wearing masks and symptomatic Covid saw >10% reduction compared to villages without extra mask wearing. It's abundantly clear that the effect would be far greater with universal masking so to say "mask wearing only leads to a 10% reduction" omits a massive part of the story.
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
To quote the authors who tried in vain to prevent people like Vinay from mangling their research:
> Our results should not be taken to imply that masks can prevent only 10% of COVID-19 cases, let alone 10% of COVID-19 mortality. Our intervention induced 29 more people out of every 100 to wear masks, with 42% of people wearing masks in total. The total impact with near universal masking–perhaps achievable with alternative strategies or stricter enforcement–may be several times larger than our 10% estimate. Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used, and even more for the highest-risk individuals in our sample (23% for ages 50-60 and 35% for ages 60+). These numbers likely give a better sense of the impact of our intervention on severe morbidity and mortality, since most of the disease burden is borne by the elderly. Where achievable, universal mask adoption is likely to have still larger impacts.
No, it isn't. Because he's being generous: the 11% difference was on a baseline seroprevalence of 0.76%. So you have a study where cloth masks were shown to be completely ineffective, and the total absolute effect size of the surgical mask arm was .08% (edit: 0.09% per the numbers in the paper).
In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.) No matter how you spin it, this is a small, small effect. And this is in a completely unvaccinated population -- the best possible scenario for masks.
Even if we accept the argument that "several times more" people would be protected if we lived in a fictional, ideal universe where everyone wore surgical masks (newsflash: we don't), we're still only talking about a total effect size of a fraction of a percent.
Oh and by the way, it's particularly hilarious that the paragraph you quoted says the following:
> Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used
That has to go in my top-five lifetime examples of weasel-wording for reframing negative experimental outcomes. Cloth masks showed no effect. Saying that surgical masks reduced prevalence "more" is like saying that together, Ootani Shohei and I hit 46 home runs last year. But yeah, he hit more.
That's not accurate unless I'm missing something... sticking with just the surgical mask arm -- the effect size of 0.08% was based on a binary mask vs. non-mask intervention. It has no relation to the number of people masking. The intervention was getting more people to mask -- they succeeded mildly, where 6/10 people still hadn't masked. But that was sufficient for a 10% reduction in seropositive cases.
Edit;
They actually address this specifically;
Our estimates suggest that mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points, corresponding to an estimated 51,347 additional adults wearing masks in intervention villages, and this effect was persistent even after active mask promotion was discontinued. The intervention led to a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence (which corresponds to a 103 fewer symptomatic seropositives) and an 11.9% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms, corresponding to 1,587 fewer people reporting these symptoms.
So for 51,000 people additional people wearing masks -- 1,600 people were spared Covid symptoms and 103 people were spared symptoms + seropostive diagnosis. This with only a total of 42% of people wearing masks and a relatively low level of underlying Covid.
It's an especially obvious intervention based on the exponential potential of Covid infection and early R0 of 6 or whatever it was, plus how effective the surgical masks were (especially in older age groups via Figure 3).
The RCT was a binary test of each kind of mask. Any other outcome is imaginary. There's no mathematical adjustment that can tell you what would have happened in the hypothetical alternative universe where everyone wore a surgical mask. That's just storytelling with numbers.
> But that was sufficient for a 10% reduction in seropositive cases.
No. It was a an 11% relative reduction, on a 0.76% seropositivity rate. The actual effect size was about 0.09% (I wrote 0.08% earlier, because I just divided the two numbers, and didn't use the figures from the paper). When you compare the cost of an intervention to the benefits, you use the absolute effect size, because you don't pay relative costs for your interventions (e.g. is it worth forcing every toddler in the world to wear a mask while sleeping for a "huge" 66% relative risk reduction from 0.0000003% to 0.0000001%? Probably not unless you're a crazy person. The costs vastly outweigh the benefits, even though the "relative" benefit is strong.)
> Our estimates suggest that mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points, corresponding to an estimated 51,347 additional adults wearing masks in intervention villages, and this effect was persistent even after active mask promotion was discontinued. The intervention led to a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence (which corresponds to a 103 fewer symptomatic seropositives) and an 11.9% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms, corresponding to 1,587 fewer people reporting these symptoms.
This is garbage. They're combining the two mask arms and claiming a combined effect size, even though the cloth mask arm was shown to have no effect. You can't do that. They're spinning like crazy to hide a weak outcome. They also don't report the raw numbers for the arms, and they don't dwell too much on the fact that "distancing" increased in the mask villages over the controls. That could easily swamp the measured effects. But I digress.
The surgical mask villages had 106,201 people, and an 11.2% relative reduction in seroprevalence, from 0.76% to 0.67%. The cloth mask villages saw essentially no difference at all: 0.76% vs 0.74%
There's simply no way to look at this data as anything than incredibly weak evidence for masks. I honestly can't believe we're fighting about something that makes, at best, a tiny fraction of a percent difference in outcome. Mass hysteria.
I whole-heartedly don't understand this.. in the places with universal masking, there is essentially no Covid (most of Asia, even cities like SF). Surgical masks are obviously sufficient to prevent most infection in hospital and other clinical settings. There's evidence that even a small portion of people wearing them in public reduces the incidence of disease. And your takeaway is that it's mass hysteria to encourage an extraordinarily cheap NPI?
Just completely, utterly wrong. Japan had a huge spike this winter. Korea is currently at all-time highs. Vietnam is currently near all-time highs. Thailand peaked at 20,000 cases per day, and is currently at 10,000.
These numbers are lower than the US in absolute terms, but claiming "essentially no Covid" means only that you aren't informed of the reality of the situation. Covid is running rampant across Asia, even now.
> There's evidence that even a small portion of people wearing them in public reduces the incidence of disease.
There is literally no evidence of this. The few RCTs that have performed suggest the opposite: you have to put masks on a huge number of people (hundreds to thousands) to prevent even a single case.
> And your takeaway is that it's mass hysteria to encourage an extraordinarily cheap NPI?
No, my takeaway is that there's very little evidence supporting the use of masks. Because there isn't. And most of what there is, is of exceptionally low quality.
The major difference to Germany I see between the two countries in terms of measures, Japanese were masks (vaccinated) and Mask Wearing in Germany has become political as it did in the US.
Wait a second.
> In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.)
You are assuming 0.76% prevalence. This is, I assume, in specific point of time, but somehow, you extend this to long-term intervention.
If you spin COVID-19 "but only 0.5% of population is infected _right now_", any intervention will seem extremely ineffective. "Oh, you want to vaccinate 300 millions of people to prevent 2000 deaths" (without saying it's 2000 deaths _per day_).
I am not. I'm using the numbers from the paper to illustrate a point.
Even if seroprevalence was as high as 6% at any given time (which is about as high as it ever was in NYC, for example), an 11% difference is 0.66%, or 1 case per 152 people wearing masks. And that's in a fully unvaccinated population.
We're simply not talking about huge differences here. Certainly nothing close to a statistically meaningful difference in R0.
pointing out elsewhere in the thread that when the CDC fucked up, they ultimately admitted it and changed recommendations, does not support your argument.
Medical doctors are not scientists, or even engineers. They are more like highly-skilled technicians. NTTAWWT, but the MD degree by itself shouldn't bring individual doctors anywhere as much social and scientific credibility as it does. For most Americans, the best source of information on COVID has been, and remains, their public health authorities.
Not sure which side of the argument you are on, but it's funny, did you see how the death count for vaccinated people on the 22,000 pfizer study has been corrected from 17 to 24 people?
And the FDA has asked for 76 years to ongoingly release the safety data on the vaccine?
I'm vaccinated, but I'm super angry and worried about wtf is going on here.
What's certain is, yes: If this pandemic has proven anything, it's that there are incompetent and corrupt people EVERYWHERE on ALL SIDES.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/11/19/fda-2076-vaccine-data...
If these people were operating in good faith, it would endanger their valued reputations as certified antivax nutjobs.
a contradictory conclusion, and somehow both falling for and denying the appeal to authority fallacy at the same time. you discount doctors being 'experts' but then claim another group of 'experts' being the right ones (with no justification, no less).
there is no shortcut when it comes to triangulating reality. all the data must be considered, not just your favored sources. otherwise, you will be biased and very likely incorrect (you shouldn't even have favored sources). note that the original article literally points out a bias/fallacy that public health officials have fallen prey to.
It should be obvious that the burden of proof lies with the outlying opinion, but somehow, it never is.
Prasad is routinely interviewed & quoted by the "left-wing media". You are eager to fixate on the "wing" of the media coverage, but not engage with the argument being made.
Public health "authorities" are groups of people with opinions. Other people with expertise are no more or less qualified to have opinions, even if you don't agree with those opinions. If those opinions are backed by evidence and reason, and your opinions are backed by appeals to authority, then you lose.
> It should be obvious that the burden of proof lies with the outlying opinion
Close, but wrong. The burden of proof lies on the person advancing a hypothesis, whether that person is within the consensus or outside of it. Citing an authority does not excuse you from the burden of proof, any more than it excused the church in the time of Gallileo.
Filters work better under suction than pressure - because they are less likely to leak.
So why have a nonsensical system where everybody has to wear a mask properly all the time and change it regularly in the correct manner just to have any material effect, when an individual that is worried could just wear a better one that filters inbound properly and everybody gets to do what they want.
What's interesting about this is the psychology of why intelligent people have swallowed this. Do they believe the mask is filtering inbound when it isn't? Or is it entirely political - signalling membership of a group to others. Or is it that the perennially worried believe they should have the right to tell others what they can and can't do, when there is a perfectly reasonably 'live and let live' option available.
Why choose a position that divides society when there is one that brings people together?
You have no idea whether you are 'protecting others' or just creating plastic waste for no good reason. Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect whatsoever in the real world. No deflection in rates can be seen from NPIs and the process leaks like crazy.
It's entirely a backward belief. Believing you are 'protecting others', yet doing nothing to protect yourself against the almost certain risk that other people won't be 'protecting others'.
None of it makes any sense in any logical analysis.
Huh? You need to protect others because masks (mostly) don't work inbound, that's what I'm saying. (But do work outbound.)
> Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect
Sorry, restate: the presence of masks is trivial to validate.
the only places outside of healthcare settings where masking plausibly makes any difference for ordinary folks is at home (amongst friends/family) and in crowded indoor social gatherings (club, house party, etc.). a modicum of physical distancing is all that's need in most public places to minimize tranmission risk about as much as is possible. combine that with masking public-facing workers (like cashiers), and we've maxed out the potential of masking as an intervention. everything else is theater.
That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one.
As for the rest of your comment, the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, so low that it drowns in the noise and is essentially a complete wash, and there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
No, because that's not what the 11% number was measuring. You can't just take an 11% relative reduction in population seroprevalence at a given time, and then blindly multiply the virus R0 by that factor. They observed a drop in symptomatic seroprevalence that corresponded to about 1 case for for every 1300 people who wore a mask. That is nowhere near an 11% drop in R0 (which you'll recall is an exponent).
> That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask:
How do you know? Have you measured it? No, of course you haven't. You're just asserting things.
> so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one.
Fine. You should take Ivermectin, then. And vitamin D. And flush your sinuses daily with a neti pot. And get your chakra aligned. It's essentially the same argument. Can't hurt, might help! By your logic, it all must be done.
...or do you just pick-and-choose which unsupported interventions you prefer to believe in?
(for the record: I do not believe you should take Ivermectin. But it is the same argument.)
> the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that,
It really isn't. Just like mask studies, there are a few weakly suggestive good ones, and a few bad ones that make ridiculous claims, and a whole lot of nonsense in between.
> there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
No, not really. It's a pretty common, safe drug. We probably know more about the downsides of Ivermectin than we do about the downsides of (say) masking young children in school.
You are also continuously seeking reasons to justify the way you have already decided you want to go about this, so effectively you are just arguing for your own satisfaction, not to gain insight.
Your arguments by assertion hold no water for me. Good luck with this attitude.
If you are arguing anything else than you aren't actually being consistent in your reasoning.
Risks are also low for eating 50 Kg of bananas, it might cure COVID, so why not try it? This sort of reasoning is complete nonsense when it comes to picking your medications.
The null hypothesis is "it does not work". Then you carefully design a study to take care of all the variables, you do your double blind test with a placebo and you look at outcomes. That's the standard. Anything less simply won't do. 'Might work' isn't a reason for (self) prescription.
As for mask effectiveness: they work, there is ongoing debate over how much they work. Like everything else in terms of countermeasures, absolutely nothing will be a 100% sure filter so we layer multiple filters on top of each other to improve the degree of protection we achieve, aka the cheese model.
It's interesting how you say that so definitively, when there are multiple, large RCTs ongoing, evaluating the question.
Perhaps you're substituting your opinions for science?
> The null hypothesis is "it does not work". Then you carefully design a study to take care of all the variables, you do your double blind test with a placebo and you look at outcomes. That's the standard.
> As for mask effectiveness: they work, there is ongoing debate over how much they work.
Funny how "the standard" shifts from topic to topic, sentence to sentence. When it's an intervention you support, the presumption is positive, even if the collective evidence of effect is...mixed, at best.
So these studies are in the realm of 'we can't rule it out 100% let's check one more time'. Since this is a forum and not a scientific paper I can claim with some confidence that it isn't going to work, if you want to take the opposite side of that bet be my guest.
Masks work, whether it is 10% or 15% effective is what's at stake there, not whether they work or not. If ivermectin was 10% effective it would have been established long ago.
You are guilty of exactly those things that you accuse me of.
timr took the effort to correct you point-for-point. You come back with "Fine! I'll take my ball and go home then!"
I'm not sure what made you dig in your heels like that (personal reasons?), but to good-faith bystanders your arguments appear petty and unreasonable.
Somehow I start to suspect that masks might have a similar effectiveness that are dependant on climate, air humidity and widespread co-infections. Maybe not effective against covid but might prevent other infections that ultimately make covid worse or make them more susceptible to covid.
I'm generally in support of the masking rules BUT I also have a very young baby and there is definitely a high cost for him. Not seeing a smile when he is left at daycare has caused him to cry more than once, I don't even want to think about the long term effects of seeing so much less facial expression in his critical first months.
I know this is a talking point of anti-maskers but let's not pretend all of the other side's arguments are bogus _because_ they made it. This is just one example, there _is_ a cost to masking up the entire population.
There's also a thought experiment, which is convenient, since the outcome is open to everyone's interpretation. But it's not actual data.
It was criminal. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence: SARS-CoV-1 was thought to spread via airborne droplets, the high rate of transmission, the types of transmission, medical staff infections, reduced rates of transmissions in countries where mask wearing while sick was common, ... we would have convicted COVID19 on less evidence.
But no double blind experiments, so no proof. Go about your day citizens!
It was only over a year (with a lot of evidence) that the CDC said “aerosol transmission is maybe sorta kinda possible maybe”.
There are multiple ways to validate an idea, and sometimes you can’t design a blind rct. We know parachutes work despite never having proven it in an rct trial.
In fact, the one study examining parachute use showed no effect! ;-) https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
> ... [T]he trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.
Hah. Ah, yes. Always read carefully!
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
but based on your own contention, you won't read it, so here's a key sentence from the abstract:
The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.
Could you link some?
What I have read seems to suggest otherwise, for example "Efficacy of face mask in preventing respiratory virus transmission: A systematic review and meta-analysis" [1]
Key conclusion: "Meta-analyses suggest that mask use provided a significant protective effect"
A number of studies have been linked in sibling comments, studying the effects of cloth masks. They work to significant reduce exhaled contaminant load.
> In one study, during talking, unmasked subjects expelled more than 5,000 contaminants per 5 cubic feet; 7.2% of the contaminants were associated with particles less than 4 μm in diameter (68). Cloth-masked subjects expelled an average of 19 contaminants per 5 cubic feet; 63% were less than 4 μm in diameter. So overall, over 99% of contaminants were filtered. The second study used the same experimental setup, but studied a wider range of mask designs, including a four-ply cotton mask. For each mask design, over 97% contaminant filtration was observed (69).
> https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118#abstract-1
Also, at this point we know that even if you catch COVID-19, the viral load that you catch plays a factor in how seriously ill you get. Masks reduce the viral load that a sick person exposes others to.
Why?
I am not the parent and also not a native English speaker - is it not common to call respirators also "masks"? Does that term refer to surgical masks only? I live in the Czech Republic and the Czech word "maska", which is translated as "mask" (and I assume comes from the same latin origin) is pretty general term used to refer to basically anything that covers something.
If it is not a general term, do people in the US still really use surgical masks with the intention of protecting themselves from Covid? Where I live we would be talking about FFP2 and above, discussing surgical masks as covid protection would be irrelevant because no one wears them (granted, many people do not wear anything). Is it not like that in the US?
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
We really need to stop repeating the talking point that "everyone screwed up". The original evidence base was that masks don't do much to stop respiratory illness. "The science" changed in the span of a week in early 2020, based on little more than propaganda. No actual science was ever performed, and once we did some, we found out that the early evidence was pretty much correct.
Each random person's picture of masks will be very different from what the next person is thinking.
And it's also very important to distinguish between the different meanings of viral transmission – of what virus, and according to what scientific results it's being talked about.
A lot of the friction comes from this.
In SARS-CoV-2 transmission specifically, I speak about it as airborne or aerosolized, based on all the papers that are out that confirm that now, and I when I say "masks" I tend to think of gaping surgical masks or better, and no, those don't work well enough.
However in the sense of the word masks as N95/FFP2 masks or better—often called respirators—then those masks are almost unreasonably effective at stopping transmission.
Here's the data I base my perspective on, in the nutshell form of some tweets from scientists, tweets linking to scientific papers. (Some are peer-reviewed, some at the preprint stage.)
https://twitter.com/JenniferKShea/status/1449748053548752903 — We've summarized the literature supporting airborne transmission of COVID-19 & several other respiratory pathogens. Guess what? #COVIDisAirborne
https://twitter.com/mjb302/status/1409628852867850240 — Important new research examining the real world impact better PPE has on workplace acquired infections of SARS-CoV2. — TL:DR - FFP3 respirators provide 100% protection to healthcare workers looking after patients infected with SARS-CoV2. 1/25
https://twitter.com/andymoz78/status/1441355141051936772 — A thread on our recent pre-print “The removal of airborne SARS-CoV-2 and other microbial bioaerosols by air filtration on COVID-19 surge units” (*Pre-print -not peer reviewed*) — TL:DR Hospital air is dirty, we can clean it
https://twitter.com/DFisman/status/1454776521818886145 — Remarkable new work from Korea shows the extraordinary impact of masks on SARS-2 transmission on public transit. — Parameterized based on *aerosol* simulator. (Because SARS-2 is airborne). Distancing helps, but less important (b/c SARS-2 = airborne).
https://twitter.com/caruzycki/status/1360635674324463616 — 2/ If this disease were only spread by droplets that fell to the ground within 2 metres, [plexiglass barriers] would be a perfectly fine solution to limit transmission. Unfortunately, we unequivocally know that aerosols are important with this disease.
If you have any issues with my comment above which is based on clearly delineated and reasonable personal opinion and includes links to the scientific results it is based on, you have a duty to respond, not downvote.
People keep dismissing this, but respirators in hospitals are very different than respirators in the hands of the general public. Fit matters more than anything else, and hospitals have staff and procedures to ensure that PPE is used correctly.
This isn't a small or theoretical concern. Even a tiny gap negates the effect of the respirator, and people don't fit their respirators properly -- in large part because properly worn respirators are annoying and hard to tolerate for long periods of time. I regularly see people walking around with KN95 masks on their faces, with massive gaps around the nose and chin. These masks are pure viral theater.
(Also, not for nothing: two of the twitter links you cite are about respirators in hospitals. the other two are mechanistic studies, which are basically useless. Every failed intervention or drug in the history of medicine has a mountain of plausible mechanistic studies supporting it. Most things don't work, but everything we try has someone claiming that it's a sure-fire solution, based on a lab study.)
In hospitals, high importance is rightfully placed on correctly fitting N95/FFP2 and up – this is so that they function to spec and can be formally assumed to work like the specification indicates so they can be applied as a tool in general use by, well, by a population of staff.
This does not mean that respirators which are worn in a reasonable manner will ever be as poor filtration devices as gaping masks, especially not if the pathogen is airborne / aerosolized and operates almost purely as air flow, not droplets with mass and inertia to consider.
And COVID-19 is airborne and must be considered as airborne. There were five links, and the fifth is a collection of papers :) There is also a significant amount of detail and discussion and framing and context in adjacent tweets i all the links.
On a serious note, how often did they really mess up? In a sense of having consequences that are close to impossible to fix? Not once, if you ask me.
Not all lies are malicious. Some are necessary. "Masks aren't helpful" was one of those. Everyone with a three-digit IQ should have understood what was really going on, and everyone else was better off believing the lie.
Dr. Tam, who is responsible for both gross incompetence AND intentionally misleading the public WRT COVID19, mistakes that literally killed people and, is probably still killing people, remains in her position as Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. This is why I can't let it go.
Is the idea that mask policy would make up for all the politicians calling it "the China virus"?
I agree my comment doesn't reply to stuff higher up in the thread.
So California looks at Florida in horror, even though COVID just keeps on truckin' through Cali. And Florida screams that a mask is history's greatest threat to liberty, even though it's a plain and obvious way to reduce transmission.
California’s recent COVID death rate per 100K population is 2/3 Floridas, and the COVID incidence is concentrated in the counties with Florida-like attitudes.
About what you’d expect if the actual recent infection rates were similar after Florida's drop from its mich higher recent peak, rather than Florida's being now much lower the way the reported case rates would suggest.
California’s death rate is far lower than Florida. This isn’t something you should be both-sidesing. Tens of thousands of Californians are still alive because of the measures we’ve taken.
And it’s not so much horror as disgust and confusion, like seeing someone smearing feces on themselves and saying “I trolled u!!”
Not sure my point is getting across. I’m not quite sure what my point is. Still trying to figure out what makes California (and especially San Francisco) different without resorting to simple left vs right language.
Aerosol transmission.
It won't. In an hour the air will fill with the virus if someone is infected. The original virus apparently took 15 minutes to infect in a room. If delta is minimum 6x more infectious we are talking minutes.
By increasing air circulation, or meeting outside, we can reduce infections much more than if 30 people are wearing a mask inside a room for an hour.
For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. If an administrator chooses a risky intervention and it turns out to be the wrong choice, we hold that person more liable than another administrator who chooses inaction with equally bad consequences. Because we give administrators power and hold them liable for their choices, we expect them to avoid risky interventions out of self-interest.
Early in the pandemic, experts put too much weight on the risks of improper mask use. Perhaps because they were trained to use masks in risky situations where the consequences of improper use were real. It took them some time to realize that the general public would be using masks in low-risk situations, which reduced the expected risks significantly.
Prevention paradox.
Regarding the masks, at least in Germany the problem was different... politicians knew that masks were effective but, since the stockpiles of the Cold War era had been dismantled and domestic production all but non-existent because no matter what China is going to be at least 10x cheaper, they feared a "bank run" on the few masks that were still in the country.
Politicians didn't have the guts to come out and say "yes, we know that masks help, but please don't go on shopping sprees, we need every single mask there is for the hospitals".
In 2009 as H1N1 started ramping up the reserve had half a billion masks (and 100 million already ordered), the health minister launched buildup order to increase the stockpile to 1.7 billion (a billion surgigals and 700m N95/FFP2).
After H1N1 drew down, the health minister got greatly criticised for the expense, and following the event the agency got slowly starved out: the government decided to drop FFP2s entirely, and significantly draw down the stock of surgicals. In 2013 it moved the entire thing over to private entities (companies were supposed to stock up masks for employees, imagine how stupid that idea is).
Obviously this completely killed the domestic production in short order as companies were not doing jack shit, and even if they had they’d have bought chinese production. As soon as 2015 all the companies set up after 2006 had folded, and domestic production capabilities were essentially gone.
In 2016, the agency which had been specifically set up to oversee pandemic preparation and response to pandemics was killed, officially “folded” into a more general public health agency, after having been slowly starved of funds for years.
When COVID-19 hit, the country had no production capabilities (500 million masks a year) and the stock was essentially nil (about 150 million masks, 3 weeks worth of healthcare demand alone).
Why would you not want to follow a conservative, evidence-based variant of the scientific method?
> During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision.
And the current administration continues to employ this official and give them a microphone
That's half the problem here, with anti-maskers screaming that they can't breathe.
You can try forcing them, like we're doing now, and they'll just take off their mask to cough and sneeze like half the passengers in my last flight + take every possible option to take it off + wear it off their nose to begin with.
My recollection was that it was much worse. They definitively and aggressively said that it was _not_ transmitted via aerosols.
"no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus"
I posit that's not what happened, there was no absent evidence. The NHC knew full well that they had (another) SARS on their hands in January 2020, but lied to the WHO because they were directed by the party to suppress the findings for the usual reasons (don't rock the boat, save face on the global stage, keep the populace under control). The WHO took this false information and neglected to verify it before disseminating it, so they are complicit in the affair.
Basically I kept hearing only n95 I’d effective, or you’ll use them wrong. We know masks would help more with larger droplets, yet we persisted with the lie.
To be fair, there was also a shortage of masks, so I don't think the consequences would be much better if they acted correctly.
The worst result was reducing the confidence of the people in health authorities. We are still to pay the price for that.
The first rule of politics is to never let a good crisis go to waste. The second rule of politics is to always piss on whatever your opponents are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
I’m not saying the deception was necessary, just illustrating it’s not black and white. It would’ve become a partisan issue regardless with Trump doing his performative masculinity routine and refusing to wear them.
This was not just in the US, exact same thing happened in most of Europe.
“In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25)” https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Also note, what you posted is not a scientific study. It’s a made up model. Real world evidence is falling in line with previous scientific knowledge. Countries w/out mask mandates have no statistical difference in transmission, as expected. But, the whole thing has been politicized.
Generalizing from influenza to COVID-19 seems like a big assumption.
Cool story bro, but I disagree. If we were following the scientific method how to explain why 70% of studies cannot be reproduced?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_r...
"A similar survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments."
Not to mention that basically all studies are paid for by one of only 3 (connected) sources - military, government or corporations.
If you control the purse strings, you decide what to (or not to) study.
Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us.
It took way too long to figure out that absolute LDL cholesterol levels predict nothing and that only oxidized LDL (even at extremely small concentrations) is a predictor for heart disease.
Deliberate misleading may be worse than a mistake, but it probably wasn't because of the scientific method.
'we can't do that, people will use it wrongly' 'we cant tell the people that, they might use the information wrongly.' on and on again.
Just one of many examples was a trauma center application that showed all the trauma centers in the US on a map. you could see the coverages for ambulance and helicopter. I put in a feature where one could see the distance to the closest trauma center, as well as get directions. I was asked to remove it because people might use the information incorrectly.
to me, the problem is much more broad than this article suggests. its not just one phenomenon. lying and hiding information is built into their way of thinking.
The greater the details, the greater the burden. People naturally make assumptions about credibility according to the depth and breadth of the information provided. If you're not prepared to make the commitment, then it's quite prudent not to publish so many details. If you don't publish it, then people can't mistake it for up-to-date, accurate, and/or comprehensive information, and they'll be more likely seek it out somewhere else or otherwise hedge their reliance. If you do publish and it's inaccurate, then you're misleading people and possibly redirecting them away from other, more reliable sources.
It's difficult to say without more details what the fundamental concerns in your case were. But note that the real, nuanced reasons for certain decisions aren't or can't always be adequately explained to employees. A lawyer or emergency services expert might give the sophisticated analysis, but by the time the directive makes it down to people implementing it the rationale is "because people are dumb". But in truth it's really more that people are trusting.
If you don't know dead cold where the trauma center is, you should be calling 911 (or equivalent), not trying to decide where to drive.
If you are in the middle of nowhere, you don't need to drive to the closest trauma center to improve the situation, drive to the nearest larger town/city. There will be a way of landing a helicopter there.
And so on.
But now you add some helpful little details--a colored route from A to B with a label, "5 minutes drive time". Now they reach the obstruction. Will they immediately assess the situation as they see it, or will they believe that "5 minutes" already accounts for the time necessary to pass the obstruction, thus hesitating under the false belief that the electronic map is using hidden information?
EDIT: Note that this situation describes the error in the CDC's mask decision as discussed in the article. What the CDC should have said at the time was that it wasn't going to mandate masks because it lacked confidence in its information regarding mask advocacy and efficacy. Instead what the CDC did was affirmatively tell people not to wear masks. If gave people too much detail and implied that it knew more than it really did. We can argue over whether the CDC should have known that masks were beneficial, but I think most can agree that they should have been more careful about giving false confidence either way. People aren't stupid, but they are easily misled, and once misled they'll continue rationalizing the direction they're headed. That describes not only how people responded to the CDC guidance but to the CDC itself--its false confidence in the poor 1960s-era aerosol experiments that claimed more than it actually proved.
Misleading information is poisonous. First rule: "do no harm". That's paramount over the responsibility to affirmatively help people.
Say someone is moving to a new city and wants housing that is close to high level medical care. It's useful if they are able to access information about where it is located.
I mean, until a few years ago there was no scientific evidence that parachutes helped with surviving jumping off a plane
Given the cost of an ambulance, most people I know will drive themselves to the ER for anything where they're still barely walking.
As a tangent, what really annoys me lately is Google Maps. For some very stupid reason Maps is not coming up with a destination of Covid test or vaccination centers, instead Maps is redirecting you to general search to get the latest news on Covid. There you can look up the address and manually navigate there. And even then it happened to me once the Maps refused to accept that destination. No idea what the reasoning behind that would be.
This isn't a huge issue in the countryside - this is one of the uses of medical helicopters, honestly. You are probably better off getting folks at the scene to help stablize you and allowing the helicopter to come there. That is, unless you were told to go somewhere else.
(I've nearly lost a tree for a medical helicopter when I lived by a overly dangerous curve: They decided to close the road and land there instead. They also help in rugged terrain).
The problem wasn't about _being able to land_, when in the middle of nowhere.
If you're "in the middle of nowhere", how are going to get a helicopter to you? What are you going to tell them with no address etc.?
By going towards a town, they'll know where to fly to, so they can pick you up.
What we should assume is that 99% of people in general are morons and not specialists - just like you and me are not specialists and belong to the same 99% and can't comprehend these things and because they can't understand these things, they are also failing in explaining that to public. Explanation takes understanding and thinking. Government officials(including in health) does not do thinking - they only act according to instructions.
We more or less know right now what is going on and IMO it is still debatable if mandatory masks are long-term solution. What general public has forgotten is that eyes are as good open doors for covid infection(and so far only distancing, good sunny weather and relaxed unstressed healthy people has prevented spread of virus or they have getting through covid sickness without noticing it - without symptoms), not to mention that masks does not offer 100% protection, but more like 80%, not to mention that people are 100% unprotected when they have to eat or drink or if they are entering without spacesuit in highly infectious rooms. So, in short - it is easier to tell people to wear masks - but it would take a lot of explaining all iffs, where covid infection can be passed from one to another, so correct information would be that masks can reduce covid infections, but not prevent it fully.
Besides the main problem here is that covid is not deadly virus for healthy people, but it affects mainly people who are already living their last days. It just is mind bogling, that people in general have no idea how many people are dying every year and that that number is too big for what medical services were meant for.
As for seatbelts - some of the deaths in car crashes could be avoidable if seatbelts were not worn, as passenger might have been ejected out of car and could have a chance of surviving impact(if it is not a wall or other car, but grass or bush) after landing, instead of burning alive inside of crashed car. So, everything depends on situation and timing to receive that help where it is possible to help.
America does not have much compassion in healthcare, the fear of medical debt may outweigh the fear of death.
SO much of the current covid conspiracy stuff relies on redacted studies. The thing is, the conspiracy theorists either think that they've been redacted because of "the man", or don't know how redaction works full stop.
The redaction/retraction confusion here is rather funny.
"Redacted" scientific research on covid, would make a conspiracy theorist out of me too :)
That doesn't seem to work that way in most situations.
For instance there is a mandatory floor plan in all public buildings in case of emergency, and now with covid some do flow control by physically blocking entries/exits. These maps aren't updated to cross out blocked paths, and nobody seems to getting sued to outer space.
Gov sites are regularily broken, out of date, ridden with errors. I once needed to go to an clinic and used the GPS coordinates to go there, only to realize midway they were the town center coordinates and not the accurate building's coordinate. They still operate, I requested an update and it's not fixed.
You can't sue someone preemptively for bad information. You've also got to have a bad situation made significantly worse by bad information.
I mean, you're welcome to file a suit, but if you don't have a contract, and you don't have actual harm, and you don't have statuatory harm, expect your suit to be dismissed.
Government being complete shit at software, and people don't trust the government. Correlation?
Yes, but not always in the way you expect. Because people tend to distrust government with money, they often tend to try and spend the least amount of money for software. Everyone who works in software knows that that often means that you get a shitty product.
On the other end of the spectrum is government being afraid to deliver a product that isn't 100% perfect. So they end up paying loads of money and delaying releases because of scope creep.
I've done a lot of consulting in government and these are two things I've seen there a lot.
People insist on making simple things too complicated.
> People insist on making simple things too complicated.
Didn't you just make it more complicated here?
By adding a disclaimer? And at the same time presenting possibly outdated information? And requiring people to verify the information with another source?
While deep down knowing very well, that a lot, if not most, will not double check the information, before they end in an emergency?
And also, verifying for accuracy once does nothing, if the information becomes outdated, between verifying and the time of the emergency.
The simplest solution here, was what they actually did. They removed the information that was the source of the confusion.
It is not outdated, just may be, you don't know. Better to have the information available than not. It's simpler than not having it.
I think it's just so bad - when you have people making up crazy stuff about Government control (like the crazy stuff around vaccines being population control, injecting tracking microchips, the QAnon cult, etc. that are all getting massive), actually having real examples of the Government lying is basically the worst thing that you can have!
Assuming I'm to stupid to think for myself is the most insulting thing you can do to me. Sadly I still can't respond to this behavior properly, I get so worked up, it messes up my day. It even causes me to complain about it on HN.
The "people will take stupid risks" if we give them protective measures was in full force, right down to Dr. Tam telling Canadians that we didn't need masks, that the public "wouldn't know how to use them correctly anyway" and just endanger ourselves even more, so save the masks for the medical profession.
The criminal part is downplaying airborne transmission risks so your "no masks" story doesn't fall apart.
At one point, ER Docs and Nurses were wearing goggles, face shields, double masking (n95 + surgical masks) and experimenting with microwaving the n95s for reuse and Dr. Tam was STILL saying there was no proof it was airborne.
It's such a blatant, apologies for the hyperbole: "you are plebs and tax cattle, and not as important as these special people here".
The experts decided to burn their own reputations for a short term benefit, and are paying the price now with vaccine hesitancy and growing ire towards experts.
By 02/02/2020 masks were no longer available in retail channels in the US. Not on Amazon, not in your local store, not at any price.
Retailers ware not competing with hospitals for mask allocations - they we simply cut out. There was even an article on Bloomberg which I can't find right now that talked about supply channels and why your Walgreens won't be stocking masks anytime soon.
The notion that we were told a noble white lie to help protect our health professionals was invented a few months later to whitewash the incredible incompetence of our health officials/administration at the time.
What I'm saying is - it looks like a bit of honesty and an encouragement for the general public to improvise face covering could have helped the USA and Canada despite the chronic lack of "real" PPE. The criminally negligent messaging around masks caused hesitation and doubt that was a gift to the covid deniers who to this day refer to that huge u-turn on masks.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/czechs-get-to-...
Apropos, when the similar effort by the "patriotic Chinese emigrants" here got reported in press, one common angle was to present it as a hostile act by the Chinese state and also a failure of Finnish state of not restricting the PPE sales.
edit. Ah, a part was that the operation was coordinated by an official in the Chinese embassy. (Paywalled link in Finnish https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000007971030.html )
Do you want to stand by that statement or withdraw it?
It's literally in the comment.
In the end they had to control the medical supply chain. It's a lot more work than lying to the public, but it actually works. Unfortunately lying lost the trust of the public and COVID became a highly political issue.
"It’s an idea that ...posits that people adjust their behavior in response to perceived risk: the safer you feel, the more risks you’ll take."
regarding road guardrails, for example: "...proponents of the idea make a stronger claim: that guardrails cause so much reckless driving that any potential safety benefits of guardrails are offset or even reversed."
Take the guardrail thing for example - you posted the arguments of proponents, but cut out the response where it goes through how the actual evidence shows it's not at all the case that guardrails increase risky behaviour!
The current headline is a bit clickbaity--I wish they'd give a preview of what the article is about (like the old days?) and if people are interested, they can read the whole thing.
> The question—for driver safety, sexual activity, or public health—isn’t whether some individuals change their behavior in response to perceived risk. It’s whether, at the population level, an intervention makes the world a safer and better place.
Just to make it clear how the article is arguing that "risk compensation" is generally a bogus concept.
In reality, when I did wear a helmet, I did not bike more rashly. If anything, the helmet was a constant reminder of the dangers involved in city biking which meant I was possibly more alert than I would have been without it.
To my knowledge, the number of cyclist collisions stays relatively constant with the number of cyclists: more cyclists mean around the same total number of collisions, which is fewer on a per trip basis. As a benefit, by acting as a natural barrier between deadly fast steel boxes and pedestrians, having a lot of cyclists also saves pedestrian lives.
However, I can understand the argument of it potentially reducing the number of people wanting to ride a bike. Especially for casual riding inner city or suburbs.
Are you doing the opposite of what they advise, or merely disregarding?
Were they wrong?
> Were they wrong?
Yes. Totally and absolutely wrong. Practice based on fear of consequence is not morality. Weakening the affect of consequence changed exactly nobody's morality. Anyone who claims a morality that is followed only by being based on enforcement through physical harm is pretty messed up.
Promiscuity levels changed with the change in cost of the alternatives. Morality of people making those choices did not budge one iota.
Disagree with that all you like, you might well be right. I claim whatever it is it's a long way from promiscuity increasing with a decline in consequence for sexual activity from saying anything about the morals of those who would have loved to fornicate but lacked opportunity prior. Or indeed those so easily swayed by the "everyone does it" argument and were making a virtue of their lack off reasonable opportunity. Reasonable people may disagree with that of course.
Usually this kind of thing is imposed morality which isn't individual morals. "I want everyone else to follow what I think is moral by making (sex/drugs/other thing I dislike) have dire consequences through policy because I can't convince _them_ to do the right thing because _they_ lack [my] morals."
I don't think driving more slowly to stay under the speed limit in an enforcement blitz is moral behavior. I think driving as safely as practicable for the safety of pedestrians when there is no enforcement (eg in a poor and corrupt country) might well be moral.
If you have different definition of what morality is, that's ok but there's not much to discuss.
So what?
So there's a value judgement about whether that change in the behavior of others is a good thing. So "morality" which is where this came in.
You want to make cases about the pill adoption and STD prevalence getting worse, go right ahead. It is different data and a very different case to make. Also far from obvious which way it goes, fwiw.
>So what?
It sounds relevant if the pill was introduced and got legalized on the grounds that it would not cause that kind of change but e.g. only help married couples to plan their pregnancies.
The amount of teen sex has reduced drastically since those days. At least in the US. And the amount of unprotected sec has reduced even more.
Kids these days are having far less sex overall and far far less unsafe sex than their parents, who were having less than their parents.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/images/2014/YRBS-AIDS-2...
[3] http://teendecision.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/historic-...
Isn't that one true though? Anecdotally, since the introduction of the stuff Americans have only gotten fatter. It makes intuitive sense to me that artificial sugars also contribute to insulin resistance, increasing the risk of diabetes. And while for any X you can pretty easily find nutrition studies that say "X kills you" and "X makes you live longer", it's not too hard to find studies linking diet soda to obesity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4498394/
I tend to consider reality TV to be fake, but I think people like this really do exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIAFe7zaCRU
> "Our mom told us when we were younger, if we ate a sugar you drink a diet coke afterwards and it will cancel out the sugar"
> Do you believe that to be true?
> "I did when I was a kid."
People who drink diet soda gain no more weight than people who drink regular soda.
It is true, however, that people who drink diet soda or regular soda gain more weight than those who don’t drink soda at all.
Turns out diet soda does not make things better from a weight loss perspective, but it doesn’t make thing a worse either, which negates risk compensation as a theory.
Reality TV is essentially fake. Even the real parts, since by its nature it focuses on the strange, absurd, bizarre and unusual. It's not that these things don't exist, but if they were common, normal, or usual, they wouldn't be featured on reality TV.
The reasoning should be like this: "I found support for the idea that fat people think diet soda is a good alternative to dieting on reality TV, so this idea is probably uncommon, unusual and strange."
In other words, you can choose to drink soda, and make other decisions that lead to obesity - the cause of both might be the same. (You might be hinting at that by saying they "drink soda because they are overweight" but I'd suggest that's inaccurate. As in, being overweight doesn't cause soda consumption!)
Of course we don't know what people eat and what they discard.
We could have had a decades worth of n95 stockpiling for less than the cost of one tank for every living American.
Point is, just because at one point there existed a team called the "pandemic response team", doesn't mean we were at all prepared in the way that GP is suggesting, or even that they would have helped at all
In fact, for the most part, they include the steps that were taken, except if they were followed as in the playbook they would have been taken a lot earlier.
Edit: Here, I found a link for you:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Play...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/03/fac...
Then our medical staff promptly ran out of PPE in the first few weeks, especially n95 masks, just like we did with SARS.
The public did recklessly go out and panic buy toilet paper. I suspect the experts may have a point.
People didn't "feel an extra sense of security" and therefore buy lots of toilet paper (recklessly.) Rather, they felt a sense of insecurity about running out of toilet paper.
I have my own story: These days many trans people are coming out, and sex change operation is becoming more socially acceptable. I was, for a moment, worried that trans people might be deciding on a whim/fashion to permanently alter themselves. But then I realized I miscounted - the number of people with gender dysphoria will always be greater than number of people unhappy with the change. So I changed my mind on this - it's always worth to change if someone really desires to.
Ultimately, the idea that "other people will do it wrong" is a very anti-democratic sentiment.
The prospect of (a)social/classic media lynch mob, be it on facebook or yellowpress doesn't make the alternative more attractive.
The mob side of the problem is much easier to understand. It's just the little ham actor in their mind, acting out his temper tantrums on the stage he calls his mind.
"It's me, I must be right. They tell me I have to change!? That can't be, finally its me and therefore I know and therefore I'm right. Beside I don't like to change, it hurts. Okay, it's just inconvenient, but...but that hurts too, mum"
Who could or would argue with that?
Well, for the most part politicians. Often leaders. Seldom good and inspired leaders.
...
Wearing masks is annoying, they cost money and in the beginning of the pandemic, we simply didn't have them. So we find all sorts of excuses against masks. Same for seat belts, they cost money and people didn't want to be tied to their seats.
It is not so different from companies that prevent you to repair your devices because "you may hurt yourself" when in reality, they just want to sell you a new one or go through their own overpriced service.
It is not the only argument you can use. You can say that masks are bad for the environment, it is single use plastic after all, that they promote crime and make communication harder by concealing one's face, that it impairs breathing, which is mostly debunked but who cares.
It is the opposite of "think of the children". False sense of security is used when you have a safety that works but don't want, and "think of the children" is when you want it but it doesn't work.
1. Humans cannot always interact with their surroundings at 100% mental clarity. Stupid mistakes can and will be made even by the most careful and skilled person. Fool-proof or defensive design features are very well embraced by engineers and the results have been a resounding positive.
2. Some interventions are probably not as benign as people assume, and this could become a confounding factor when it comes to analysing the outcome. Some motorcycle helmets, for example, have been found to trap CO2 at concentrations known to have a negative cognitive effect.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/O-2-Concentrations-in-...
Once a work-around becomes available, where one can be just as safe with half the prudence, it feels like cheating: now all these careless people can be safe without any of the admirable virtue in being prudent and following rules. So those in charge resist giving the people an easy way out, because doing so represents a path towards loss of credibility of the authority institution, who is constantly advocating for virtue in the people.
And you're leaving out by far the most important argument, which is "people are less likely to cycle if they're required to wear helmets".
The remaining cyclists being run over by the increased motor traffic is a vicious cycle it's hard to break out of.
- they gave the government a false sense of security, so they are only now reacting to the dramatic rise in Covid cases.
- vaccinated people can both get Covid (with the current Delta variant) and transmit it, they just don't get as sick as unvaccinated people. Still, restrictions were eased for vaccinated people as a motivational measure to get vaccinated, and now the virus is being transmitted from vaccinated person to vaccinated person until it finds an unvaccinated one.
- vaccination is actually impeding the measures that can be taken in the future: there is the argument that restricting the freedom of movement of a vaccinated person may be an undue breach of their constitutional rights, so there will be even more hesitation before extreme measures (lockdown).
I'm currently isolating at home with Covid despite being vaccinated, so please excuse me if I sound harsh. I'm actually glad that I am vaccinated, but I now see that the vaccine was more than just a bit hyped up by the authorities...
Maybe we ought to hand out some Xanax to the anxious folks driving all these fear-based policy decisions and constant churn of new articles that functionally try to weld the door shut on people's lives over a risk (at this point) that is far greater in the imagination than actual reality.
At least I can come up with a reasonable explanation for in the car.
What about those people walking alone in the suburbs with masks on? There's nobody else on foot for 2 blocks.
At bicycle speeds with a mask I'd definitely want / need that helmet.
> safer and better place
It is safe in compromise and on there can be consent on that compromise or not.