I still don't want to get the flu :(
I wish we could have a culture of "wear a (good) mask when you're sick". I don't think I'm going to die from the Flu or Covid, but it is going to make life miserable for awhile.
I wish we could have a culture of "wear a (good) mask when you're sick". I don't think I'm going to die from the Flu or Covid, but it is going to make life miserable for awhile.
I was wearing a mask early on in the SF Bay Area. Back when the health authorities were saying that there's nothing to worry about and that masks don't help anyway. I remember so many people giving me the stink eye for no reason. I guess my behavior was the "anti-science", tinfoil-hat stance back then.
Then it all flipped on its head pretty much overnight. And when later, having been vaccinated and having had COVID, I stopped wearing a mask out in the open, I remember the same people getting angry at that. But if you traveled 50 miles outside the SF Bay Area, the reactions were exactly the opposite.
It just bugs me so much that we find ways to turn every single thing into a culture war. We go out of our way to find reasons to lash out against others. I'm not sure if social media is the source of it, but it sure provides a positive feedback loop.
The virus has been naturally selected to make people this way. It's like cat owner brain parasites.
Cat people: We exist to serve.
Getting any type of evidence and research on this theory is impossible ethically and socially and even something like "are cat parasite infected humans more likely to oppose masks" is something that is impossible to test for even though its probably a factor because there's too many other strong social factors.
It's a fun science fiction theory at least and worth a think about how infections effect human behaviour.
I guess this is another result of an individualistic culture? A lot of Americans really don't like being told what to do, wear, or say. Even if it's in their best interest to do so.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
There are plenty of others I see (admittedly less so, but still daily in the affluent Bay Area) who drive around in their cars, alone, with masks on (non-Uber) and people who show up at the gym everyday wearing a mask while walking on a treadmill. I toured a preschool earlier this week where the teachers were all still required(?) to wear masks in the classroom (a bilingual Chinese immersion Montessori program).
Admittedly, I’m pretty anti-mask, and for those reasons: it dehumanizes interactions. That said, (for those still reading) I wish masks were a norm for when people were sick and carried no additional activist messaging. I fully support that use case and appreciate my fellow humans who wear them in those circumstances.
But then also, I’d expect those interactions to be rare, because if you’re sick you shouldn’t be hanging out with others, but self isolating.
That being said, there are many situations where it still makes sense:
- Feeling sick and on your way to pick up someone else
- Just dropped someone off and haven't taken it off yet
- It's not easy to take on and off so you just leave it on
- You're only driving for a minute and will need it when you get out.
So they're still wrong, but I see why they said it.
I wear a mask when out in public and my reasons, which are multiple, include but are not limited to "I have an immune compromised family member and don't want to be the one who kills them" and "I myself have been sick only once in the last 4 years and I'm pretty happy about that".
I’m about as liberal they come, and so are many in my circle. But not one person wore a mask for the sole purpose of not liking Donald Trump and then using a mask as a statement. That’s a bizarre take.
It may have been absurd how quickly masks were given up in red areas (don’t know; wasn’t there), but our laggard approach in Santa Clara county certainly was and felt reactionary.
Having been raised by 2 Republican extremists, I can tell you exactly why it was so politicized:
1. "YOU CANT TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" Is the refrain of government telling people what to do or not. And remember, that corporations are legally people, so the same applies.
2. Higher education leads to 'librul ideas', with things like gay people should have the same rights as straights, racism is still a thing, and other higher thinking. And this 'education' is seen as indoctrination.
3. Because of disdain for higher education (which is seen as indoctrination), comes the idea that "My upbringing is worth just as much as your book knowledge", throwing away bodies of evidence. Journals are equivalent to scribbles.
Once the sides were drawn, American polarization kicked in. There's no room for mere difference of opinion. The other side must be evil, stupid, and intent on destroying America.
I'd argue that that's especially true for the party in power at the time, though you have to take that with a grain of salt since I'm on the opposite side.
This always seemed rather optimistic. Flu rates are seasonal, and COVID could have been seasonal. But pandemic flus and particularly nasty flu strains also fade away because enough people either get them or get vaccinated that they are usually no longer so significant the following year. COVID lockdowns largely prevented this.
If the vaccines had worked anywhere near as well as an optimistic interpretation of the trials suggested, the lockdowns would probably have looked better in hindsight.
(Which isn’t to say that lockdowns didn’t have some value. If nothing else, they bought time for the vaccines to roll out and they may have contributed to a lot of people getting Omicron instead of earlier strains. It seems like Omicron was a decent amount less nasty.)
Masking/not masking became an overt way of signaling tribal association, and it was no accident whatsoever. Predictably, it caused untold numbers of unnecessary deaths.
One takeaway from all this is how willing and fervent people are to signal their group membership, even at the expense of personal life safety.
The right started out as "Covid is bad, but so is crashing the economy to prevent it", which turned into "Covid isn't that bad, wearing a mask is excessive", which became "The vaccine is more harmful than the disease". The left went from "Causing people to die is worse than any economy hit" -> "You should do everything possible to prevent it" -> "You should wear a mask at all times in public".
I often feel the left would have taken reversed stances if the right had taken the pandemic seriously. If Trump had advocated shutting things down and pushed strongly for vaccines/masks, it seems pretty likely the left would have called this an authoritarian overreach and/or highly questioned the safety of the vaccines.
In short, I think our culture is so highly polarized that as soon as something becomes a major topic, people immediately divide into separate 'sides' on it.
EDIT: follow-up question -- was the pandemic as polarizing in other countries besides the US?
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
EG: even European countries that were more draconian earlier in the pandemic returned to relative normalcy, with less fear/debate around school reopenings, mandatory testing, mandatory masking, etc, sooner than the US.
In the US, sticky "showy extreme COVID vigilance is my essential identity as a good citizen" or "showy nonchalance is my essential identity as a free person" partisanship lingers.
Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all said in September 2020 that they won't trust any Trump vaccine. <https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>
When I finally contracted Covid (I was vaccinated + boosted in alignment with then current CDC guidelines), I ran the range of all the major symptoms like high fever, loss of smell, tachycardia, drop in O2 saturation, etc. Most of the symptoms persisted for several days before I began to recover and the tachycardia and O2 levels bothered me the most. I was actively monitoring my O2 levels and had they dropped much lower I would have gone to the ER as a precautionary measure. Even after the initial recovery, it took almost two more weeks for me to recover my sense of smell.
For me, Covid is no joke and it is absolutely insane to me how basic health precautions like wearing a mask to reduce transmission, isolating, etc have become politicized.
...or you're just fine catching covid outside of work but it's so much worse to catch it in an office
I think complete isolation could indeed have an impact. Another thing that I think we will see down the road is more super bugs due to the overuse of sanitizer during that period as well.
At the UK inquiry the Chief Medical Officer made the point that pursuing herd immunity via infection is deeply flawed and highly unethical. Given the population has gained little actual immunity to the virus so far and it continues to circulate all year around and has so disabled over 100 million people and killed at least 28 million and every week kills many thousands in the US its not going to stop. Covid is the third biggest killer in the world currently and the death count associated with it due to a massive reduction in testing is unfortunately enormously undercounted especially with the increase in heart attacks and strokes which Covid causes due to its vascular impact.
I really don't want either one. Putting a piece of cloth on your face when you are/recently were sick really isn't much of a burden. I did.
The parent was concerned with reducing spread to others. Interestingly, one meta study [1] concludes that cloth masks are actually better than "good" masks if they are not worn and used correctly.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/46/1/e84/7337687...
If sick people work an average N95/KN95 mask off of Amazon (which is the 'good' I was referring to), it'd help. It's not perfect, and you can do better, and you can do worse. But it's a reasonable intersection of "easy to do" and "effective".
> “Reported deaths involving COVID-19 are several-fold greater than those reported to involve influenza and RSV. However, influenza and likely RSV are often underreported as causes of death," the CDC said.
So it’s not that COVID isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s that flu and RSV are much worse than they seem. Seems like the guidance should be about how to spread all respiratory viruses less, not about how to be as bad at controlling COVID as we are at controlling the flu.
This would IMO be worth actual study. One would expect that what seem like basic precautions (wear a mask if you feel at all sick, stay home if you have or recently had a flu, RSV or COVID) should meaningfully reduce overall infection rates. But this may or may not be true in different contexts, and any of these precautions have costs as well. For example, keeping kids away from school seems fairly well established as being bad. Keeping kids from getting sick is not entirely obviously good for them. And plenty of people have allergies — making them all wear masks all the time has its own issues. (On the flip side, a decent, clean enough mask can help with some allergies. Choose your poison.)
(There are cases that people get wrong to degrees that seem absurd. I know someone who worked at a tech startup pre-pandemic. The founders knew that the startup had a norovirus outbreak and nonetheless kept themselves and everyone who wasn’t acutely sick at the office. If they had closed the office and switched to WFH for a few days to break the transmission strain, they surely would have had happier and more productive employees.)
Covid is going to be an all year around infection that hasn't at any point dropped below 1 in 80 people carrying it, we need to use HEPA filters and UV light to clean the air indoors and adopt masking as a mitigation until we have better vaccines or treatments especially for Long Covid.
I've heard it said that current COVID-19 vaccines are counterproductive, because they only reduce symptoms as opposed to increasing one's chances of catching the disease, or reducing one's infectivity. Someone who has been vaccinated and infected is more likely to go to work or school and thus more likely to spread the disease.
If you know you’re sick, why not wear a mask? How hard it is really?
Not wearing a mask has zero impact on the person already sick. Them wearing a mask is 100% about being nice to others. There is no benefit to them.
Airplanes usually have pretty good ventilation and filtration.