I live in a country where it's 30c+, 60%+ humidity, and strong sun practically every day. We're required to wear masks at all times except strenuous outdoor exercise (rules that I do follow, to be...
I live in a country where it's 30c+, 60%+ humidity, and strong sun practically every day. We're required to wear masks at all times except strenuous outdoor exercise (rules that I do follow, to be clear). Outdoors, and I like to spend a lot of time walking and in parks, it makes the experience kinda miserable, not to mention the uncomfortable and unsightly "maskne" afterward. After a while, it starts to seem completely unreasonable requirement outdoors when there's so much ventilation, strong UV, generally brief contact passing others, and high vaccination rates. Indoors, it's a small discomfort and does offer additional protection, though I think once vaccination numbers are high enough or we've given enough time for people to make their choice, we'll have to bite the bullet and move forward without masks.
I'd also hesitate to say America in particular is weird. They might be more vocal and brazen about not wearing a mask at all, but if you look carefully at people in countries with high compliance, so many people are more subtly cheating. Nose out the top is extremely common. Walking mask down while holding a cigarette or drink so at quick glance, it seems reasonable. Stuff like that.
Hi. Are you in Brazil too? Cause even my winter is hot! :D Yes, wearing a mask in the heat is awful. I'm not against using common sense. For example, if your work requires you to be outside, just...
Hi. Are you in Brazil too? Cause even my winter is hot! :D
Yes, wearing a mask in the heat is awful. I'm not against using common sense. For example, if your work requires you to be outside, just take a look around, if there's no one, yeah, take the mask off -- but keep it handy. The problem are those who are entirely against using masks at all, in my view.
As an American, I wholeheartedly agree. While I have been enjoying being able to go to restaurants and a pub or two again, I still mask up the overwhelming majority of the time. It's easy, it...
As an American, I wholeheartedly agree. While I have been enjoying being able to go to restaurants and a pub or two again, I still mask up the overwhelming majority of the time. It's easy, it helps, and if I need to be selfish about it - I haven't gotten a cold or any other malady other than allergies in over a year.
And now that the mandates lifted back in May, what little momentum we had is gone. Good luck getting those nationwide mask mandates back in enough time to push this back. Guess it's time to start...
And now that the mandates lifted back in May, what little momentum we had is gone.
Good luck getting those nationwide mask mandates back in enough time to push this back.
Guess it's time to start going door to door putting extra pressure on the unvaccinated.
I'm in a county with extremely high levels of community transmission according to the CDC. School starts on Monday and there are no plans at all to deal with this recent surge. Mask wearing was...
I'm in a county with extremely high levels of community transmission according to the CDC. School starts on Monday and there are no plans at all to deal with this recent surge. Mask wearing was already low here prior to the lifting of the masking guidance, so I'm not overly optimistic about the next 3-6 months.
Every few months I think about how thankful I am that I haven't had kids throughout this whole pandemic. Of course chances are we'll have another pandemic in a few years and I probably will have...
Every few months I think about how thankful I am that I haven't had kids throughout this whole pandemic.
Of course chances are we'll have another pandemic in a few years and I probably will have kids by then.
As someone currently living in Alabama, which has the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, "but that's their own fault" isn't terribly helpful and is pretty discouraging. My wife and...
As someone currently living in Alabama, which has the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, "but that's their own fault" isn't terribly helpful and is pretty discouraging. My wife and I are vaccinated but obviously our kids can't be, and although we've tried to encourage people we know to vaccinate there's only so much we can do to swim against the tide of willful ignorance and misinformation. Is it "our own fault" that people in our communities aren't willing to do what's needed to protect others?
I've learned this week that the reasons for not choosing to receive it are not as simple as I thought they were. I had assumed that most of the unvaccinated were culture warriors who were trying...
What else can be said? Your fellow state citizens are failing you. The vaccine is being offered abundantly and for free. They are choosing not to receive it.
I've learned this week that the reasons for not choosing to receive it are not as simple as I thought they were. I had assumed that most of the unvaccinated were culture warriors who were trying to "take a stand against the libtards," or whatever. It turns out that in reality there are a bunch of people willing to get it, but who have bad information about it and are scared of it. Believe it or not, with the proper education some percentage of the unvaccinated will willingly get it, even at this point. I know it sounds hard to believe, and I didn't believe it at first, either. Also a large portion of the people who haven't gotten it yet are people of color whom our government has not only failed, but also tricked before. If you can get leaders of their communities to come out and say that they're vaccinated and that it's safe, you can reach many of them. (Sorry, I'm trying to find one of the articles I was just reading about this, and am coming up blank. I could have sworn NPR did an interview with a Black doctor who was talking about this in the last week.)
The second to last section of this article talks about this in some detail.
Also a large portion of the people who haven't gotten it yet are people of color whom our government has not only failed, but also tricked before. If you can get leaders of their communities to come out and say that they're vaccinated and that it's safe, you can reach many of them. (Sorry, I'm trying to find one of the articles I was just reading about this, and am coming up blank. I could have sworn NPR did an interview with a Black doctor who was talking about this in the last week.)
The second to last section of this article talks about this in some detail.
There are 2 problems with this attitude: There are people (like my spouse) who are immunocompromised, or elderly, or children, and cannot get the vaccine because it will make them worse or kill...
There are 2 problems with this attitude:
There are people (like my spouse) who are immunocompromised, or elderly, or children, and cannot get the vaccine because it will make them worse or kill them.
Most of the places where this is happening also have very low numbers of hospitals that fill up quickly and cause spillover into the hospitals around the rest of us who are vaccinated, making them unsafe, particularly for those mentioned in #1.
We can't afford to just let them deal with it because it will continue to cause us harm as well.
That might have been the objective of those whom let it get that bad. Or who talked long and hard about how to do the absolute bare minimum every chance they got. There should have been a...
Remember a year and a half ago, this was about flattening the curve. The entire argument was preventing healthcare from being over run. It wasn't about stopping the pandemic in its tracks, it wasn't about keeping everyone perfectly safe. It was about preventing hospitals from stacking three people to a bed.
That might have been the objective of those whom let it get that bad. Or who talked long and hard about how to do the absolute bare minimum every chance they got.
There should have been a WW2-level of mobilization to restructure the needs of the country, not just to 'flatten the curve,' but to actually stamp it out and keep it low until a vaccinne was developed.
The vast majority of those desk workers vould have been put to use in any number of ways. All the colleges could have been properly shut down and labor reallocated to do things like distribute the produce being churned back into the ground because restraunts weren't buying.
There was a failure to look past what we do now and think about what ccould be. And I think it's in part due to this engrained sense of not wanting anything fundemental to change.
If there was ever a time to implement deep structural change, the midst of a worldwide crisis seems a good enough time as any.
Instead we got remote work and kudos (but not money) to essential workers.
What needs to happen is the US needs to stop hoarding vaccines it's people clearly don't want and sending them to the rest of the world.
I agree. I think a binding UN resolution to release all IP related to the vaccine into the public domain would help that tremendously.
How would you have done this? The impact to everyday living, to travel, to trade, to employment, to the economy, and to mental health would be huge. The amount of planning that would need to go...
There should have been a WW2-level of mobilization to restructure the needs of the country, not just to 'flatten the curve,' but to actually stamp it out and keep it low until a vaccinne was developed.
How would you have done this? The impact to everyday living, to travel, to trade, to employment, to the economy, and to mental health would be huge. The amount of planning that would need to go into this would be massive. The last time most developed countries did this, WW2, was during the tail end of the Great Depression; there wasn't much of everyday life left to disturb that hadn't already been disturbed by the terrible circumstances. Huge changes in society are fun to read about from a history book but very difficult to pull off in real life. I do think the US really fumbled with its inconsistent messaging, state-level mandates, and mask shortages, but I don't think the answer was full WW2 style mobilization.
New Zealand managed it. Early border restrictions, screening, and quarantine of people entering; taking every case seriously; and a couple months of hard lockdowns, social distancing, and masking,...
New Zealand managed it. Early border restrictions, screening, and quarantine of people entering; taking every case seriously; and a couple months of hard lockdowns, social distancing, and masking, and they beat it and got back to normal life. They saved lives and got their economy back on track. Meanwhile the countries that went easy for the sake of the economy are still dealing with it.
Comparing the USA to NZ and saying that it's easy since NZ did it seems a little facile. NZ has less than 5 million people in total, the USA has 13 metropolitan areas larger than that. NZ is a...
Comparing the USA to NZ and saying that it's easy since NZ did it seems a little facile. NZ has less than 5 million people in total, the USA has 13 metropolitan areas larger than that. NZ is a series of islands with discrete ports and airports that can be monitored, the USA is most definitively not. And so on, and so on.
And an update, about two hours after I posted this the city school superintendent posted a video stating that children and teachers/staff will be required to wear masks to start the year.
And an update, about two hours after I posted this the city school superintendent posted a video stating that children and teachers/staff will be required to wear masks to start the year.
This probably comes on the heels of the CDC changing their guidance for schools. They recently reversed course and are now recommending masks for all people in schools regardless of vaccination...
This probably comes on the heels of the CDC changing their guidance for schools. They recently reversed course and are now recommending masks for all people in schools regardless of vaccination status:
Given new evidence on the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant, CDC has updated the guidance for fully vaccinated people. CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status. Children should return to full-time in-person learning in the fall with layered prevention strategies in place.
If we're going to return to masking, we should at least do it right and put an emphasis on wearing proper N95/KN95 masks. Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they're far less effective than...
If we're going to return to masking, we should at least do it right and put an emphasis on wearing proper N95/KN95 masks. Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they're far less effective than N95 masks. Mask effectiveness is probably more important in the context of delta's 1000x higher viral load.
It seems silly to go back to wearing face coverings but then half-assing the effectiveness. My KN95 is my most comfortable mask anyway.
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with wearing K/N95s. Even if the masks are more effective, I suspect viral load thresholds to succumb to the virus are sigmoidal or logarithmic and so beyond a...
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with wearing K/N95s. Even if the masks are more effective, I suspect viral load thresholds to succumb to the virus are sigmoidal or logarithmic and so beyond a certain amount of effectiveness, the added decrease in transmission isn't really worth the price or the hassle for the user. Though if this is the pattern, the threshold might be somewhere higher than a cloth mask, say a KN95 mask, but lower than an N95. However I am not a health professional. What I do agree with is the Atlantic article that says that the CDC and FDA need to make clear public health guidelines about masks and the sentiment that lack of clear guidance has been a public health tragedy here in the US. We shouldn't have to debate these issues in online forums, a developed country should have public health officials sampling data and updating guidelines constantly. The politicization of the issue doesn't help.
You might've just convinced me to restock on N95s. However, a few months ago, I took a flight across the US, and I saw an unbelievable number of people wearing K/N95s without having pressed the...
You might've just convinced me to restock on N95s. However, a few months ago, I took a flight across the US, and I saw an unbelievable number of people wearing K/N95s without having pressed the nasal strip down, or in some other way entirely defeating their effectiveness.
When the mask 'debate' started last April, it seemed baffling that various public-facing doctors were arguing that the benefits of using effective masks would be undercut by individuals misusing them. How hard is it to get a good seal? Apparently, very.
I could also see the extreme conspiratorially-minded populations arguing that sencouraging people to use such a sterile-looking mask is yet another step along the path of dehumanization and isolation from one another, which is their go-to for why masking is bad in general. Not that we should particularly mind such fringe opinions, it's just hard not to anticipate every possible backfire.
It sucks that the people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated are just dragging this out for everyone. 95% of new cases are in non-vaccinated people but apparently that's not enough of a...
It sucks that the people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated are just dragging this out for everyone. 95% of new cases are in non-vaccinated people but apparently that's not enough of a reason to get vaccinated.
As mentioned in an article linked here the other day, the only time to get vaccinated is when you're knocking on death's door according to some people.
As mentioned in an article linked here the other day, the only time to get vaccinated is when you're knocking on death's door according to some people.
Highly debatable. Masks have become discretionary over in Britain since July 19th and even then I'd say the enforcement of them has been quite lax. We've actually seen a substantial drop in new...
Highly debatable.
Masks have become discretionary over in Britain since July 19th and even then I'd say the enforcement of them has been quite lax. We've actually seen a substantial drop in new cases recently from a peak of 54,183 on July 17th to dropping as low as 23,204 three days ago. This is quite remarkable when we previously feared hitting a six digit peak in the 200k - 400k range mere weeks ago.
Britain has a high rate of vaccine uptake though, and the only reason the US haven't overtaken our nation is because of the anti-vaxx crowd.
How hard is it to put a piece of cloth on one's face just in case? America is weird.
I live in a country where it's 30c+, 60%+ humidity, and strong sun practically every day. We're required to wear masks at all times except strenuous outdoor exercise (rules that I do follow, to be clear). Outdoors, and I like to spend a lot of time walking and in parks, it makes the experience kinda miserable, not to mention the uncomfortable and unsightly "maskne" afterward. After a while, it starts to seem completely unreasonable requirement outdoors when there's so much ventilation, strong UV, generally brief contact passing others, and high vaccination rates. Indoors, it's a small discomfort and does offer additional protection, though I think once vaccination numbers are high enough or we've given enough time for people to make their choice, we'll have to bite the bullet and move forward without masks.
I'd also hesitate to say America in particular is weird. They might be more vocal and brazen about not wearing a mask at all, but if you look carefully at people in countries with high compliance, so many people are more subtly cheating. Nose out the top is extremely common. Walking mask down while holding a cigarette or drink so at quick glance, it seems reasonable. Stuff like that.
Hi. Are you in Brazil too? Cause even my winter is hot! :D
Yes, wearing a mask in the heat is awful. I'm not against using common sense. For example, if your work requires you to be outside, just take a look around, if there's no one, yeah, take the mask off -- but keep it handy. The problem are those who are entirely against using masks at all, in my view.
As an American, I wholeheartedly agree. While I have been enjoying being able to go to restaurants and a pub or two again, I still mask up the overwhelming majority of the time. It's easy, it helps, and if I need to be selfish about it - I haven't gotten a cold or any other malady other than allergies in over a year.
And now that the mandates lifted back in May, what little momentum we had is gone.
Good luck getting those nationwide mask mandates back in enough time to push this back.
Guess it's time to start going door to door putting extra pressure on the unvaccinated.
I'm in a county with extremely high levels of community transmission according to the CDC. School starts on Monday and there are no plans at all to deal with this recent surge. Mask wearing was already low here prior to the lifting of the masking guidance, so I'm not overly optimistic about the next 3-6 months.
Every few months I think about how thankful I am that I haven't had kids throughout this whole pandemic.
Of course chances are we'll have another pandemic in a few years and I probably will have kids by then.
We're probably just going to keep having this pandemic.
The state has failed. We must all do what we can to compensate.
As someone currently living in Alabama, which has the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, "but that's their own fault" isn't terribly helpful and is pretty discouraging. My wife and I are vaccinated but obviously our kids can't be, and although we've tried to encourage people we know to vaccinate there's only so much we can do to swim against the tide of willful ignorance and misinformation. Is it "our own fault" that people in our communities aren't willing to do what's needed to protect others?
I've learned this week that the reasons for not choosing to receive it are not as simple as I thought they were. I had assumed that most of the unvaccinated were culture warriors who were trying to "take a stand against the libtards," or whatever. It turns out that in reality there are a bunch of people willing to get it, but who have bad information about it and are scared of it. Believe it or not, with the proper education some percentage of the unvaccinated will willingly get it, even at this point. I know it sounds hard to believe, and I didn't believe it at first, either. Also a large portion of the people who haven't gotten it yet are people of color whom our government has not only failed, but also tricked before. If you can get leaders of their communities to come out and say that they're vaccinated and that it's safe, you can reach many of them. (Sorry, I'm trying to find one of the articles I was just reading about this, and am coming up blank. I could have sworn NPR did an interview with a Black doctor who was talking about this in the last week.)
The second to last section of this article talks about this in some detail.
Thanks!
There are 2 problems with this attitude:
There are people (like my spouse) who are immunocompromised, or elderly, or children, and cannot get the vaccine because it will make them worse or kill them.
Most of the places where this is happening also have very low numbers of hospitals that fill up quickly and cause spillover into the hospitals around the rest of us who are vaccinated, making them unsafe, particularly for those mentioned in #1.
We can't afford to just let them deal with it because it will continue to cause us harm as well.
Also, the more people catch the virus the more opportunities there are for new strains to evolve that further endanger everyone.
That might have been the objective of those whom let it get that bad. Or who talked long and hard about how to do the absolute bare minimum every chance they got.
There should have been a WW2-level of mobilization to restructure the needs of the country, not just to 'flatten the curve,' but to actually stamp it out and keep it low until a vaccinne was developed.
The vast majority of those desk workers vould have been put to use in any number of ways. All the colleges could have been properly shut down and labor reallocated to do things like distribute the produce being churned back into the ground because restraunts weren't buying.
There was a failure to look past what we do now and think about what ccould be. And I think it's in part due to this engrained sense of not wanting anything fundemental to change.
If there was ever a time to implement deep structural change, the midst of a worldwide crisis seems a good enough time as any.
Instead we got remote work and kudos (but not money) to essential workers.
I agree. I think a binding UN resolution to release all IP related to the vaccine into the public domain would help that tremendously.
How would you have done this? The impact to everyday living, to travel, to trade, to employment, to the economy, and to mental health would be huge. The amount of planning that would need to go into this would be massive. The last time most developed countries did this, WW2, was during the tail end of the Great Depression; there wasn't much of everyday life left to disturb that hadn't already been disturbed by the terrible circumstances. Huge changes in society are fun to read about from a history book but very difficult to pull off in real life. I do think the US really fumbled with its inconsistent messaging, state-level mandates, and mask shortages, but I don't think the answer was full WW2 style mobilization.
New Zealand managed it. Early border restrictions, screening, and quarantine of people entering; taking every case seriously; and a couple months of hard lockdowns, social distancing, and masking, and they beat it and got back to normal life. They saved lives and got their economy back on track. Meanwhile the countries that went easy for the sake of the economy are still dealing with it.
Comparing the USA to NZ and saying that it's easy since NZ did it seems a little facile. NZ has less than 5 million people in total, the USA has 13 metropolitan areas larger than that. NZ is a series of islands with discrete ports and airports that can be monitored, the USA is most definitively not. And so on, and so on.
And an update, about two hours after I posted this the city school superintendent posted a video stating that children and teachers/staff will be required to wear masks to start the year.
This probably comes on the heels of the CDC changing their guidance for schools. They recently reversed course and are now recommending masks for all people in schools regardless of vaccination status:
If we're going to return to masking, we should at least do it right and put an emphasis on wearing proper N95/KN95 masks. Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they're far less effective than N95 masks. Mask effectiveness is probably more important in the context of delta's 1000x higher viral load.
It seems silly to go back to wearing face coverings but then half-assing the effectiveness. My KN95 is my most comfortable mask anyway.
Relevant article from the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with wearing K/N95s. Even if the masks are more effective, I suspect viral load thresholds to succumb to the virus are sigmoidal or logarithmic and so beyond a certain amount of effectiveness, the added decrease in transmission isn't really worth the price or the hassle for the user. Though if this is the pattern, the threshold might be somewhere higher than a cloth mask, say a KN95 mask, but lower than an N95. However I am not a health professional. What I do agree with is the Atlantic article that says that the CDC and FDA need to make clear public health guidelines about masks and the sentiment that lack of clear guidance has been a public health tragedy here in the US. We shouldn't have to debate these issues in online forums, a developed country should have public health officials sampling data and updating guidelines constantly. The politicization of the issue doesn't help.
You might've just convinced me to restock on N95s. However, a few months ago, I took a flight across the US, and I saw an unbelievable number of people wearing K/N95s without having pressed the nasal strip down, or in some other way entirely defeating their effectiveness.
When the mask 'debate' started last April, it seemed baffling that various public-facing doctors were arguing that the benefits of using effective masks would be undercut by individuals misusing them. How hard is it to get a good seal? Apparently, very.
I could also see the extreme conspiratorially-minded populations arguing that sencouraging people to use such a sterile-looking mask is yet another step along the path of dehumanization and isolation from one another, which is their go-to for why masking is bad in general. Not that we should particularly mind such fringe opinions, it's just hard not to anticipate every possible backfire.
It sucks that the people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated are just dragging this out for everyone. 95% of new cases are in non-vaccinated people but apparently that's not enough of a reason to get vaccinated.
As mentioned in an article linked here the other day, the only time to get vaccinated is when you're knocking on death's door according to some people.
Highly debatable.
Masks have become discretionary over in Britain since July 19th and even then I'd say the enforcement of them has been quite lax. We've actually seen a substantial drop in new cases recently from a peak of 54,183 on July 17th to dropping as low as 23,204 three days ago. This is quite remarkable when we previously feared hitting a six digit peak in the 200k - 400k range mere weeks ago.
Britain has a high rate of vaccine uptake though, and the only reason the US haven't overtaken our nation is because of the anti-vaxx crowd.