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Biden: Pandemic is over
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
One thing that I think (or at least hope) comes from this is for the people who were more moderate to see that when the anti-lockdown people said "for how long?" and the Covid-cautious replied "as long as it takes", they really meant it. There have been a bunch of sardonic exchanges that opened with something like, "are you going to wear a mask the rest of your life?" and the answer is apparently that this is exactly the plan for people that take continue to take Covid seriously. Their retorts seem to be along the lines of "I also intend to continue wearing bike helmets and seatbelts", which is consistent with this just being something that they think should be a permanent feature of society going forward.
My hope is that this looks crazy enough to the median person that it is effectively politically impossible to mandate masks any time in the foreseeable future. Biden's statement that it's over seems consistent with that, but I tend to think politicians give whatever answer is consistent with the timing of elections rather than generally held principles.
I remain disappointed that so many people have huddled around mask wearing as such a significant political symbol. I was hoping the US would adopt a mask culture similar to what Japan has, where wearing a mask is common for people that have the sniffles but need to go out and get groceries, and its not weird to put a mask on when you are on the train with a bunch of gross randos.
Instead we are getting kindof the opposite, where its mainly hypochondriacs wearing masks in public and sick people wont wear them because they dont wanna look like a pussy. pretty lame all around.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that those same asian countries also got bogged down into a forever masking and forever state intervention loop at this point? China and Hong Kong is obviously the worst examples but most of East Asia seem to be utterly unable to move on. Have you considered that maybe the masks themselves play a big role in this as you turn an abstract threat of an invisible virus into a clothing ritual everyone has to partake every single day or otherwise face social scorn and state sanctions?
Say what you want, when I see a group of American kids who continue their regular life at this point vs a group of Japanese kids wearing a mask most of the day every single day, I know which society is healthier.
"i know which society is healthier" is the type of appeal to common sense i would expect to see on reddit, not here where we can ostensibly say what we really mean. I didn't bring up China because i think their pandemic response was ridiculous and draconian. Their ability to move on is not something that has crossed my mind, as i don't live in an east asian country and "moving on from covid" has literally already happened in every sense that practically matters to me (other than the fact that it still like, exists). Ive been going to concerts and shit since like, october last year.
my guy, my whole comment was about how i wished that stupid people didn't perceive masks as some sort of satanic ritual designed to make their lives worse. Sadly they do and the idea seems to have bled into the fucking water table of social opinions.
If people believe that the masks don't help against the spread of covid, and spent 2 years constantly harassed to put one on, I don't think this is such a weird conclusion to arrive at.
Where I live, the public health authorities stayed very adamant that masks don't work until Fall of 2020. At that point when corona returned the political pressure to do "something" was so great that they had to concede and advise to the cabinet that mask mandates might help, with the side note that "they don't work directly but they might make people obey other rules better". Of course in the end for whatever reason the masks didn't have any visible affect on the numbers and we ended up with a total lockdown and national curfew for months. But that is another story.
What am I supposed to conclude from this episode with the masks? They were quite clearly admitting that the reason I had to go around with a mask on my face 8+ hours a day was that it would make me more obsessive about the virus, and avoid human contact. Now does it make me "stupid" to perceive as some sort of ritual designed to make my life worse?
P.S. I know we aren't on reddit anymore, but I don't think calling people you disagree with stupid is fitting to this place in any case.
idunno, probably that public health services are inefficient and worried about appearances more than results. and yeah im sorry for calling my strawman stupid, though i have to wonder why it caused you any offense.
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Asian masking is like American circumcision : a widespread cultural practice backed by mythology that is occasionally dressed up as science.
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This is still performative masking, it's just one-step higher up on the political posturing scale. In the US, you wear a mask to signal that you care in a specifically blue-tribe way. In Japan, you wear a mask to signal that you care (or, sometimes, to disguise your face). Neither actually does any caring, of course, as the solution to not spreading respiratory diseases to others is to stay at home and eat chicken soup or whatever your regional equivalent of this is.
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I was inclined to agree circa April 2020, but I think that we've since run massive natural experiments and found out that masks basically don't matter to any meaningful extent, short of wearing tight fitting respirators. Every time I see someone still wearing a cloth mask, I wonder at just how bad their information diet is.
Anecdote. But Dragoncon last year had a mask policy. Pretty much nobody got Covid. This year they tried a mask policy but it failed because the hotels were not under control of the con and didn't also have a mask policy. Lots of people got Covid.
What does this add to the conversation?
It's an example of masks preventing Covid.
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I specifically want sick people to wear masks, masks do block particulate matter from coughs and the like. I don't wanna dig up the mask horse but i don't recall reading anything that said "masks don't work, throw em out", just various things about masks middling efficacy at stopping covid. All the masking and social distancing meanwhile basically ended the flu for a few years, i feel like theres something to be gleaned from that and it isn't "fuck masks" imo.
You'd need to look at a country that never saw adoption of masks to confirm that masks were the culprit. Sweden is basically the only country I can think of to avoid mass masking, either cultural or legally enforced. They seem to also report no influenza season: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publikationer-och-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-season-2020-2021/?pub=99545
i shouldn't have used the flu thing to support my point that masks help reduce the spread of diseases from coughs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 this study supports my point, what you got that says masks dont stop the particles from coughs?
note that i never defended cloth masks, and they do seem worthless at best.
Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.
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Weird how masks destroyed the flu and yet all the pre-COVID studies showed poor results for masking against influenza. Or how Asian countries with cultures of mask-wearing pre-COVID did not "destroy the flu". I wonder if there were other things going on in 2020 that were not going on in other years.
none of that means that masks are a bad prophylactic for generally slowing down the spread of respiratory infections that spread by coughing.
Even assuming that people actually cough into their well sealed "KN95 respirator" (eww), what proof do we have that those respiratory infections actually spread by coughing and the relatively larger sized particles?
eww? my friend, when someone coughs on the bus its eww for everyone, my point is that the person who is coughing should have as much of the cough localized to them as possible. yes eww, but it's the guy who's coughing thats gross to begin with.
What are you asking for here, studies that show that the particulate from coughs can contain viruses? That you can catch a cold by being coughed on?
im not saying that if we adopted voluntary masking at 100% uptake the cold would be gone, im saying that i bet it would reduce the spread of cough-transmitted sickness.
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