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Notes -
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.
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.
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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