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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.
I work in the events industry. Over the course of the last four weeks we hosted two conferences.
The first was a medical conference attended primarily by medical professionals who interact with sick, elderly and otherwise Covid-vulnerable people every day.
The second was a tech conference attended primarily by software engineers.
Guess which conference had a mask mandate in place, extending to building staff in addition to conference delegates. The answer may surprise you!
Note that there are no legal masking requirements anywhere in my country: you're not expected to wear one in banks, on public transport etc., and most people don't bother. Likewise, my employer dropped its mask requirement for employees months ago. The mask mandate in the tech conference was imposed at the request of the client. It seems that virtue-signalling hypochondriacs are far more common in the tech industry than in, you know, medicine.
And I'm not really that mad at the client for requesting that delegates and staff wear masks. They can do what they like. I'm a little mad at my employer for acquiescing to this request. It's not simply a case of "the customer is always right", they aren't going to acquiesce to every request. If we were hosting an event for the Saudi embassy, and the ambassador requested that all female staff wear hijabs, I assume my employer would tell them they were out of their minds. It seems that masking requirements still lie within the Overton window, even for people who don't adopt them personally.
It might have something to do with the very observable fact that most software engineers have a much lower self-confidence than doctors. Masking has become at this point the ultimate way of avoiding giving offence to “somebody”. Most software engineer types I know would start sweating cold at the thought of getting called out by someone with more social prowess than themselves (ie almost everyone) so they go really out of their way to avoid any possibility
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