371–380 of 448 posts
I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…
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No other western country has actually been willing to do what NZ or Australia did - strict contact tracing, strict lockdowns, and a near-complete ban on entering the country, with those that do being picked up the police or military at their plane and driven to quarantine hotels where the doors lock from the outside. I don't know why everyone keeps going on about other countries not getting the same results - no othe…
In fact it’s worse, western nations have done the stupidest thing which is half measures. They’ve wrecked their own economies by taking measly half measures and not providing adequate relief. Wrecking people’s lives without actually achieving meaningful ends. At risk of being labelled “anti-lockdown” or whatever, i’ll clarify my point is we should have done MORE. Strict lockdowns, tracing, etc... AND providing direct…
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Staff enforcement is much easier in the US since losing your job results in homelessness.
The US has a homelessness rate of 6.2%, while the UK has a homelessness rate of 7.7%.
To use a local(ish) example to me, Multnomah County in Oregon has about 815K people, and 3800 that are either living on the streets, in a shelter, or in temporary housing. That's 0.4%. Portland is known for having a homeless problem.
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But numbers seem to be up again, this article is speaking of another lockdown: https://t.co/2S9b4HfUhg
That's in Sydney, which is over 700km away. It is also nothing like the scale that the UK is dealing with and will hopefully be dealt with by a short lockdown - possibly not even of the entire city of the politicians pull their finger out quickly enough.
Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.
We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.
I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…
Apparently the enforcement and compliance with the rules is night and day different here. They described London as a place with rules that everyone just ignores.
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Great Britain is an island...
It is probably the most connected not-tiny island. (One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.) "According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million…
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Go and gather in groups where all are below 50 with no underlying conditions, instead.
Some of you will still get Long Covid, which may leave you with permanent breathing issues and other health problems. The biggest lie is that if you're under 30 you're immune. You're not - not even slightly. You're far less likely to die than someone who is 85 and obese with diabetes and high blood pressure. But no one knows what the long term health implications are for younger people who make a partial recovery. An…
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The only peer-reviewed RCT ever conducted for Covid-19 and masks found no statistically significant protective effect: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
That is not an accurate summary of the study. Emphasis mine: > Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others. > The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate amo…
"Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."
The points you are raising about limitations in no way affect the conclusion of the work. Short of putting infected people in a room with uninfected people, there is no ethical way to test the hypothesis that "masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others".
But since it's pretty unlikely that masks are effective in one direction only, this is the highest-quality evidence we have that they have no effect in one of the two directions.
> Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question.
A randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard for an intervention of this sort. But yeah, you can't do one for that hypothesis. So you're stuck with something that is fundamentally un-falsifiable. The best you can do is try to do what people have done so far: look at populations, and see if mask mandates make any difference, or ask people who caught Covid if they wore masks, or do similar things within families.
This is called retrospective cohort analysis, and it is low-quality evidence, at best.
> Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
Yes, we should assume that this might happen. It could well be true that wearing a mask makes people be more careless about distancing, for example. This is called "risk compensation", and is a well-known phenomenon in public health.
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The only peer-reviewed RCT ever conducted for Covid-19 and masks found no statistically significant protective effect: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Here's the CDC: --------------- Data regarding the “real-world” effectiveness of community masking are limited to observational and epidemiological studies. * An investigation of a high-exposure event, in which 2 symptomatically ill hair stylists interacted for an average of 15 minutes with each of 139 clients during an 8-day period, found that none of the 67 clients who subsequently consented to an interview and tes…
All of these studies were conducted on data from the spring, when cases were declining across the northern hemisphere. How are these places doing now?
DC: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/metro/DC
Canada: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/canada/
Germany: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
US nationally: all-time highs
California: all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/state/CA
New York: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/state/NY
Boston (where the "unified hospital system" was located): near all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/metro/Boston
I could go on.
Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever. But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
The german paper is particularly ironic, given that it was published approximately concurrently with a huge increase in diagnosed cases in the same city, which is now at all-time highs for the year:
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> but you have to suck up the costs In other words immiserate anyone who’s not a comfortable white-collar person that can hole up in their home, Zoom to work, and dispatch immigrants to deliver food
I suspect your perceptions are coloured by your environs: what do you know of NZ and Oz? The poor in New Zealand and Oz were not hit any harder than the middle-class and wealthy people that lost their savings due to circumstances e.g. businesses going under. I personally don’t know of any restaurant that had to close due to Covid (and most restaurants are close to the edge during normal times). My friends on unemploy…