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Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

nytimes.com

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Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#431

Post by em500 »

bonzini wrote: post #423
flukus wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they aren't necessary, they're only effective at preventing the spread of COVID if the wearer has a medical degree, don't wear masks on planes, etc Everyone seems to also forget that a lot of this took place when they wrongly thought surface transmission was the main vector. The bigger problem was the delay in recognizing aerosol transmission, Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early but the CDC and WHO dr…

> Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January. They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019 since there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.

> there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.

If this is true, then it's not a given that COVID-19 even originated in China.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#432

Post by walrus01 »

livinginfear wrote: post #221

I think it's worth noting that among the demographics that frequent this site there is ostensibly a deep distrust and skepticism of the American government on matters of surveillance, and law enforcement. Yet simultaneously there is ostensibly a high degree of trust in the motives and competency of the American government when it comes to COVID. There's been multiple threads lately, including one that is on the front…

> I think it's worth noting that among the demographics that frequent this site there is ostensibly a deep distrust and skepticism of the American government on matters of surveillance

I don't think that many people on this site are claiming that the American government is incompetent in their surveillance and SIGINT endeavors, from a strictly scientific/technical point of view. Rather that they're too competent and being too effective. Whether those technical capabilities should be applied in certain situations is a political question.

> CDC

I would hope that the majority of the site here, who do not have doctorate level degrees in epidemiology and virology, can realize the extent of education and experience that it takes to get a PhD in those fields. My primary complaint with the American government's handling of covid19 (600,000+ dead??!) is not with any incompetence on the part of the scientists, but the policy makers, in particular the previous administration. And the general populace's resistance to measures that could have halved the cumulative death toll. Additionally with state governments that have gone through multiple rounds of "we must reopen the economy!" to "oh shit! coronavirus is spreading again!"

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#433

Post by walrus01 »

andreilys wrote: post #368
codelord wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally follow the CDC guidelines. I think if everyone equally trusted CDC we wouldn't have the kind of outbreaks that we have seen in the past year. So raising doubts in CDC's credibility overall is hurtful IMO. That doesn't mean we shouldn't debate a particular recommendation and take it all as Gospel. Meaningful debate about a particular issue is useful. A general statement against credibility of CDC IMO is n…

The CDC/surgeon general recommended not wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic, while Silicon Valley was way ahead of the curve (meanwhile hit pieces were posted by journalists with an axe to grind saying they we’re overreacting). So yes it has lost its credibility.

They specifically recommended not wearing N95 masks, which were very scarce and in limited supply at the beginning of the pandemic. With the goal of maintaining the very limited supply for medical personnel, while cargo planes moved around the globe and production ramped up.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#434

Post by walrus01 »

I have a personal theory that humans do not fully understand death rate when it's spread out widely across many geographic areas. Let's say, for instance, that the covid19 death rate is about 450 people a day. It might be more or less than that right now, I haven't specifically checked (but I do recall that it's easily been 2000-3000 a day for some periods of time in very recent memory). But that might be 450 people where 1 dies in some town, another 2 die in another city, and so on, totaling 450.

Whereas if you were to load a 747-400 with 450 people and fly it into the side of a mountain in one catastrophic absurd event every day of the week, for months, it would be shocking world stopping news. Why? What changed? It's the same number of dead people, right?

Following this theory to a further extent, I think it helps to explain a lot about the people who believe covid19 is a "hoax" or a "scam". They don't see it, it isn't splashy and shocking, it's diffuse and spread out in such a way that their instinctual response is to go "just get on with your life...".

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#435

Post by dalyons »

google234123 wrote: post #340
greesil wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was to minimize casualties and human misery, to prevent what some countries are going through right now. Flatten the curve was a slogan.

Lock downs also cause huge misery. Recessions are not victimless.

You would choose what is happening now in India instead?

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#436

Post by skocznymroczny »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #392
dimator wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the citation I found for this claim: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/06/the-cdc-now-recommend... Overall, science is a process. If research came out that changed the recommendations, well, that's how science works. This is no different in my mind than the gradual change in the recommendations towards cigarette smoking over the decades, only in this case it played out over weeks and months (that article wa…

Masks weren't a mysterious new invention that the CDC just learned about at the start of the pandemic.

Also their usefulness is very limited outside of virtue signalling.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#437

Post by Markoff »

I feel like mandating masks (in US) at this point is quite pointless, pretty much everyone who wants to protect themselves can get vaccinated (and they most likely did already), so they don't need to worry about serious symptoms and people who don't wanna get vaccinated are clearly not worried about them so why force any of these groups to wear masks? Scared people are protected, not scared don't want protection and are prepare to bear consequences, the group of people who would like to get vaccinated but they can't for medical reasons is extremely small and I don't see similar restrictions because of other risks. So why even bother with recommending to mask anywhere?

This makes sense only in countries where you can't get immediately vaccinated (pretty much everywhere outside US and few other countries like Israel).

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#438

Post by skocznymroczny »

dguaraglia wrote: post #398
Rebelgecko wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the CDC's original statements on masks (they aren't necessary, they're only effective at preventing the spread of COVID if the wearer has a medical degree, don't wear masks on planes, etc) contributed a lot to the distrust and politicization of mask wearing. When you expect an institution to always be impartial and tell the truth, those sorts of white lies can quickly erode trust.

Meh, I understand your point, but as someone who follows the conspiratorial world passively, I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people. In reality, the usual suspects were pushing conspiracy theories about the CDC even before they determined masks were useful. A famous conspiracy peddler famously…

> I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people.

So is the post-facto realization of "we knew masks work, we just didn't want the people to grab all the supply".

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#439

Post by johnchristopher »

herbst wrote: post #389
andreilys wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC/surgeon general recommended not wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic, while Silicon Valley was way ahead of the curve (meanwhile hit pieces were posted by journalists with an axe to grind saying they we’re overreacting). So yes it has lost its credibility.

Our Swiss virus guy too told this 'lie' in the beginning, a few months later he explained that this was wrong and the only reason he said masks are not necessary was because there weren't enough and private people were already stockpiling it anyway. So people wore masks and life went on. I still don't understand why sooooo many countries can't be more honest about these things

In Belgium, basically the same thing happened but at the same time they also said covid was just a flu.

So, a lot of trust lost.

Now I suspect them to do the same with the astrazeneca stock they have to liquidate.

Headlines this week said the indian variant is going to be the major one in Belgium.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#440

Post by Markoff »

dalyons wrote: post #435
google234123 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lock downs also cause huge misery. Recessions are not victimless.

You would choose what is happening now in India instead?

if Indian numbers have to be trusted they are really not that bad, some European countries had even worse numbers per capita

people sometimes forget the size of Indian population and just look at nominal numbers instead per capita numbers, considering how poor is India and how bad is Indian healthcare these numbers comparable wiuth Europe are actually pretty low

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