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

nytimes.com

661–670 of 925 posts

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

#661
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that now there's no way to tell whether the unmasked person next to you is vaccinated and safe or unvaccinated and dangerous.

Meanwhile in more sane countries citizens choose wether to wear masks and not. We locked down early and often, so almost none died. Anyways, studies show distance to be more preventative.

Your measure of sanity is the inverse of my measure of freedom, and the same as my measure of government authoritarianism.

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

#662
post #644
post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Masks are a minor inconvenience but they affect millions. It adds up.

It adds up to something comparable to bringing up atrocities apt? I don’t see how. It’s not like the inconvenience of wearing a mask done billions of times leads to overall a massive inconvenience that becomes intolerable. This type of inconvenience is not additive. There is no compounding effect.

It adds up to significant unnecessary suffering. It’s clear to me that doing, e.g., human challenge vaccine trials was a much more cost-effective measure (nowadays just get the bloody vaccine and be done with pandemic), and masks are just a weak band-aid for which I have not seen much more evidence since the Slatestarcodex review (which called CDC on its bullshit very early: masks probably help a bit, but not much, and the evidence is weak either way), and they are being used first and foremost as a political signaling and psychological comfort device (remember the whole “masks more effective than vaccines” rhetoric).

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

#663
post #492
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From and outside perspective this government you are describing is only hard to visualize. For years now voting comes down to the lesser of two evils where everywhere else in the world new parties form and establish new ideas America still has two of them only, kinda. As Swiss it's also far from our understanding what democracy is supposed to be.

A ton of Americans think of it as a lesser of two evils; because many (most?) Americans have the luxury of being comfortable. They don’t really think about politics, they don’t really have policy wants/needs. It’s just sensationalism on Facebook and celebrity on Instagram. It’s more about sports-team tribalism than participating in a society. At the risk of sounding morose, I don’t know where we go from here. Everyon…

even if people cared a lot, you think they’d get presidential primary candidates that they want? or a vice president that they want? these things are faze choices.

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

#664
post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sure helped the trust to CDC.

Trust in the CDC and Fauci only really declined among Republican voters (and was still high). Sometimes, certain people being told not to trust you is a sign you're doing the right thing.

Inefficacy of masks is a central point in anti-maskers message, and sometimes they would cite you the whole passages from official WHO/CDC advisories. And the belated reversal is just an additional point to "scientists don't know shit" attitude.

No, yeah it did tremendous damage. While there'd certainly be anti maskers without anti-mask hysteria by authorities, the scale would not be the same. It's hard to quantify but likely many tens of thousands of excess deaths globally are on WHO lies.

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

#665
post #394
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this stems from the perception that the US federal government is monolithic, secretive, and imperceptible. The reality is that it's wildly diverse, staffed by "everyday" Americans, takes place almost entirely in the open, and very knowable (even if there is complexity -- just like computers). In the same way that many modern humans have grown distant from "nature," Americans have grown distant from our own go…

From and outside perspective this government you are describing is only hard to visualize. For years now voting comes down to the lesser of two evils where everywhere else in the world new parties form and establish new ideas America still has two of them only, kinda. As Swiss it's also far from our understanding what democracy is supposed to be.

There is a political duopoly in this country that has a democracy-murdering stranglehold and barely anyone is aware of it.

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

#666
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most probably have a more nuanced position than that. My personal hesitation is that people are just going to ignore the explicit condition of full vaccination. Worst case outcome could result in dragging the pandemic out and providing opportunity for new variants to develop. A concern closer to home is that this will increase risk for my parents, who have been hesitant about the mRNA vaccines and refuse J&J…

Not sure why the rest of us should be required to continue to change our lives because of your parents (unfortunately) unfounded, anti-scientific personal views?

That’s fair, my point is just that it’s a valid source of anxiety.

And it’s not just my own parents. Like 30% of the US seems like they are not going to get a vaccine any time soon, and I worry that the guidance critically depends on the assumption that unvaccinated people will still mask up and distance. I don’t think it’s a very good assumption (would love to be proven wrong), and I don’t know what that means for the public health outlook of this new guidance.

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

#667
post #632

Can anyone offer guidance to one who has recovered from the actual Covid infection why they would receive the vaccine? Edit: This recent caveat included Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27125728

The vaccine keys your immune system on a mostly unchanging part of the virus. It’s such a key part of the virus that for the virus to mutate that part it would be a dramatically different and less deadly mutation. In an infection your body randomly keys on any of a large number of characteristics of the virus. Those almost certainly will be less lasting than the vaccine. That’s why to get the vaccine.

So I guess my hesitation is, if my body has already been keyed by the original virus, had a terrible viral load (was positive for longer than I ever imagined), but very few symptoms... I’m fairly proud of my immune response and personally am wondering why I should take aim with a direct mRNA shot, feels unnecessary.

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

#668

Can anyone offer guidance to one who has recovered from the actual Covid infection why they would receive the vaccine? Edit: This recent caveat included Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27125728

I have only anecdotal evidence. My brother got Covid and after he recovered he would black out from walking briskly up a single flight of stairs from sudden lack of oxygen (O2 meter on his finger showed this as well). He was otherwise fine and could breathe easily, it just didn't oxygenate his blood well. He got the vaccine and that symptom just disappeared.

Now this is interesting — we need to run a study of “long Covid” symptoms after vaccination.

Personally, I fared ok - so I’ve got to consider the cost benefit (cost in terms of disrupting my current state)

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

#669
post #656
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The importance of following the principles for public health is greater than the importance of the advice being unbiasedly perfect Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Also, even if this is true at some point, as more people adopt your mindset of conformity, it would become very valuable to manipulate, which is easy to do (Goodhart’s law).

Overwhelmingly we follow laws against public drinking, noise ordinances, littering, etc. How is following a mask mandate adopting a mindset of conformity that is different than following laws on littering? Consider the possibility that you have been manipulated to find outrage/concern/defiance over wearing a mask.

Those laws are fixed norms against doing concrete bad things. A norm of listening to any bullshit some authority figure spouses is not a fixed norm, but a meta-norm to respect any new norms created by that authority.

My media consumption is also extremely limited, and comes almost exclusively from left-centrist (HN top posts, Techmeme) sources.

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

#670
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 10-30% of Americans got COVID-19 so far, depending on how you tally the numbers. Of those, approximately 8% can be expected to experience long-term effects that disrupt their daily lives: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91270 >About 8% of all participants said at least one activity of daily living suffered long-term consequences, most commonly household chores. That puts the net risk for…

Those numbers don't factor in age or preexisting conditions at all.

The safety factor is 800. Preexisting conditions and age aren't going to change the conclusion.
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