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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

#871

Post by concordDance »

codelord wrote: post #851
concordDance wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally follow the CDC guidelines I don't believe you. Do you use a food thermometer when cooking food? Do you make sure to cook eggs until the yoke is firm? If you're a woman, do you make sure you never have more than 1 (alcoholic) drink in a particular day? Do you never eat rare steak? People ignore almost everything the CDC says in their regular lives as the CDC is completely optimizing for health, not qual…

Not sure why would you go and make a statement about me without any evidence (And btw yes to all your questions). Your point would be stronger if you don't target a person and maybe talk about the average consumer. My point exactly that a large chuck of the population don't follow CDC guidelines, if they did we collectively would be a healthier nation.

I'm quite surprised. I have never even heard of someone who did so I thought it was a good rhetorical point (and I think it would have been if you weren't an outlier).

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

#872

Post by scrollaway »

dguaraglia wrote: post #848
mensetmanusman wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have witnessed Chipotle’s staff scream at a construction worker because he was using a tshirt as a face covering. “That’s not approved!! Get out of here!” Different things are happening

So, nothing like Belgium then, and exactly what I described: people being asked to wear a mask and not doing it. I don’t know the circumstances of the situation you mention, but it hardly qualifies as security theatre. Also, I doubt they screamed ‘not approved’ but I guess no anti-mask narrative sounds dire enough without a little exaggeration.

You're replying to someone else than me. I'm not sure why they brought this up either

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

#873

Post by sokoloff »

blagie wrote: post #840
_euac wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's almost a year between the time we originally went into lockdown to 'flatten the curve' and the time a significant part of the population got vaccinated. You can't pretend that not using a mask now - once someone is vaccinated - is the same as not using a mask back then.

N95 masks ($2/day) + vaccines would almost certainly eliminate COVID19. Wouldn't it be nice to eliminate COVID19? Look at the heroics for WWI and WWII. And those caused fewer combat deaths. You can't pretend Americans haven't grown selfish and lazy.

Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.

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

#874

Post by blagie »

sokoloff wrote: post #873
blagie wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N95 masks ($2/day) + vaccines would almost certainly eliminate COVID19. Wouldn't it be nice to eliminate COVID19? Look at the heroics for WWI and WWII. And those caused fewer combat deaths. You can't pretend Americans haven't grown selfish and lazy.

Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.

Trillions?

That's the harm to the economy. That's not the cost of masks.

Providing everyone in the US with two high-quality N95-equivalent masks each week for a year would be at most $60 billion. ($2 per mask * 100 masks * 300 million people, at retail prices).

We didn't do that. Our kids have a half-year of learning loss. Small businesses around me closed, and a ton of people fell behind on mortgages. We're looking at pretty high inflation from how we've expended our money supply, eventually. Etc.

Part of the reason these things look like bad use of funds is that people don't do ROI calculations, and confuse millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is a thousand times more than a billion, and a million times more than a million. But to everyone a MILLION dollars looks like a big number, as does a TRILLION dollars.

People also confuse the ridiculously high effectiveness of proper masks with the fairly low effectiveness of cloth masks.

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

#875

Post by jen20 »

totalZero wrote: post #862
greedo wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently 46.6% of the population. Over 2m/day on average being vaccinated.

NB: codingdave is referring to fully vaccinated individuals, while greedo is referring to individuals with at least one shot. Both are correct. https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

@scrollaway is most definitely _not_ correct however, since no number below 50% is “a majority” of the population by definition, and regardless that is not a sufficient number to deliver value in the form of herd immunity via vaccine.

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

#876

Post by unpolloloco »

galgalesh wrote: post #780
buzzert wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about 1,300 deaths a day from smoking? https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

I consider this somewhat different because people who smoke knowingly do it onto themselves. If people think the benefits outweigh the risks, I don't see that as a "failure" in any way. Passive smoking is the main cause of harm to _other_ people and is unsurprisingly also the thing that's the most regulated. (Smoking in bars etc.)

At this point, isn't non-mask-wearing somewhat similar? The death risk to vaccinated people (for now) is lower than for getting the flu (even with the flu vaccine). So, the risk is only significant to unvaccinated people, who have had plenty of opportunity to get the shot. So the risk here to those people isn't from themselves (like in smoking), but from others - but the risk is their own choice to take?

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

#877

Post by sokoloff »

blagie wrote: post #874
sokoloff wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.

Trillions? That's the harm to the economy. That's not the cost of masks. Providing everyone in the US with two high-quality N95-equivalent masks each week for a year would be at most $60 billion. ($2 per mask * 100 masks * 300 million people, at retail prices). We didn't do that. Our kids have a half-year of learning loss. Small businesses around me closed, and a ton of people fell behind on mortgages. We're looking…

> Providing everyone in the US

Can people not in the US harbor the virus? I assumed you were trying to eradicate it and to do so with your original figure of $2/day/person masks, it’s trillions per year worldwide. You later silently amended (not sure if in error or moving the goalpost) that figure to 2 masks/week in your $60B/yr estimate to cover most, not all, of the people in the US.

$2/day/person * 365 day/year * 7.5 B people/world -> over $5T/year/world

Thanks for the unneeded lesson on powers of 10, though.

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

#878

Post by paul_f »

thathndude wrote: post #443
walrus01 wrote: post #434

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…

I think your point cuts both ways. People can’t appreciate how big the US population is and the normal death rate. Every year around 2.8 million people die in the US from all causes. Around 7,500 people every day. So 450 a day isn’t that incredible of a number given the scale of the population. When an airplane crashes, the reaction is less about loss of 100-300 lives, but the way in which it happens. If a loaded 747…

Agree. To add, 450 individuals dying separately from different causes in different places is not as newsworthy as 450 people dying in one event in one place in spectacular fashion.

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

#879

Post by paul_f »

infoseek12 wrote: post #270

I hope my thinking on this is overly pessimistic but I think wearing masks is going to be perhaps the biggest lightning rod in America for a while. It’s going to act as a proxy issue for many other sociopolitical and psychological issues that will be channeled into this conflict. I think the perhaps the best advice is entirely cliche. We are going to need to respect other people’s choices and try to be as patient and…

The reason for the contention is because it is not simply one side wearing masks and the other side not. It is one side wearing masks and demanding the other side do as well.

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

#880

Post by [deleted] »

vcavallo wrote: post #665
herbst wrote: 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.

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

[deleted]
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