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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

#901

Post by jjnoakes »

covidthrow wrote: post #292
jjnoakes wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets hurt if I wear a mask?

Nobody, directly. Who gets hurt if social structure is affected by the apparent identity of masking? There are plenty of instances of catastrophic social division due to physical differences. I think your choice should be your own, and based on health and other reasons. But it's pretty myopic to ignore the history of superficial social striations.

> There are plenty of instances of catastrophic social division due to physical differences.

Sure but the fault lies with society, not the individual with the differences (chosen, like masks, or not, like a physical characteristic).

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

#902

Post by stolenmerch »

HWR_14 wrote: post #894
stolenmerch wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the mask that does harm. It's the temptation by authorities to make blanket mandates that can easily encroach too far in an effort to cover as many scenarios as possible for legal purposes. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just in their best interests to make it as easy as possible to interpret and enforce. It's also not at all cut-and-dried what a "public space" is, so that's a bitter argument that will b…

You've said that a fine-tuned mask mandate is too hard to write and enforce. You didn't address the underlying question of what the harm of a mask mandate is. Like, suppose I grant that it's difficult, and 80% of the time isn't needed. My question is then "and who cares?" My insurance isn't needed a far greater percentage of the time, nor is my wearing a seatbelt. What I'm getting at is if it were just a permanent la…

This is getting a bit silly here, but for starters, people wear clothes regardless of a law so that's not a good comparison. Also, to put it very bluntly, I don't think the number of lives saved is worth the social costs I've already enumerated.

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

#903

Post by garmaine »

ivraatiems wrote: post #898
garmaine wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID's long incubation time while infectious makes it potentially the most lethal disease ever. Most colds and flus evolve to be less lethal because lethal variants die out before spreading too far, making them evolutionarily less advantageous. That is NOT true of COVID, so there is potentially nothing preventing it from morphing into something more like MERS with a 20-30% fatality rate. As bad as COVID was, we dodg…

> COVID's long incubation time while infectious makes it potentially the most lethal disease ever. "Most lethal disease ever" is a really strong claim, so I would like to see some of the evidence that leads you to believe that. The r0 of measles, which still infects 20 million people a year, is substantially higher than COVID's, and though its death rate in developed countries is lower, the higher r0 means it is pote…

Your comment doesn’t address what I wrote. Unlike most other diseases, COVID has no evolutionary pressure to become less lethal over time.

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

#904

Post by garmaine »

herbst wrote: post #864
garmaine wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? There's plenty of far-right parties in Europe, some of which have even entered into governments or came close to it. And in any case the core threat isn't fascism per se, but the darker aspects of human nature which remain unchanged. The USA after all didn't have a fascist government in that time period but nevertheless performed widespread involuntary sterilizations. More relevant to the circumstances unde…

As said I don't think Europeans generally think that way. We are very aware about things that happened, sometimes more sometimes less, but we have a long history we are not always proud of and build our future based on that knowledge. We do not have, and also never really had, this kind of far right here in Switzerland. Our most right party is very liberal. I think you are generalizing Germany to Europe.

France and the UK have far-right parties that poll well, as did Sweden recently. It’s not just Germany.

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

#905

Post by blagie »

sokoloff wrote: post #877
blagie wrote: post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 *…

sigh

* My comment was about the US. See the last line of my comment.

* In the US, the economic gains of having rolled out N95 and equivalent masks when they become widely available would have cost orders-of-magnitude less than the masks. Ending COVID19 sooner would still pay for a program like this today.

* Whether or not the vaccine will stop COVID19 is still TBD. We don't have good numbers on impact on spread, on ultimate vaccination rates, nor on mutations. It seems on-track, but still TBD.

* Yes, similar measures would need to be taken elsewhere to fully eradicate the virus, and that's assuming no animal stores. Doing math there brings up a million apples-to-oranges comparisons.

* Numbers in second post were was based on similar (successful) programs implemented in Taiwan and Korea, which did stop COVID19 (pre-vaccine) and allowed those economies to continue functioning, while ours imploded. Quotas were 2-3 per week, and everyone was required to use (and reuse) them. My second comment was more precise, if anything.

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

#906

Post by ivraatiems »

garmaine wrote: post #903
ivraatiems wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COVID's long incubation time while infectious makes it potentially the most lethal disease ever. "Most lethal disease ever" is a really strong claim, so I would like to see some of the evidence that leads you to believe that. The r0 of measles, which still infects 20 million people a year, is substantially higher than COVID's, and though its death rate in developed countries is lower, the higher r0 means it is pote…

Your comment doesn’t address what I wrote. Unlike most other diseases, COVID has no evolutionary pressure to become less lethal over time.

It did - I asked you to provide evidence for that claim, and some of the others you made. It's a strong assertion and it needs strong evidence.

To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest COVID isn't lethal or isn't unique at all. I am suggesting that the idea it is so unique as to be excluded from selective pressure to become less lethal over time is a claim that requires evidence.

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

#907

Post by wolverine876 »

stolenmerch wrote: post #784
ceejayoz wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subject of this HN thread is the CDC lifting the masking requirement, and some folks choosing individually to still wear them at times; an act that causes no one any harm. A debate on mask mandates in general over the last year is probably off topic, but I'm inclined to see them as quite justifiable.

Fine, then the claim that "If masks work, and you don’t wear one, you are potentially killing people and worsening the pandemic." is off-topic and irrelevant since this is no longer true.

It is true if you aren't fully vaccinated.

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

#908

Post by lumberingjack »

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…

And I believe that humans are so closed off from reality and don't care about others so much the point that they don't realize how little of a rate that is compared to everything else. We got people claiming they almost died from covid. Then testing negative realizing that they just got normal flu, holy crap normal flu is so bad it can make you lose weight? Yes idiot.

I just spent about 3 months non-stop hospital visits for the past year and a half for open reduction internal fixation multiple times. The hospital was empty like literally the lights are out in this hallway I have to find the light switch and turn it on so that I can go down to the X-ray room. This is a city of 300,000 with an empty hospital. Yet they claim it's full when all 35 covid beds are taken. I walked all around the hospital hoax fake are the first words that came to my mind.

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

#909

Post by nobodyandproud »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #746
nobodyandproud wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not speak for most Democrats. I’m a Democrat; my circle is mostly Democrats. We also knew last year in February and March that we wanted masks. So trust that Fauci meant well? Yes. He was in an extremely difficult position and in a position of policy advisor. But trudt that masks were ineffective for the average person? Absolutely not. It’s a contradiction that masks are effective for frontlines, yet somehow w…

I'm not a Democrat, which shouldn't really matter. I'm just relaying what actual surveys found, they were regularly asking questions about who was a trusted source of information on COVID and reporting on trends. Feel free to Google for them if you can't accept what I said as plausible.

I can’t accept your assertion because the polls say some very different.

For example: https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/health/2021/04/26/poll-...

Despite Fauci assuring that the J&J is safe, people are still very hesitant.

Which means the trust extended to Fauci only goes so far.

So while you want to paint a broad stroke of “Democrats trust” vs “Republicans don’t”, the reality is far more nuanced.

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

#910

Post by dguaraglia »

scrollaway wrote: post #872
dguaraglia wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh, I knew. I was just pointing out that even in the scenario he described it didn't even approximate to what you describe as happening in Belgium (which to be clear, I completely believe).
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