301–310 of 1001 posts
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…
This argument is poorly constructed. I think there could be better ones, but here’s my problem. It goes through the three CDC studies and correctly observes that they fail to separate regions that have high vaccination rates from schools without a mask mandate. Indeed, the ideal experiment would involve two schools that are otherwise identical in the same geographical area with high vaccination rates: one that has no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The north star for most countries and cities has always been cases over hospitalizations or deaths. With vaccine intake high in most developed countries a covid infection is like a cold or a bad flu for some. I think the time has come to rethink this goal of cases being a metric to shut down everything and let society return to some sense of normalcy while still maintaining a safety mandate for those with special con…
Sounds like you are on a path to awakening so I don't want to discourage you, but it might be worth sharing additional data and context to parts of your comment. >With vaccine intake high in most developed countries a covid infection is like a cold or a bad flu for some. That may be more driven by the mildness of Omicron than it is by the protective effect of the vaccine. For example, the latest data show that vaccin…
So with this one I wonder if the mildness of omicron is due to previous infection/vaccination than the virus itself being mild. Like if omicron came into the scene in 2020 it would have been just as deadly but more infectious. I don't know for certain if this is true but was something I was thinking.
As for this I 100% agree:
> This is something that is in all likelihood not variant-specific. In other words, cloth masks were always ineffective, however with the increased transmissibility of Omicron, this fact of ineffectiveness has become readily apparent.
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the childhood mortality risk associated with Covid is comparable to the flu (which seems to be the case) why weren't we masking every child before Covid?
The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. It's not about protecting the individual children (at least not primarily, because they are so low risk). Whether or not this is still a useful approach probably depends on the locale. It seems like places where the Omicron wave is rapidly ending, having children wear masks is entirely…
People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity? "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children to possibly impact hospital capacity elsewhere" is not something that makes sense to me. If this was just another bottleneck in some system and not related to the pandemic you'd address the real problem, right?
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…
and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. You have some good points up until this one. Go to your local hospital and ask them how they'd like it if their case load went up by 2x due to a lack of "halfway measures." In some places, that will be OK, while in others, it will be utterly catastrophic. Obviously that doesn't justify ridiculous overreactions to unmasked toddlers, as you p…
The outbreak curves and percentages are basically the same, especially when you account for the population differences in age, obeasity, diabetes, etc.
A red state might do worse at times, but is also more easily explained as a result of a more vulnerable population.
Be scientific about it rather than political. There are a lot of ways to analyze the data.
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…
Never heard about this, source? Toddlers tend to be somewhat exempt from mask mandates because they're toddlers and everyone understands when they don't comply.
There have been numerous studies showing that mechanically N95 and equivalent masks can greatly reduce the emission of coronavirus and influenza, and can also greatly reduce the intake of coronavirus-sized particles. That's why these types of articles always focus on mask mandate effectiveness instead of mask effectiveness. How many schools with mask mandates also have their lunch indoors with poor ventilation? Can y…
Poor adherence in young populations is exactly the point.
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…
Never mind the fact that they are not rated to filter viruses.
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…
But I don't want anybody mandating it. I've been trying to work out in my own mind why I switched to being more, uh, 'deontologist' if you will, several years ago. I'm just starting to almost be able to articulate it. If you take a consequentialist stance, then any catastrophe sufficient to put your chosen 'utility' at risk instantly justifies literally any measure that mitigates that risk. As long as the measure is outside the realm of the thing you regard as 'utility'. Is free speech for its own sake not part of 'utility' but only a means to increase it? Then out the window it goes when it causes problems. Same for privacy, leaving your home without permission from an authority, pretty much anything we think of as freedom.
It greatly disturbs me to find the Overton Window in a place where I see smart Americans debating every day whether strongly authoritarian and invasive measures are OK, if they save lives.