391–400 of 1001 posts
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Your face hole is not virus spewing if you aren't sick.
Too bad you can't know if you're sick or not until it's too late. It's one of the reasons this virus spreads so quickly. Even if you're not sick wearing masks also helps to protect you from getting sick. It's win/win for extremely minimal effort/inconvenience.
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This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which "drop everything" makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we'd do it naturally. But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit. I tend to think that people who operate in…
> Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. I'm sympathetic to your point (and I love to play piano), but I can't help but ask, if we slightly reword your claim: would you be willing to take responsibility for spreading coronavirus to n other people so you can play the piano? Edit, to be clear: I'm not talking about the piano, or surface transm…
There are countless more problems and risks in life than Covid. Many are much more important to individuals.
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> the government brought in TSA checkpoints, The government brought in the TSA to take over checkpoints and relieve the air transport industry for liability for failures of and abuses at the checkpoints as part of the post-9/11 air transport industry bailout; the checkpoints had existed for a long time.
Yep, pre-911 you still had to go through a metal detector and get your stuff x-rayed. Taking off your shoes and no fluids are the only new restrictions really.
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I do not want to seek to diminish your very real belief that my issues are not real. But they are. My panic attacks in public started when I had to wear masks. When I am anxious or stressed, my breathing shallows. When this happens and I am wearing a mask, i have even less airflow coming in. I have tested this by simply lowering my mask, and examining how much air enters my nasal cavity. It is a huge difference. Or,…
Have you tried using a plastic mask insert/bracket? I find them very helpful. It lifts the mask off my mouth and nose, so the mask doesn't feel as constricting and I no longer suck in cloth when I'm breathing harder.
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> if a student's well-being depends that directly on being able to play the piano It's death by a thousand cuts. The piano policy isn't that devastating by itself, but it's one of 50 things that have been taken away.
It's exhausting. And the piano policy in the example is totally absurd. I hope my remarks didn't come across as personal. I have kids in school too, and although I'm currently favoring masks, I'm also miserable about how my kids' early childhood social and academic development have been impacted.
General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors. And i…
People stopped having kids once they could(easily available birth control). Trying to connect it to COVID or Climate change is not supported by any data whatsoever.
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In the case of the piano, it's very simple: anyone who is worried about catching Covid by listening to the piano is free to not listen to the piano. There's really nothing to balance.
Solid, got it. Next time I talk to criddell's kids' university's dorm administrators, I'll try to set them straight. Hopefully they'll be able to zoom out a bit from whatever conversation-impairing details they've latched onto.
It's perfectly fair to point out the limitations of the available studies. Of course we want better ones -- that's a good argument for more, better studies. But the lack of absolute proof isn't an argument against masks in school. That's dumb. Until we conduct some well-designed rigorous controlled experiments on human children (which we'll never do, for presumably obvious reasons) we are going to have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge.
There is substantial evidence that a properly worn N95 or KN95 mask reduces the transmission of covid, right?
Can children be swayed/educated/convinced to wear a quality mask often enough to make a difference in the transmission of covid among their teachers or their families? IDK. Good question. We aren't completely sure, but probably.
Maybe we should answer that before killing masks in school. I mean... let's not be dumb, right?
Masks aren't exactly burdensome. We make kids wear shirts and shoes, even when it's unnecessary in summer. Given the current situation, if you could magically set aside politics and the associated mouth-breathers (which of course we can't) wouldn't we actually demand proof that masks are a net negative before we stop mandating them?
To me, this is a question of how much do we allow "dumb" to run the way things are. Apparently, it's quite a lot. I'm curious how far down we'll go before the end?
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> 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. You should be angry at corporate…
It’s only increasing due to immigration, if I’m reading this correctly. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
downvoters: is this outcome undesirable? if so, why, and what can we do to fix it? because I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to say that having more kids is a good thing, and using immigration/migration as a means of replacing those kids we're not having is a bad thing.
thus, is this outcome (declining citizen birth rates, increased immigration/migration compensating for it) not the intended, desired one?
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> It's not about individual risk, it's about collective risk, and honestly it's quite selfish to consider the COVID risks only with regard to yourself. Is it wrong to be selfish? That seems be an implicit assumption in your argument.
Yes, it's wrong to be so selfish that you can't experience a minor inconvenience to mitigate the risk of causing another person's death or severe injury.
1. Should people have the expectation that they can inconvenience others, even if only in minor ways? This is taken as given, but it's not always the case. For instance, reducing speed limits everywhere would only slightly inconvenience everyone but save thousands of lives.
2. Is it a minor inconvenience? Certainly not to some people with breathing difficulties.
3. Does it really mitigate the risk to the degree you imply? The case is frankly not as solid as you suggest.
There are even more, but frankly the case is flimsy enough as it is.