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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#741

Post by Zanneth »

sleepybrett wrote: post #568
gherkinnn wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. At some point you've got to ask if these measures are worth living for. It's winter in the northern hemisphere. It'd dark and it's cold. Keeping people locked up at home for a third season is absurd.

I live in seattle. It's dark and cold. Hell the mask helps, it's great for keeping my face warm. I don't consider myself locked up. I miss in person game nights the most, i miss dinner with friends (in a private home or restaurant) somewhat. We do gamenights online using videochat and products like roll20 and boardgame arena. It's not super awesome but it works for us for now. I leave the house, go on walks go shoppi…

How much longer are you willing to live like that? Keep in mind that people who decided to move on are living happy and healthy lives without making as many sacrifices. You can call them "narcissistic" but the reality is that this virus is here to stay, regardless of how many people get vaccinated, for a very very long time.

You are welcome to live any way you like, but please don't judge others for examining the situation and deciding how to live their own lives.

Re: The case against masks at school

#742

Post by JPKab »

hcurtiss wrote: post #714
dsl wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.

Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids.…

Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing.

It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???

It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.

Re: The case against masks at school

#743

Post by AussieWog93 »

thoms_a wrote: post #641
AussieWog93 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I think you may have been downvoted because your initial comment appeared to be referencing the "White Genocide" conspiracy theory - essentially the idea that the Jews are planning to slowly eliminate the white race in the West and replace them with blacks and Muslims.)

This is a bizarrely specific conspiracy theory (and seems to be designed for maximum divide & conquer of voting populations) which I've never heard of. What exactly led to its inception? I always enjoy engaging with conspiracy theories, as they are a great training regimen for keeping one's mind sharp and empirically grounded, but I don't even know where to start with this one!

>What exactly led to its inception?

From what I understand, people noticed the fact that whites were gradually becoming a smaller proportion of the population of Western nations, due to both lower fertility and increased immigration.

In addition to this, some migrant groups (notably Muslims from the middle-east) have higher-than-replacement fertility rates.

Extrapolating this out, the idea was that whites would eventually be "replaced" by Muslims and other "minority" groups over the course of many decades.

I don't quite know how the Jews got involved in the conspiracy, but I always found the accusation that they're trying to increase the population of Muslims to be a bit ridiculous.

Re: The case against masks at school

#744

Post by baskethead »

taylodl wrote: post #304

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…

The article was written by a infectious disease expert. and an emergency room doctor at UCSF.

Are you saying you know better than those two about whether or not masks are necessary at schools?

If I were you I would simply trust the experts on this one.

Re: The case against masks at school

#745

Post by acdha »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #668
acdha wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me. It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anyt…

> It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else. I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohort…

I did read, when it came out. I’m quoting Dr. Benjamin Silk, one of the authors:

"The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.”

The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is especially of interest since the relationship here was reversed with Alpha, and is still unclear with Omicron - the figures I’ve seen have relatively recent infection somewhere between 2 doses and 3 in terms of efficacy, and infected plus vaccinated being the strongest.

Now, if you think from a public health perspective that makes the call very easy: vaccines are cheap and effective, and more reliably produce an immune response. Waiting for people to get infected means that the schedule is unpredictable (overloads happen), and the timing being variable means that you might have people thinking they’re protected but they were part of the group who never mounted a strong response, or who have waned over time. Rather than having people get infected randomly or hoping that they had a strong response, it’s much easier to spend a few seconds vaccinating them so you have a higher confidence that they’re protected.

Re: The case against masks at school

#746

Post by pseudosavant »

tqi wrote: post #512
dsl wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.

1. If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. 2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.

This has gone on long enough that I’m putting off multiple surgeries. Thankfully not life threatening. Just significant quality of life ruining.

The unvaccinated are harming and killing a lot of people. It isn't just grandpa's problem.

Re: The case against masks at school

#747

Post by [deleted] »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #730
ianferrel wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses. Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.

I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated comb…

[deleted]

Re: The case against masks at school

#748

Post by nostromo »

taylodl wrote: post #304

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…

> They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.

This isn't true. Here in Washington State we're experiencing peak Covid, and only about 30% of hospital capacity is for Covid. And that's an all-time high. For most of the pandemic it's been between 10 and 20%.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard#das...

Re: The case against masks at school

#749

Post by [deleted] »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #730
ianferrel wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses. Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.

I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated comb…

[deleted]

Re: The case against masks at school

#750

Post by nostromo »

dahfizz wrote: post #429
ngngngng wrote: post #275

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 is the kind of thing that just drives me crazy. If the mandates were at the very least logically consistent, I would not consider them a burden. "You are not allowed into the restaurant unless you are masked, but you may immediately take it off once you've walked 10 feet to your table" is nonsense. Forcing you to leave the coffee shop with everyone unmasking to drink anyway is nonsense. It is security theater. I…

The crazy thing is this is creating a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists.

When the media, the government and "science" double-down on policies we all know are total bullshit, it makes people lose faith in the media, the government, and "science."

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