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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#881

Post by JoshuaDavid »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #780
timr wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead? It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufa…

I don't understand why you would be against getting a free booster, or even a shot every 6 months. Is it more harmful in Israel? Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics. Either they are had something else (like a flu or a cold, you wouldn't know without a test), or something about natural immunity isn't working. I won't speculate, I believe its the for…

Do you have a citation on previously infected unvaccinated people having 10x the mortality rate of vaccinated people?

Or are you saying a lot of people think they've gotten covid but actually got something else?

If it's the latter case, how do you feel about encouraging that the people who don't want to be vaccinated because they've had a prior infection get an antibody test, and get vaccinated if it comes back negative, and if they do indeed have antibodies we treat them the same way we'd treat someone vaccinated?

If you think that natural immunity is comparable to vaccine-generated immunity, but that proposal still sounds unappealing to you, I'd be curious why.

Re: The case against masks at school

#882

Post by lovich »

yellow_postit wrote: post #880
lovich wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage

I don’t have an answer but I always get stuck on the slippery slope intersection about what differentiates willingly unvaxxed vs people that don’t exercise and eat healthy enough.

The unvaxxed tipped the system. It’s like when your company finally adds npm audit checks to your ci pipeline and you are the first team to push a patch after that. Sucks that you got the luck of the draw and are dealing with the failures of multiple groups, but the failures are real now and there is no more forward progress without handling the situation

Re: The case against masks at school

#883

Post by joshuamorton »

lr1970 wrote: post #413
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 statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospital…

> Recorded deaths do not differentiate between "died from covid" and "died while covid positive" making death statistics hard to interpret.

This has never been true and remains false.

Re: The case against masks at school

#884

Post by lovich »

adamcstephens wrote: post #846
lovich wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage

Sure, the electorate has thus far been unwilling to increase the capacity. At the same time the private medical facilities have been underpaying, overworking, and under-resourcing our hospitals. They close rural hospitals because they're not profitable /enough/. We could have more beds, and happier staff, but then the profits would be lower.

I agree that the hospitals as private businesses have not handled the situation well because they are seeking profit, but the electorate has no punished them for it.

There are no single issue voters for increasing the medical systems capacity. There are multiple political groups who care about the medical system but none who are willing to sacrifice every other possible gain if they get an improved medical system. That is what I mean about the electorate signaling that they do not care

Re: The case against masks at school

#885

Post by joshuamorton »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #798
perardi wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYTimes has a pretty good source on this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-... I'll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well. Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this.

> Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well. Not accurate AT ALL. NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage. Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard. https://www.npr.org/sections/heal…

> Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates.

Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.

Re: The case against masks at school

#886

Post by kingaillas »

JPKab wrote: post #775
katbyte wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe take your kids out of public school then? Your kids are not the only ones there and don’t take priority over everyone else’s (and the teaches)

So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is. The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. V…

Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks.

Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.

Re: The case against masks at school

#887

Post by JoshuaDavid »

JPKab wrote: post #727
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…

General observation from reading YOUR comment - you must not have young kids at a key developmental age in primary school for if you did you'd realize how detrimental arbitrary, poorly-fitting, non-medical masks are to small children's ability to learn to speak, read other's emotions, and other crucial milestones. It's an uncontrolled experiment that was launched, without any regard for potential negative consequence…

> This isn't just anecdotal, there are studies showing small children are TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS behind where they should be.

Do you have a link? I would not be surprised if there were significant developmental issues, but two standard deviations is such an enormously large effect size that I'm doubtful.

Re: The case against masks at school

#888

Post by DangitBobby »

nradov wrote: post #756
emteycz wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? We're on a free market. Surely they could simply add a big surcharge. I'd expect their insurance to go way up too.

There is no free market. Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers aren't legally allowed to set premiums based on vaccination status. https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/

Let's not pretend that insurance based payment even remotely resembled a free market before.

Re: The case against masks at school

#889

Post by AussieWog93 »

adamrezich wrote: post #856
AussieWog93 wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 event…

notice that I did not say anything about races or religions or groups or anything, aside from, implicitly, "people who were already citizens of any given Western nation" and "people who are immigrating/migrating to said nation, en masse". my original post, untainted by your invocation of specific groups of people to brand my post as being an invocation of a specific—named even—"conspiracy theory" to be harmful to dis…

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Re: The case against masks at school

#890

Post by throwawaythekey »

michaelmrose wrote: post #863
throwawaythekey wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> N95 masks are not at all difficult to breathe in in my experience. Not at all. My default assumption would be that if the mask doesn't make it more difficult to breathe then it is unlikely to be effective. The filtration mechanism should introduce friction which you then have to compensate for with additional pressure in your lungs.

This is a bad assumption that you can disprove for yourself in 10 seconds. You aren't pushing air up a slope you are creating a pressure differential. An impediment ought to at best result in a small decrease in the speed of filling and a tiny amount at that because your mask is very porous. Your mask is effective not in proportion to keeping air out but because larger items like globs of spit get stuck on it and bec…

Thanks for the extra perspective. Without going into specifics like linearity it still seems like it could be the basis of reasonable public health advice. Forgive the tongue in cheekness but something along the lines of:

"Expect some discomfort - that lets you know the mask is working"

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