301–310 of 415 posts
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The wedding makes the jobs of the facility employees a lot harder.
The facility employees should never go to work with Covid-19 symptoms, including “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache”, regardless of the wedding.
Why do people go to work when they're sick? I don't understand for the life of me, how someone thinks it's ok? If you don't feel well, your company (or money) is not worth your life or the lives of others. Stay home ffs.
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Why does the care facility deserve more blame?
If the care facility is housing at-risk patients, they should have strict protocols in place for visitors. Shaming a wedding here seems irresponsible by the media considering these people could have picked up Covid anywhere like Walmart.
Walmart, on the other hand, requires customers to wear masks, and they have and will impose occupancy limits as needed to help minimize exposure.
While we cannot practically reduce the risk of infection to zero, we should also behave wisely. This applies both inside the nursing home and outside it.
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Not wearing a seatbelt hurts yourself only. If Covid were an STD there would be huge social pressure on it even though it would be passed less frequently.
This is a common and dangerous misconception. Wearing a seatbelt causes you to be a projectile that bounces around the car, into other people. YouTube "not wearing a seatbelt" and you'll never not wear one again when others are in the car.
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You can tighten the circle even tighter than that. Since (non-N95) masks are mostly useful for limiting how far your own droplets spread, and don't do much to protect against incoming germs, it's really not about whether or not you personally are following the rules. It's about whether or not everyone else is. It's sort of like the pool at my kids' swim school. If other toddlers were being allowed to go in the pool w…
The "non-N95 masks don't protect yourself" was what we thought in March; it's no longer what we think after the Starbucks contact tracing and other studies. Regular masks absolutely provide substantial - admittedly, not perfect, but substantial - personal protection.
There is no evidence for this, and if you read the CDC guidance document that suggested it this week, you'll see that every citation in the newly added section refers to studies about filtration efficiency, which is a very different question:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...
The high-quality evidence for masks has not changed substantially since March. The few lines of direct evidence suggest that it's possible they help a tiny amount, but we haven't been able to detect much evidence of this, either way. Only by combining multiple (poor) studies together, pooling the data and statistically re-weighting the pooled results was the WHO meta-analysis able to find any signal at all, and the signal wasn't strong:
http://www.economicsfaq.com/retract-the-lancets-and-who-fund...
In 2020, we've had a number of studies that attempt to use statistical analysis of infection data from late spring (when cases were declining in the northern hemisphere) to draw conclusions about masks, and a handful of anecdotes that are repeated frequently by the media -- the Missouri hairdresser, the Korean Starbucks -- that were neither controlled, nor subjected to statistical analysis of any sort.
The only randomized controlled trial conducted on masks for personal protection against Covid -- the highest quality form of evidence for a health intervention -- has been completed since June, and rejected by three major publications:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04337541
https://www.berlingske.dk/videnskab/professor-stort-dansk-ma...
Moreover, as we have now seen, most of the places around the world with mask mandates and high rates of self-reported compliance are experiencing spikes in infection. At the very least, these call into question the publications that attempted to make claims based on data from the spring. We're starting to see retractions related to this:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.21.20208728v...
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> Not wearing a seatbelt hurts yourself only. And yet people in many countries reject it. If a significant amount of people already makes a bad choice at this point where it affects themselves we cannot expect these people to make good choices to protect others.
Because the average person has a very bad understanding of risk and consequences? Also, the laws aren't solely about the wearer; not wearing seatbelts at scale has societal costs.
When it comes to things that are defined by social consensus (like whether or not one should wear a seat-belt, or smoke indoors, etc) like the hypothetical "average person" is always correct by definition.
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They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?
> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. Please, read the article. Neither the residents of the long-term care facility nor the inmates at the jail are likely to have had any meaningful ability to vet their contacts.
> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.
It wasn't a partygoer. I'm fine with holding specific people responsible (even legally) if they failed their explicit duty of care, but assigning blame to the whole population just because they don't comply with your narrow moral senses is intellectually dishonest. If we stopped doing that, maybe we could also focus on actually being effective (e.g. specifically protecting the old / vulnerable & their caretakers with specific, targeted and (most importantly) effective measures), not just requiring that everybody abide by arbitrary rules.
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I think you're confusing libertarian with anarchist.
I don't think I'm confused. I'm well aware that the word "libertarian" is used to describe a vasty range of beliefs, but I gave a realistic description of mainstream libertarianism in the United States. The Libertarian Party opposes food and drug safety regulations and workplace safety regulations, for instance.
The thinking is that the restaurant should be certified by industry not by the government, kind of like how the ASE certifications work for mechanics.
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Thank you for putting random third-party individuals in your social circle at risk.
COVID is not going anywhere. It is here with us and is not a light switch to be turned off. Eventually, everyone will get it. By hiding in your closet and afraid coming out is not the solution. I live in here in Mountain west where there is a lot of skepticism about everything with COVID. Not that it's not real, but how to approach get past it. For example, I believe that flattening the curve means staying open and g…
I don’t begrudge you for making the choice but wish you well and hope your family stays safe.
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Removing personal choice should sound alarm bells for anyone who has read Brave New World, 1984 or the Gulag Archipelago. If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start…
The tragic thing is, it's much easier to measure "coronavirus deaths" and "coronavirus cases" than it is to measure the price we pay to minimize those things. It's your typical case of over-optimizing for a single KPI and losing the bigger picture. The measures we've taken are deteriorating society in more subtle ways, and there are deaths and suffering indirectly caused by these measures. They are just not easy to s…
It's not the government ruining people's lives, it's the pandemic.