My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August.
We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit.
In Vegas the concern for masks started to wane. By Utah, no fucks were given and pretty much not a single fuck was given until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the lower peninsula of Michigan.
When I say no fucks were given - I mean that pretty much no one around me cared about wearing a mask, social distancing, etc. Hotels would participate out of corporate necessity. We drove hundreds and hundreds of miles sometimes and were the only people in stores with masks on. Sometimes I felt like an outsider alien, being stared at by the people around me. I was surprised yet not surprised at the same time.
So the surge and issues the comminuties up there are facing don't surprise me in the least.
It's actually the state governments that's at fault here. Not the specifically the people. Let me tell you I was in back-country Oregon recently, some of the MOST republican places within Oregon, not going to name drop the county. Anyway, the Oregon state government is very much democratic (cause you know Portland). But because of that, even the republican counties are under a mask order. And the extremely red counties, people are actually wearing masks all over the place. Grocery stores even are employing someone to just stand there and either hand a cheapy surg. mask or tell them to put one on.
So what I'm saying is that regardless of what people WANT to do, the state has the power and push to get people to do it. And this is why we need Biden in office yesterday.
Grocery stores even are employing someone to just stand there and either hand a cheapy surg. mask or tell them to put one on.
In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.[1] The store entrance gate won't open until the automated face scan has seen a mask. Hikvision has a mask and temperature detection system integrated with their face recognition systems.[2] If you already have a face recognition system, adding mask detection is a software update. And yes, face recognition now works on people with masks.
> In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.
Having facial recognition everywhere isn't necessarily considered "advanced" in all circles. Technically, perhaps. Ethically? Not so much.
Facial recognition could be put everywhere in the US. Its primarily the political, legal, and social culture that prevents it, not the access to sufficient technology.
calling this facial recognition is a bit of stretch when its more akin to "is a mask present?", not trying to match to people in a database. No different then self driving cars detecting a pedestrian. very far from unethical (although i would hope they would make an effort to accommodate all skin colors to not unintentionally discriminate against anyone.)
Facial recognition with masks is already working [1]. So storing facial images of all customers entering store with or without mask is essentially the same.
Some might see a million dead people as a worse thought.
I don't really like the idea of facial recognition, but the political class lives in a public facing world where every move they make is scrutinized. So they see the world maybe differently than when they're private citizens.
I guess it depends where each person falls on the “freedom vs safety” spectrum. I’m strongly on the “freedom” side. But I feel it’s a perspective based in some objectivity, as it’s generally a lot easier for one to protect themselves than to free themselves.
That's not enough. Someone standing in front of such a system cannot tell whether records are kept, or shared.
1. One risk is that the government will slowly erode any limitations. In Germany, one of the most privacy oriented countries, restaurants were required to collect contact information. This was announced as being strictly for covid contract tracing purposes. Less than a month later, the police in multiple states were found to have demanded and received access to those lists for reasons entirely unrelated to covid. So any default level of trust has already been betrayed.
2. Another risk is that the vendors themselves might prefer "alternative definitions" of record keeping and data sharing for various reasons (e.g. processing in the cloud and/or by third-party companies with even less restrictions, data collection for ML training purposes, selling the same dataset for profit, "flagged as hidden" vs "never actually stored", "stored to persistent media then deleted" vs "never persistently stored", preventing access by contractual/legal vs technical means...). The people making such promises are never ever the engineers that actually understand their system. And similar to the previous paragraph, companies have every incentive to slowly erode any guarantees they might've actually met at some point.
3. The people buying the products (shop owners) as a general rule have neither the expertise, time, motivation nor source code level access to call the vendors out.
It's both. You can still wear masks in areas where they aren't explicitly necessary. In liberal cities in many "red" states, most people wear masks. It's 100% a "culture war" thing at this point. When I was moving from CA back East a few months ago, I saw practically nobody wearing masks even in rural CA.
That's not even mentioning that it's the people who are electing governments which don't require these basic public health requirements.
You know who else has the power to lead people and states? The federal government. Almost like they were empowered specifically for this kind of scenario.
no, the federal government exists to defend the interests of the states, and resolve disputes between them. it's not meant to be a higher level of authority.
yes, but the supremacy clause applies only to laws written within its (federal) jurisdiction, as enumerated in the constitution (and amendments). the battle there, of course, is how much jurisdiction can be finagled under the interstate commerce clause and the like.
all commerce, including the interstate kind, has slowed down due to the pandemic response, but that certainly doesn't mean that the interstate commerce clause should be invoked for covid (or in many other cases that it has been employed by the federal gov't). that power should be reserved for things like collusive, coercive, and anti-competitive behavior, its intended purpose.
for epidemiological concerns, the public health services act is the relevant federal legal framework, as @dragonwriter mentioned elsewhere.
however, a national mask mandate is a political ploy unlikely to lower infection rates materially vs. less visible and harder-to-enforce mitigations. it's polarized pangeantry, being pushed to put some points on the political board and coalesce power. anyone who cares about getting past the pandemic should punish such ineffective partisan behavior in favor of real meaningful, targeted, and effective measures--start with focusing on private social gatherings, the primary vector of spread (and completely unrelated to interstate commerce), not meaningless public displays of compliance.
> all commerce, including the interstate kind, has slowed down due to the pandemic response, but that certainly doesn't mean that the interstate commerce clause should be invoked for covid (or in many other cases that it has been employed by the federal gov't). that power should be reserved for things like collusive, coercive, and anti-competitive behavior, its intended purpose.
> for epidemiological concerns, the public health services act is the relevant federal legal framework, as @dragonwriter mentioned elsewhere.
The Public Health Services Act is almost entirely an exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. (Some bits of it may be grounded elsewhere, but that is the main source of authority for the Act.)
You can't really say it's the right statutory authority and say that the Commerce Clause should not be invoked in this context.
> "The Public Health Services Act is almost entirely an exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause."
some quick research reveals that the federal quarantine powers of the PHSA are largely restricted to state and national borders. so that's indeed based (partly) in the commerce clause, protecting trade across borders from destabilizing forces. but the 5th & 14th amendments (due process and equal protection) also contribute, as does the necessary and proper clause (allowing the fed to use unenumerated powers to carry out its charter, and only its charter, when necessary and proper).
but a true national quarantine, where people are confined to homes or communities, and other proposed national measures (like a mask mandate) would require broader powers that go beyond the commerce clause, and that was the (unstated) common understanding from which i was arguing from before.
i still find this use of the commerce clause troubling, as it's just another stepping stone in the consolidation of power away from states to a future autocrat. the commerce clause is meant to curtail human-induced distortions on interborder trade, not pandemics.
I started thinking about this when thinking of the United Nations. If the UN had become what it could have, we would have some sort of federal world system that could tackle things like climate change, etc. This same thing occurs at different levels. The US federal government is in the best position to enforce regulations that require collective state action, like pandemic response. If they’re not solving the problems they’re uniquely in a position to solve, then what’s the point of federal taxes?
The states aren't run by stupid people. They're not gonna send in some state cops start shooting people over masks or to escalate in that direction. They don't have the manpower to enforce mask mandates without the consent of the governed. Their options for projecting power into areas where people have relatively homogeneously chosen to not comply are limited.
There are plenty of examples of unpopular rules successfully enforced, from school integration to the War On Drugs. The lack of mask/distancing enforcement is purely government cowardice and indifference. They could do it if they wanted to.
Publicly fire a few county bumpkin Sheriffs who refuse to enforce the mandates and you'd see an attitude change.
AFAIK most (all?) sheriffs can't be fired. They're elected county officials, so maybe they could be impeached but I really don't think they can be just outright fired like that.
Also, I would imagine many of the sheriffs that refuse to enforce mandates probably have considerable support from their constituents. Surely that would make their impeachment a significantly more difficult ordeal for whatever agency is responsible for the impeachment proceedings.
Do you think mask mandates are working in the other states due to enforcement? They aren't. People are just wearing them because they accept the seriousness and have a sense of the risk and their responsibility.
Some do it out of shame, others necessity (e.g. shop not letting you in without a mask) but nobody is afraid of being arrested for failing to wear a mask.
With mask noncompliance so widespread, what exactly is Biden going to do? Throw all the anti-maskers in jail? Post law enforcement outside their houses to force them to quarantine? In fact, while the state technically has legal authority to get people to comply with mask mandates, they don't literally have the ability to do so. So, I would argue that the state doesn't have the "power" to do anything here at all, or, at least that it hasn't been demonstrated to date.
Cases are skyrocketing everywhere. While your statement is true, it's extremely misleading.
Oregon is 47th place in terms of population adjusted total cases. In terms of number of absolute new cases, Oregon is 40th. Every state with fewer absolute new cases than Oregon is smaller with the exception of Lousiana. Oregon has done a fantastic job of handling Covid.
It isn’t misleading in any way: the parent was talking about mask rules in Oregon, asserting that they make all the difference. Yet cases are going up, all over Oregon, and especially in the places with the most compliance.
The fact that cases are going up all over the northern hemisphere - in places both with mask rules and without - should tell you something very important about the effectiveness of those rules.
I'm not sure why you're being purposely ignorant. Rules in Oregon have been relatively more strict so Oregon has had relatively fewer cases. Oregon lifted restrictions, opening up dining & gyms for example leading to an increase in cases. As a response, Oregon has reentered a lockdown.
Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants.
From what I can tell (I'm just staying home), people maybe did backyard gatherings when it was nice enough out, but moved indoors and that's gotten a lot of people sick.
> Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants.
Prove it.
When cases go down, it’s because of masks. When they go up in the same place, it’s because people suddenly stopped wearing them, but no proof is provided for either assertion.
I think we can all agree (and I don't have to prove) that if nobody would ever meet anyone outside their home there would be 0 infections. So that would be the ideal. We could have states just mandate very strict shelter in place. Would you like that?
Probably not, in which case we have to allow people to get outside their homes. When we do that we come up with rules to try to minimize infection rates, distance and mask wearing is supposed to help with that. Is your argument that mask wearing has 0 impact on COVID19 spreading rate?
But if mask wearing isn't helping at all with infectious diseases like COVID19, why are health experts always wearing them? It's a lot more comfortable to not be wearing any mask so they could do that instead. They'd have the data and the skills to determine if it helps or not, much better than we would.
> I think we can all agree (and I don't have to prove) that if nobody would ever meet anyone outside their home there would be 0 infections. So that would be the ideal. We could have states just mandate very strict shelter in place. Would you like that?
Absolutely. If we were really serious about beating the virus, that's exactly what we would do: Real and strictly enforced stay-at home, and mask wearing for exceptional cases when you had to go out. Coordinated nationally so we didn't have this healthy state - sick state problem. Then stick with it until it succeeded. It would be temporarily economically painful, and people would complain about their freedom to get their nails done and eat at Olive Garden, but we'd get the public health benefit and come out the other side not-dead.
Instead, we managed to do an even worse thing: Announce half-assed "business closures" and stay-at-home orders (more like suggestions), uncoordinated with other states, and unenforced, which gave us the negative economic effects and did not provide the health benefit. To top it off, we opened up way too early, causing this yo-yo effect where cases predictably spike after re-opening, causing re-closing, then a rush to re-open because economy, then another spike, then an inevitable re-close, and on and on.
Unless the vaccines pan out, we're going to be in this exact situation a year from now. Constantly re-opening, faking surprise at the cases spiking, and then re-closing.
It is a lot more comfortable to not be wearing any mask, that's why health experts like Dr. Fauci wear them only in front of the cameras but take them off when they think the cameras are off.
I think we can pretty safely conclude that any data saying blue cities have it worse than bumfuck nowhere towns must be misleading or manipulated. It just doesn't line up with what we know about education levels and compliance levels.
There are more total cases in Portland because of the population numbers. From what I recall, the per capita numbers bounce around, with rural counties going through outbreaks occasionally taking the lead. There was a church in La Grande that had a big one in late spring. Sure put the lie to the notion that it was "density" and a "city problem".
San Francisco is the second densest city in America. San Francisco has the lowest COVID transmission rates of any city, with recently a positive test rate under 1%. Masks matter.
San Francisco has imposed unrelenting, draconian business closures for most of 2020, and only barely allowed re-opening of a few classes of business in late summer before closing them again in the fall. The city has seen a mass exodus amongst the worst in the nation.
And yet, despite all of this, and despite some of the strictest mask rules in the world, and the highest rates of compliance...cases have almost quadrupled since mid-October:
But sure, none of that matters: if cases go down, it’s because masks. If they go up, it’s because someone didn’t wear their mask right. There can be no other explanation.
I wonder if cities having a high proportion of knowledge workers that are all able to work from home has a big impact too. The less people gather in groups, the better.
Blue cities are denser than outlying red areas. Density means more opportunities for transmission. All else being equal, they would see higher transmission and per-capita infection rates.
The fact that we see the opposite is unfortunate and unnecessary.
"The state" refers to the governing apparatus, not a particular state within the union. I understand there may be some confusion if you are not familiar with the US government and typical ways of talking about it.
This is an amusing ask given the use of the Commerce Clause in the past couple decades to justify everything from civil rights (Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S.) to strictly intrastate
marijuana trade (Gonzales v. Raich). Doesn't seem that large a stretch to bring a case to the SC claiming that requiring wearing masks is related to interstate commerce closely enough that it would be allowed under the Commerce Clause.
> Please cite me where the power to enact a requirement to wear masks is explicitly granted to the federal government.
Depends on the nature of the mandate. A simple hard mandate (everyone must wear masks in public or be subject individually to federal sanction) may not be authorized, but that's not the only shape of mask mandate possible.
A requirement that a state adopt and show adequate enforcement of control measures deemed necessary by the federal government, including (if deemed necessary) a mask mandate with given parameters or be subject to additional restrictions on interstate trade and travel to restrict the spread of disease to other states is absolutely not only within the scope of the Constitutional power of the federal government under the Commerce Clause, but also within statutory powers already granted to the executive branch under that Constitutional power, in the Public Health Services Act and elsewhere.
They could make a mask mandate a requirement for receiving any amount of federal spending in their state. Something similar happened with the drinking age being raised to 21. Although I wouldn’t put it past some state governments to cut off their nose to spite their face at this point...
The most SIMPLE explanation for you is the following, and it has nothing to do with Laws.
When Trump was given his presidential megaphone he was able to convince a LOT of people to not wear masks by simply not wearing one and then telling people that's fine. At least by taking away the megaphone that's a step in the right direction. Even if there's no specific law that backs him up, that alone may save lives.
Second, even if technically not legal, presidential orders are OFTEN followed. It can be challenged in the courts for years but in the mean time, an order like that will probably have the effect of getting at least another 50M masks put on. That's a fucking win.
The other thing that is 100% legal, is the executive branch can restrict funding in specific ways if a state does not behave. If I was Biden, I would start there.
I'm going to give you a longer answer, taking your concerns in good faith, since most of the responses you have so far are fairly combative.
We need to start by recognizing that, although the Constitution is an important original source in understanding how our government functions, we have over 200 years of Constitutional interpretation that lies on top of it. You are welcome to make a Constitutional argument that goes against the existing jurisprudence, and Constitutional interpretation does change over time, but it does so only slowly. One of the most important principles in Constitutional interpretation is that of stari decisis, or issues which have already been decided. In almost all circumstances, courts adhere to precedence. This isn't always the case, but when you are fighting against the current understanding of the Constitution, you need to realize that you're fighting an uphill battle, and frame your arguments as such.
So where are we in our understanding of these issues? First, the Supreme Court has literally ruled that the Tenth Amendment is useless. Specifically, in US v Sprague (1931, SCOTUS ruled that the Tenth Amendment is a "truism" that "added nothing to the [Constitution] as originally ratified."[1] It was later used to create an anti-commandeering understanding, which in this circumstance just means that the federal government can't pass a law that requires states to enforce a federal mask mandate. There might be a public health exception to that though, but that's where the tenth amendment would be relevant.
You also need to understand that SCOTUS has repeatedly expanded the commerce clause to cover basically everything. The federal government can pass pretty much any law they want, say it affects interstate commerce, and win. You don't have to like that interpretation, but everyone follows it. It was only during the Rehnquist Court that a few exceptions were carved out, but they're very, very narrow. The most famous example was that the court ruled that the federal government couldn't ban handguns in schools under the commerce clause. But for anything even vaguely interstate, and a contagious virus certainly counts, the federal government is allowed to pass pretty much any law it wants.
The courts also tend to be pretty generous towards allowing emergency powers to deal with a genuine crisis. I expect that the federal government could do pretty much anything it wants to deal with COVID. I'm sure they'd allow a national lockdown by executive order right now. A legislative mask mandate would be completely non-controversial from a Constitutional perspective.
Heck, having a president who says masks are important and is seen wearing one in public most of the time and not saying things like "you can wear a mask if you want to, me personally, I'm not going to" would go a long, long way.
However, I'm afraid that the cat is already out of the bag and many weak minds have been poisoned that wearing a mask somehow infringes rights or doesn't do anything.
> However, I'm afraid that the cat is already out of the bag and many weak minds have been poisoned that wearing a mask somehow infringes rights or doesn't do anything.
Negative belief in at least the current reality of the pandemic (if not the historical reality of the disease itself), as well as in mitigation measures like masking, has become an important tribal identity marker. That's going to be difficult to counteract, and probably doesn't work on a rational level (that is, even if you could convince someone that the overt rationale was wrong, that would be more likely to prompt a shift in rationalization than a shift in belief.)
This article demonstrates that the federal government does not (and should not) have the power to act in this manner. CNN found a single law professor who stated this:
> "I don't think that the statute can be read broadly enough to apply to all people merely moving on an interstate highway," Blackman said. "Once you go beyond people in federal facilities, you're really intruding on what the state's responsible for."
At best, they can cover Federal buildings with a policy. That is it.
Your comment proves the article's point. In the entire country, they could only find a single professor to say that the federal government doesn't have the power to issue a mask-mandate for occupants of vehicles on interstate highways.
Given that these roadways in question are interstate the federal government's power to regulate activity thereon is assumed as the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the constitutionally enumerated powers of the federal government.
Im not sure why this is downvoted, especially on a site like HN. If you had a CEO that was anti tracking CAC and just said, doing marketing is enough. The corporate culture of employees would drift toward not tracking CAC (cost of acquisition), even though none of the employees are obligated to buy into that.
The thing that is lost on the national vs state debate is that the presidents role in a our state powered republic is mostly a sales job. Selling culture, building confidence, recruiting domestic and abroad. Having a new culture changes things whether you agree with the change or not. It's not a political statement, it's how the country works.
> In America, any power not explicitly granted to the federal government is left to the states.
I am amused that anyone other than a small child still believes this. The 9th and 10th have been phantoms for longer than you have been alive and are of absolutely no consequence whatsoever.
Oh yeah, there is no 'if' there buddy. Biden won and will be able to enforce any public health measures available to him via executive order starting January 20th.
> In America, any power not explicitly granted to the federal government is left to the states. If Biden wins, this fact does not change, and he cannot enforce any policy regarding masks.
Sure he can.
The exact parameters of any such mandate and its manner of enforcement is circumscribed, but that doesn't mean there is no legally-enforceable federal mask mandate. A direct federal individual mask mandate, with direct personal liability for violations, is least likely to be Constitutional.
A federal mandate that states adopt, enforce, and demonstrate adequate compliance with such a mandate, with failure resulting in additional restrictions on interstate travel and trade, is certainly not only within the power of the federal government under the Commerce Clause, but also the executive branch under the Public Health Services Act and other laws relating to federal commerce-related responses relating to public safety.
I spent a weekend in Oklahoma last month (October 10-11), and was unable to enjoy myself because so few people were wearing masks, observing anything like distancing, etc.
I saw a Carls Jr. employee wearing a corporate-supplied t-shirt that used "maskhole" to describe anyone not wearing a mask... and he was not wearing a mask, just like all the other employees.
The hotel itself was the only place that seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously, so we retreated there, ate takeout, and left early.
The current spike in Oklahoma[0] does not surprise me at all.
I'm very pro-mask but cases are skyrocketing everywhere, even in countries like France and Italy where masking is the norm. I don't presume to know how to fix the issue, but virologist knew this was going to happen -- it is called seasonal forcing[1]. It's disturbing to me that there are people in the US that dont believe COVID-19 is real (I think you can blame the administration for that), but I'm not sure the spikes are surprising.
Fixing the issue is easy, even if brutal. Close everything that can be closed.
As the weather turned colder people started staying indoors and the conditions for transmitting the disease turned more favorable. (Eg restaurants, etc.)
Plus after a critical mass regular (intuitive) precautions are not enough. Eg in France restaurants allowed people to dine if they looked okay, and had a mask on while waiting for a table, and while not actually eating.
A few weeks ago we drove from Hendersonville, NC (by Asheville) down through South Carolina and Georgia. We were the only folks in gas stations wearing masks, and received a few chuckles when people saw us wearing them. Your comment of feeling like an outsider alien really resonates.
I don't think using a gas station as your benchmark is fair. I live in what is literally the bluest state if the per county election maps are to be believed. Nobody wears masks at the gas stations unless you're going inside. Mask compliance is practically 100% inside.
That's funny because I'm from SC and Hendersonville was the first place I felt that was too lax in social distancing this summer. In 2 different restaurants (Pop's Diner and Flat Rock Wood Room) parties were sat at tables adjacent to ours. I actually had to check to see if NC had any sort of restrictions in place. Anecdotally, I would say that mask adoption in SC where I live is ~65-70% but even in places where I was in the minority for wearing a mask I've never seen a smirk or a chuckle and definitely haven't felt alienated.
No matter where you are there will be some fraction of people who are children about it. I'm in Boston and friends have had people yell in their faces about how they're stupid for worrying about it (home depot) and I've personally had people drive by and feel the need to bother shouting out their window about how my mask is gay.
To be fair, my mask has lovely periwinkle patterns and I am gay, but that's a lot of effort they're putting into getting attention and obviously comes from deep seated issues with their own masculinity that aren't my problem.
Nonetheless they have been the exception rather than the rule, so it may be good to assume the best unless someone is actually accosting you.
I've noticed there is a strong tendency for people to assume that a stranger's gaze is antagonistic when in reality they barely register you are there.
It is hard to not be extra sensitive to these things when you are a minority, I guess honestly a lot of people are learning what that feels like for the first time.
I had exactly the same experience driving from Baltimore to Seattle this June.
There were a good amount of masks in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and Indiana it was as if pandemic didn't exist. Hotel employees didn't understand my reluctance to squeeze into a small space to pick up a to-go breakfast, and made snarky comments along the lines of "am I far enough for you sir?"
Madison, WI was much better, but starting from La Crosse all the way through Minnesota and North Dakota plains it was as if you were living in a different reality.
It depends quite a bit on where you are in any particular state. We did a similar move in May and I found that rural gas stations had close to zero mask usage, but in any larger city people were wearing masks. Some tourist hotspots (e.g. Moab) also have good mask compliance, perhaps because local businesses are desperate to avoid a full shutdown.
FWIW, I live in Utah, and in my urban neighborhood I actually see very good mask compliance. Further into the suburbs adherence drops.
Deaths per capita from COVID for the States you referred to, as reported by State health sites mid November 2020:
Nevada: 1 in 1600
Utah: 1 in 4500
Montana: 1 in 2200
North Dakota: 1 in 1300
Minnesota: (outside of the 7 county Twin Cities) 1 in 3700
Michigan: (outside of Detroit area) 1 in 3600
In comparison
Where you moved from (Orange County CA)
1 in 2000
Where you moved to (Michigan/Detroit area Wayne/Detroit City/Oakland/Macomb) 1 in 350, not 1 in 3500, that’s one in three hundred and fifty.
If you moved to someplace six times deadlier (from a COVID standpoint), I’m guessing you have bigger problems to worry about than the COVID public health posture of those States you travelled through...
Implicit in your comment is the assumption that places that have had the highest death rates so far have more to worry about than places that have had the lowest death rates so far.
We got here by whalesalad complaining about people that don't wear masks. What's the point of masks? To slow the spread of the disease. So unless you've got some reason to think that death rates per infection are radically higher in Detroit than anywhere else along the route, then death rates are a somewhat-imperfect-but-still-somewhat-useful proxy for infection rates.
And therefore your comment is pretty pointless. If Detroit is doing worse about preventing infection than all these places that aren't using masks, then being there for the next month is probably going to be worse than passing through all those non-mask-using places for a week or two. (Unless you have reason to think that Detroit not only reached herd immunity, but did so long enough ago that people aren't currently contagious there. But if you think that, I'd like to see your data. More, I'd like to see why you think that about Detroit but not about the non-mask-using-and-therefore-presumably-spreading hinterlands.)
I assume "whalesalad" was a bad autocorrect that was meant to be "wholesale". But since most autocorrects learn from your past typing, I'm really curious what opportunity you had in the past to use the term "whalesalad".
and scroll down to the "Can Our Health System Handle the Spread?" and look at the concentric rings of new infections/million radiating out of North and South Dakota.
This lines up very well with the parent comment's observations.
Meanwhile, here I am in the "anarchist jurisdiction" of Seattle and 90%+ of the people I see are wearing masks, socially distancing, and taking the scientific authorities seriously.
Keep in mind that restaurants are at significantly reduced capacity and those tables are now more widely spread apart.
These guidelines mean you are much less likely to share airspace with strangers. Yes, it's not as safe as not going to a restaurant at all, but they are trying to balance mitigating risk while allowing some economic activity. It's a hard problem.
The last time I drove through central Washington, I saw crowds of people clustered together at the front of restaurants with no masks on. I don't see that here. People generally stay spread out and wear masks when around strangers.
> This sort of pandemic theater is why cases are at an all-time high here
This kind of black-and-white "if you aren't being 100% safe you're just doing pandemic theater" rhetoric helps absolutely nothing.
> why cases are at an all-time high here.
Still better here than in much of the US, despite being the first outbreak, being on lockdown longer than most of the US (and thus with the most pandemic fatigue).
> if you aren't being 100% safe you're just doing pandemic theater
Pandemic theater is a preference for the symbolic over the substantive. It's giving yourself a pass for risky behavior (bars, indoor dining) while sneering at others for actions that are far less impactful ("haha, dumb hicks don't wear masks at the gas station!").
The hicks aren't sick because they won't wear their masks. They are sick because they're doing the same exact thing as you, just more of it. It hardly matters that your tables are spread out, or that you wore your mask while waiting for your reservation. You don't want to sacrifice hanging out with your friends, fine. But it's offensive to use "Science" to justify such a transparently frivolous choice. And I don't see why you should attack people for not wanting to make sacrifices that you yourself refused to.
> It's giving yourself a pass for risky behavior (bars, indoor dining)
Assuming that all indoor dining is created equal is the kind of black-and-white thinking I'm referring to. Look at how detailed the CDC guidance for restaurants is:
Also, the way restaurants are patronized in Seattle is different from Central Washington, at least that I have witnessed. In Seattle, I never see crowds of people clustered together, but I have elsewhere.
> The hicks aren't sick because they won't wear their masks.
I haven't characterized anyone a hick, but these people are spreading COVID more because they are not following the guidance:
> they're doing the same exact thing as you, just more of it.
I don't know why it's necessary to clarify this, but yes, doing a more of a thing that carries non-zero risk is riskier. No one is arguing that Seattlites are at zero risk. Again, black-and-white thinking. The claim is that the way people in Seattle follow the guidelines has a lower total risk than the behavior of people elsewhere.
> It hardly matters that your tables are spread out, or that you wore your mask while waiting for your reservation.
According to the CDC it does.
> And I don't see why you should attack people for not wanting to make sacrifices that you yourself refused to.
I haven't stepped foot inside any building without wearing a mask the entire time since February. I haven't gone to a restaurant or bar (indoors or outdoors) at all. To the best of my recollection, I can count the number of buildings I've been inside on one hand.
The most recent restrictions in Washington don't affect me at all because I never loosened my behavior after the first wave in April. I'm going well above and beyond what's necessary in order to reduce not just my risk but that of the people I come into contact with.
Meanwhile, jackasses are throwing parties and protesting wearing masks and making it worse for everyone.
My experience on a similar trip was that virus diligence bottomed out in the Dakotas. I went to a restaurant, and their mask warning said something to the effect of "please wear a mask, if you don't we'll assume you have a health condition." Of course, the restaurant was filled to capacity without a mask in sight.
Last time I had to hit the road, I noticed that the social distancing/mask wearing travelers were avoiding towns and eating/relaxing at highway rest stops.
I have lived in Philadelphia for almost 8 years now and it’s making less and less sense to live here.
City taxes are high, housing prices are steadily increasing, making changes to property is an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare, parking is a nightmare, etc. There aren’t (m)any good places to work that pay well enough to justify the taxes and cost of living. The winter is cold and dreary, the summer is humid.
If not for covid it would make a lot more sense to live in Boston or NYC.
I’m interested in moving to South Carolina or Florida.
Please don't use other people's real names in your HN username - it's a distraction and ultimately a subtle form of trolling (even if you don't mean it to be). If you'd like to use this account with a different name, we can change it for you - just email hn@ycombinator.com with the new name.
If you want to live in SC or FL, Philly was never the right place for you. The city exemplifies all classic east coast metropolii; it's vertical, industrial, impatient, no-nonsense and in-your-face. Having lived here for 15 years I've seen Philly offer a little bit of everything, from cultured worldliness to provincial naval gazing. And all of it happens at an urban breakneck speed the east coast is rightly famous for.
Philly, Boston, and NYC are kith and kin (esp. politically), and have much more in common with SF than do SC or non-urban FL. There the tempo of life is slower and more formal, like their danse de rigueur, the gavotte.
I live in Chicago, and masks are the norm everywhere. Definitely indoors, and to a lesser degree outdoors. We rented a house in Wisconsin for a weekend in the fall, and culturally there was a big difference. Went to pick up a pizza and the outdoor patio was packed, drinking beer and watching college football. There were some people wearing masks, but it was not the norm. We were definitely in the minority.
I have family in rural Wisconsin and she wanted to buy masks and couldn't even find anywhere local to buy some. I ended up buying her a bunch in California and shipping them to her.
I had the exact same experience on a trip to Tahoe a few months ago. My girlfriend and I needed to get away, so, we booked a hotel and just stayed in for the weekend. We didn't see one single other person wearing a mask who wasn't some sort of restaurant server. We got our food to go.
While the SF Bay Area is much better than most of the country, it's still annoying seeing people here not use masks outside of their homes, or wear them improperly.
With masks we can get back to normal relatively quickly, but people just need to wear them
Interesting to see you say the SF Bay Area is much better than most of the country, while this article says the Bay Area is experiencing significant population decline:
The whole conversation is about infections from Covid. I don't think that chaostheory needed to explicitly state the context. Everyone in every post in every thread does not need to state the entire context. That's what threads are for.
Masks will not allow us to get back to normal more quickly. The only thing that will allow that is immunity through vaccinations. Countries other than the US have implemented strict mask & border controls still do not have a handle on the virus.
China doesn't seem to have a covid problem. Now, granted it's difficult to trust their official statements on anything because of how easily they lie thinking everyone else is too stupid to see through it. But I'd think if covid were actually a problem there word would get out eventually.
I understand they put some pretty severe restrictions in place initially, though. Probably far too strict for most of us in the west to truly consider. But now they don't need them, and people are more or less living normally.
People in Asia, from both what I've seen and what my relatives keep telling me, no longer quarantine or social distance. Case in point: Singapore. They have a larger population than New Zealand yet live on an island that's smaller than NYC. They have virtually no local cases. They all wear masks.
btw which country were you referring to that had both mask mandates and strict border controls, and simultaneous are unable to contain it? Doesn't New Zealand has both? They seem to be managing it just fine.
When are we going to stop playing the blame game in regards to COVID? When it's cases in middle America surging, observers are "not surprised". How can this comment be taken as anything but scorn and disdain for rural Americans? It's repugnant.
Where was this same sentiment when places like NYC were getting swamped with Covid? Anyone?
I'm so damn tired of this holier-than-thou approach to COVID, and life in general. It gets nobody anywhere, except for making the person casting aspersions feel better than the ones they're looking down on.
If anything, this pandemic sure has made people show their true colors. Always a good thing, I suppose
The sentiment was everywhere. Rural and suburban areas thinking that NYC deserved it and that it just couldn't happen where they were. And then they refused the fruits of the lessons learned in New York because it just couldn't happen where they were.
People want to complain about the polarization of middle america, but it's mostly BS. What you see online or on the news is not at all indicative of these areas. By that, I mean, these areas are not swarming with people who "refused the fruits of the lessons" of NYC and other places. And I've met VERY few, if any, who thought that NY et. al somehow deserved the pandemic spread.
Where are you getting this information from, if you don't mind me asking?
I'm not sure where you're getting your facts from, but I've been travelling all throughout the MidWest and the South for work this past year. Most people are plenty concerned about Covid, wear masks, etc. It's a highly contagious disease that no country, except for a very select few, have gotten under control in any way.
Once again, I think the country would be a lot better if we just stopped pointing fingers like this.
I'm not American and I don't live in USA. But when a communication center with high density of population is infected at the beginning of a new epidemic it's quite logical this happening. When the pandemic expand to low density areas 6/7 months later when we know a lot of ways to reduce the contaminations, it's not normal this is hapenning.
Watching the divergent responses by governors & states who, more generally, trust scientific experts (E.g., Hogan in Maryland, Inslee in WA), vs governors who don't...
I'm glad I live in WA. If I lived in one of those other states, I would look for work, then move when I found it. Family ties, whatever; wouldn't matter. It's a clear breakdown of competent government; time to leave for a better place. For myself and even more, my kid. Not particularly related to urban/suburban/rural divides. Nor per se even Dem vs GOP.
Even if 10 years from now we discover that wearing a mask was a completely pointless endeavor .... the cost of wearing a mask is SO LOW that it is worth doing it.
But it is scientifically proven to limit the rate of the spread, which is the least I can do to protect myself and those around me.
I don't care if I get covid ... I don't think it will kill me based on my vitals. However, we don't fully understand the long term physical and mental health implications of having it (both neurological and psychological), we don't understand it from a 'pre-existing condition' standpoint, and hey who knows it could hit me like a train and do me serious harm or kill me. Plus, I would like to further the goal of eliminating the virus entirely, and not spreading it to others helps that.
I can't believe there are still people out there clamoring to the idea that there is any other way.
A counter point to consider - and one that I consider to be a little more rational - is that - what if in the messaging to get people to wear masks - we have inadvertantly encouraged riskier behavior?
As an analogy, I'd explain it like this. What if in the process to encourage people to wear seatbelts, drivers who did that then felt entitled to drive even faster thus resulting in even worse accidents and more frequent ones at that. Of course, no driver would actually think like that.
While I wear my mask, I do wonder about its overall effectiveness especially if in total we all engage in riskier behavior that we wouldn't have otherwise if we simply lived with the basic fear that you have to stay away from everyone.
Masks "help", but maybe they "help" most by thinking of them as not a help at all. It's a tough paradox to encode into public health messaging.
This is an interesting argument, and it's hard to say anything without data, which would be hard to measure imo.
As a counter, my intuition is that masks also remind people of the risks and actually encourage safe behavior. I feel this in myself, a greater awareness of the pandemic, a nudge towards being more careful. Extending your analogy, it's as if the seatbelt reminded people that there are some pretty grisly accidents out there, and maybe they should take it easy.
Both effects probably exist, not sure what wins out, and how much it matters.
I don't know about seat-belts or how this relates to mask wearing, but I was astonished when I learned that my car insurance (some ten years ago) was unwilling to give me a lower rate based on my car being equipped with ABS. Their stated reasoning was, that ABS led to riskier driver behavior and no net safety gain.
Everyone wears masks in NYC and there was no COVID uptick until the last month or so.
even if it encourages risky behavior, there's no evidence that it does it enough to translate to higher spread overall, which is what matters. As long as the net impact doesn't increase transmission, they're not a problem.
"Everyone" wears masks in NYC? I don't know where exactly you're talking about but that's definitely not true. Certain neighborhoods are better than others but even so there are tons who don't.
There are neighborhoods that are much less mask-compliant than others, but in my day-to-day, the vast majority of people I see are in masks. It's certainly enough to say that wearing masks doesn't make COVID spread worse at a population level.
The worst neighborhoods for COVID over the summer were ones that were known for poor mask compliance, anyway.
What I don't get, is even for the people saying that the symptoms are like the flu. Clearly they don't remember having the flu, because if I can wear a mask to avoid any fever, that is a reasonable cost to me.
I think the pre-existing condition is what scares me the most. There have been studies on people who recovered from SARS, and these people still suffer from fatigue and brain fog over 4 years later.
The cost is the alarming sight, causing the economic crisis. In Santa Clara/CA so far only some 400 people died of COVID-19, i.e. about 2 a day, while some 40 a day die of unrelated causes. Yet, if you step outside, you might think the Zombie apocalypse is happening.
If you let COVID run rampant, you will see higher death rates. It's not much of an argument to compare the death rate while mitigating practices are in place.
There are two factors involved that are similar, but not managed the same way.
1. Hospital Capacity: Economic shutdowns have been largely to manage Hospital capacity since if all the hospitals in an area are overwhelmed, the death toll will grow since patients suffering any kind of acute issue will have nowhere to turn
2. The spread of disease (COVID-19): This is what is trying to be controlled by encouraging people to perform effective steps to limit the spread (with a second-order effect of reducing demand on the hospital) -- that is, if less people get the disease, less people die from the disease, and we can get a vaccine program and have an overall lower casualty rate from COVID-19.
Both of these strategies do not have to be employed.
For example, in the case where there's no effective vaccine in the near future, it might make sense to simply ensure that everyone gets infected at a slow enough rate that Hospital Capacity is not critical. This is because with this pandemic, over a long enough timeline (and again, without an effective vaccine), everyone will get the disease eventually. So in this scenario you are simply concerned about managing hospital capacity, and your tools are masks, social distancing, and economic shutdowns -- no need to track the infection, etc. Some locales are using this approach, and shutting down hot-spots without too much focus on how the disease is spreading, but most developed countries are tracking the spread much more closely and can be more targeted with the guidance. This was likely the initial thinking of many people, and why a shutdown did not occur before disease had spread widely.
On the other hand, if you assume a compliant population a near total economic shutdown to for a short period of time, with strict social distancing and containment measure to ensure that there is no spread, along with no new individuals, and a strong track-trace policy, then you can eradicate the cases with minimal masks. This is basically what China did, as far as I understand it. This was the initial model other locales tried to implement when they went into "Lockdown"-mode, but were not as successful, also -- again, from my limited understanding as a lay person.
On a third hand, if we assume we are going to have an effective vaccine in the near future (which was FAR from certain when this whole thing played out) it makes more sense to do both in concert -- that is, primarily limit the total number of people infected (masks and social distancing; this is because the long term outcomes of people afflicted with COVID-19 are unknown, limit that unknown risk) with a secondary task of managing Hospital capacity to prevent things from becoming catastrophic. This is sort-of where most locales have landed at the moment: Mandate masks (slow the spread) and shutdown hot-spots as they are detected (manage hospital capacity).
I find people not wearing masks much more alarming than people not wearing them. I am much more alarmed at the prospect of mass death than people wearing jaunty masks.
In Sweden, where there's little mandated, so far only some 6000 out of 10 million died of COVID-19. That is significant (in the statistical sense), but hardly mass death (given that in the relevant time frame some 40000 died of unrelated causes).
Masks alone don't cause the widespread panic, mass media did their part.
In Sweden, they have socialized healthcare, strong unions, and robust social safety net, and an overall healthier population. So America should copy those things too right?
Ah, but I don't live in Sweden, I live in NYC. So, mass death is on my mind.
Nobody here panicked in February, or the first week of March. We were more or less going about our daily lives like normal, because that's what the state health people told us to do. Nobody wore masks, nobody social distanced.
By April 1st, NYC was seeing 500 deaths a day and increasing. It's the largest mass casualty event in NYC since 9/11, and was much worse, in body-count terms. It was comparable to the 1918 flu epidemic.
Of course, a NYC-level of mass death is absolutely not guaranteed to happen elsewhere. Different populations, different habits, luck- there's variables. But do not tell me that it's media hysteria when you didn't listen to ambulance sirens for a month.
Here's a quote from Robert Redfield, the director of CDC.
> We are not defenseless against COVID-19. Cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus -- particularly when used universally within a community setting. All Americans have a responsibility to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.
I trust his expertise and judgment. What's the basis for ignoring his advice and not wearing a mask?
Here in the Netherlands Jaap van Dissel (who holds a similar position to your Robert Redfield) remains unconvinced of the effectiveness of non-medical masks and argues they may do more harm than good. But admitting to trusting his expertise and judgement will probably get you downvoted around here.
The effectiveness of non-medical masks is not all that great. Bandannas, near zero. N95, quite good.[1] Cloth masks are all over the place depending on material, weave, etc.
CDC: "During a pandemic, cloth masks may be the only option available; however, they should be used as a last resort when medical masks and respirators are not available".
Ordinary medical masks are easy to get now. N95 masks are still hard to get in the US. The trick that makes N95 masks work is that they have a middle layer that's an electret with tiny holes, with a semi-permanent static charge. That will capture solid particles smaller than the holes by electrostatic attraction. So it can actually stop an aerosol. Cloth masks and the lower tiers of medical masks don't have that.
It's pathetic that, nine months into the epidemic, the US doesn't have N95 masks in volume production. Prices on eBay are 10x normal. Normal price is under $20 for a box of 20. Where's the "free market"?
The free market is right there, refusing to address shortages and price gouging you for essential supplies. A few people are getting rich and many people are being put at risk, but the free market is fine with this.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the government adopted a non-free-market solution and has been making KN95 masks available to its population through a combination of rationing and subsidies. Everyone has access to two masks a week, and the overwhelming majority of people wear them.
South Korea has one of the lowest rates of infection in the world and is one of the few economies expected to grow in 2020.
Yes. If factories can hike prices, then they can recoup their investments faster. Right now there's little incentive for them to invest into expanding capacity, because the demand eventually dies down, and they never see a return on the sums they invested.
>The common theme is that during an outbreak like this, everybody wants to be his customer. But as soon as an outbreak subsides, his customers dump him and run back to China. The reason? His masks may cost a dime each, but a made-in-China mask might go for two cents.
>“Last time he geared up and went three shifts a day working his tail off,” the mayor recalled. “As soon as the issue died, he didn’t have any sales. He had to pay unemployment for all these people, and he had to gear down.”
Who’s going to invest anything in solving this problem, knowing we will indignantly refuse to compensate them? There would be stockpiles and reserve factory capacity if only we allowed them to be worth keeping.
For those that say the president has no power: This is were the federal government can step up and use its emergency powers to mandate N95 mask production
This is probably the single biggest failure of the outgoing administration. They forced industry to produce tens of thousands of ventilators that proved unnecessary. They should have ensured every American had access to free (or cheap) N95 masks.
To be fair, at the time ventilators were being rationed.
Of course the need for ventilators was predicted well before the rationing was occuring, so if the administration had acted sooner rationing may have been avoided.
Instead ventilators were no longer and issue by the time they were being produced.
> KN95s are easy to get and probably work a bit better than cloth masks (though probably worse than proper N95s).
ISTR recently seeing that 90% of "KN95" masks independently tested do not meet the published requirements for the rating, so, I'd hope that is worse than N95 (the requirements are slightly different, but substantively similar), though still probably better than cloth masks.
The Constitution was ratified before anyone accepted that germs cause disease. Even if it weren't, I doubt they'd have had the foresight to predict the vast number of radicalized buffoons who would demand the "freedom" to needlessly expose fellow citizens to a virus that's killed 250k people.
> The Constitution was ratified before anyone accepted that germs cause disease.
And yet state regulations (even once the Bill of Rights was generally -- though not, I note, explicitly) applied to states via the 14th Amendment requiring people to cover body parts in public to protect some vague combination of public health and public morality have remained in place in all 50 states.
I don't think "cover your nose and mouth in public" mandates (by the states) have any federal constitutional vulnerability as long as "cover your genitals and anus in public" mandates are widely recognized as enforceable.
Federal mandates for mask wearing in public generally would probably have to be conditional mandates on the states and/or have travel/commerce consequences for noncompliance to be secure (mandates on the states with state-level travel/commerce consequences being the most secure), though.
As another mentioned, its easy to make arguments for several of those having extended effects on others. And we legislate around that, we legislate those things to generally be allowed but socially engineered to bias away from with things like "sin taxes"
In the same way, it may be a lot more palatable to have such laws around covid, (higher tax on businesses which refuse to require masks for customers, but they're allowed to refuse if they choose etc, employees would likely still be require to mask) instead of mandated requirement to wear a mask
I somehow doubt it! I can hardly imagine a smaller burden to place on a person than to compel them to wear a mask, and yet look at the endless bickering it's caused. The idea that the people protesting mask mandates would find this tax more palatable seems completely implausible.
The whole idea about taxing away undesirable behavior is fine in general I guess, but if you think of the major effect as reducing the R0 of the virus, then why not just go further and make a full mask mandate? The smoking thing for example might have secondary effects, but not the way a /virus/ does. Is there no burden so small, no benefit to society so large, as to justify a mandate?
I would say several of those examples actually do increase increase risk to others, second hand smoke, being incapacitated by drugs or alcohol can often put others at risk for a number of reasons, etc. Furthermore, I would think that other behaviors, like having an unhealthy diet or not getting enough exercise put an increased burden on society which is borne by others, even if they are not put at risk.
A casual encounter with secondhand smoke has an exceedingly small likelihood of causing a spontaneous mutation resulting in lung cancer.
A casual encounter with a SARS-CoV-2 infected individual coughing on you without a mask can easily land someone in the ICU.
Being incapacitated by drugs and alcohol are permissible in certain situations (being in your own home), not in others (driving on the freeway).
In a similar fashion, not wearing a mask is permissible in some situations (being in your own home), not in others (standing six inches behind me in line at the grocery store).
"I would say several of those examples actually do increase increase risk to others, second hand smoke, being incapacitated by drugs or alcohol can often put others at risk for a number of reasons, etc."
which is why all those things are limited by law. I can't smoke in public spaces, I can't drive drunk, etc.
They are not 'rights' as you seem to argue, and they are limited/regulated just like a million other behaviors. Wearing a mask is no different. Personally, I'd say mask regulations are the equivalent of seatbelt laws - maybe uncomfortable, or inconvenient but basically harmless.
I don't think the constitution requires you to smoke? Just like it doesn't require you not to wear a mask. So given you can freely choose to wear a mask and help save lives and reduce the severity of this pandemic, why would you not?
Specifically, what freedoms are those? Where are they enumerated in the text of the Constitution, its amendments, or the corpus of constitutional jurisprudence?
Citing “the freedoms guaranteed by The Constitution” is fairly meaningless in the abstract. There are specific protections and rights afforded by the Constitution that have been defined in the actual constitutional text and whose interpretation has been refined through legislation and the courts. Those are what you should be able to point to rather than vaguely gesturing at some poorly-defined concept of “freedoms.”
Not unsurprisingly, there is a record of jurisprudence permitting limitations on freedom of association, movement, etc. during public health crises. Are you suggesting that that the decisions in those cases are somehow opposed to the (actual, specific) text of the Constitution? If so, what specific provisions are being violated?
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Yes, but as the primary text of the constitution doesn't guarantee any rights, it's sufficient to list the rights supplied by amendments to cover "constitutional rights."
The basis most people provide is either an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the rights given to US citizens by the Constitution of the United States, unfortunately.
And your statement shows you do not understand the constitution, or more specifically the bill of rights. You are not given them, they are recognized as natural rights not government granted rights, and the bill of rights merely recognizes them.
If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice. Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks. It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
I personally believe in wearing masks, though primarily feel the value in the typical cloth or surgical masks are keeping you from touching your face.
> If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice. Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks.
Do you also believe this about laws prohibiting drunk driving, or regulating seatbelt wearing and the side of the road you're allowed to drive on? OSHA rules around workplace safety, hardhats, fall protection? I'll wait to see if the anti-mask crowd crusades against the infringement of their "right" to drive intoxicated. Otherwise, I'll continue to see it for what it is: Political virtue signaling and contrarianism sans empathy.
It should be (and is) perfectly possible to legally avoid wearing a mask in places with mask regulations. You may do this by avoiding public places.
> It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
Strange how selectively this idea is applied by some in this country.
Since most states have had public nudity laws on the books for many decades that haven't been struck down as unconstitutional, I don't see how regulations requiring masks in a time of pandemic would be a problem.
Natural rights are a social fiction and have as much or as little power as we believe they have. You appear to have a strong belief in them, but their power is limited by how much you can convince others to believe.
One might be tempted to agree if the converse were observed, those who believe in their right to not wear masks should observe the rights of those who ask that all who enter or interact with their staff wear masks. If you choose not to wear a mask, you choose not to enter that store or engage that employee. The problem is we have people who want people around them wearing masks, yet those people are refusing to stay away and in a number of instances assaulted and even murdered people who tried to restrict their movement into private property with a mask requirement.
I hear your line of reasoning from these same crazed individuals so I am lead to believe that this is the extreme end of that set of beliefs without also observing the corollary that I mention above..
> If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice. Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks. It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
Would the same principal apply if the other person had ebola?
What about someone like Typhoid Mary - should her right to do what she wanted be placed higher than the rights of others not to be infected?
> You are not given them, they are recognized as natural rights not government granted rights
They are, in fact, government granted whether or not the theory of granting them is that the government was obligated to because of preexisting moral rights, and its quite likely that there was not universal consensus on the underlying theory among everyone involved in drafting, proposing, and ratifying them.
But more importantly, "the right to not be mandated to wear covering over some part of the body to protect either public health or public morality" is not explicitly, or given the history of such mandates and their survival against challenge, on the evidence of legal precedent implicitly a right in the Constitution. You are arguing for a novel right that goes against the well-settled understanding of the rights in the Constitution (whether Amendments 1-10 or otherwise); which is fine, most people would agree things like Loving or Brown were good decisions despite the fact that the rights involved had not previously been recognized in the form those decisions found them. But to argue for such a novel interpretation of Constitutional rights, you need more than vague handwaving at the Constitution in general, you need an argument about how the explicit text in the Constitution supports your novel interpretation.
> If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice.
Yes, but it is not a choice that, either morally or Constitutionally, needs to be free of consequences, including restricting the scope of available activities one may engage in.
If someone chooses not to wear covering over their genitals, that's their choice, but its fairly uncontroversial that the law may restrict them from being in public places when they make that choice.
> Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks. It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
I have yet to see a mask mandate that concerns itself with mandate beliefs, only actions in cases where one is exposed to other people (and, invariably in those I've seen, people who live outside of the subject's household.)
> I personally believe in wearing masks, though primarily feel the value in the typical cloth or surgical masks are keeping you from touching your face.
The value of cloth or surgical masks is in reducing the distance (and quantity at any given distance) of droplet spready from exhalation, sneezes, and coughing. They aren't as good as better masks, or social distancing, but the general recommendation (and, in many case, mandate) is for them to be worn in situations where essential activities make the recommended social distancing impossible to maintain/guarantee.
Countries with dense populations, nearly universal mask wear, and also only minimally 'locked down' have very low Covid19 rates. Examples include Japan, South Korea and China.
In my mind, the above facts are really all that's necessary: dense population + minimal lock down + universal mask wear == low Covid19 rates.
Do you have a link to the high mask compliance in Indiana handy? I've honestly looked for this kind of data and haven't been able to find it, and so assumed fairly poor (US-wide at least) mask wear based on anecdotes.
I've posted this elsewhere, but mask compliance in the United States is ~80%. This is of course subject to error, but both where I live and in my travels, most everyone wears a mask. This includes urban and rural areas, some with mandates some without.
Mask usage is generally targeted at indoor spaces. There has been a great deal of research on outdoor spread, and it is nearly non-existent. Mask use outside is like wearing a condom after a vasectomy. Yeah, it might give you a bit more peace of mind, but it really isn't the main thing that is keeping you safe.
That is to say, I believe the survey is targeted for indoor mask usage, as this is also the mandate in most states that mandate mask wearing (while indoors, or outdoors when 6 feet is not possible)
To be clear: I wasn't saying that minimal lockdown was the reason for low numbers, though how I laid it out is definitely unclear.
My belief is that near universal mask compliance is the main reason some countries have managed to keep the virus under control even though they haven't been forced to do severe lockdowns.
Your point about contact tracing is relevant of course. I know both Japan and S. Korea did a lot of that, and of course the US didn't even try.
It seems that both Japan and Korea did reverse contact tracing, where you figure out where the infected person got the disease. This is in contrast to many other places, which just tried to assess where the infected person could have spread the disease.
This may perhaps (along with masks, and the use of pretty much every source of data by Korea) explain much of the variance in outcomes.
> Out of curiosity, what is your basis for wearing a mask?
Protecting those around me if I happen to be carrying but asymptomatic. If it reduces the chances of spreading the disease by even 1% then it's worth a slight inconvenience to help keep my fellow humans safe.
IMO, being willing to accept a minor inconvenience for the betterment of the population as whole is a key facet of being a functioning member of society.
You replied to a sub-thread with a bunch of questions around the idea that mask wearing is not effective.
First of all, we need central coordination to have a chance to beat something like covid19. Information about it increases daily and news outlets are notoriously bad about getting science-facts correct. Human-to-human communication (aka: let's play telephone) is demonstrably bad at keeping a coherent message. This all leads us to:
This lists actual studies based on human populations and outbreaks that indicate mask wearing is effective. It also lists references if you want to dive into the sources for yourself.
Bottom line: this isn't about belief in masks. It's about belief in real world results.
> Given that we're seeing the same spike in our big, coastal metro areas
When taking the differences in total population and population density into account, the spikes in sparsely populated states like OK are nothing like the spikes in densely populated states like NY.
rather than moralizing angrily ('fucks'), why not try to hone in on what you're worried about exactly? were you really in danger?
if you'd have focused more on the lack of distancing indoors, that might have been a legitimate concern. but masks are for show in most places, at most times, and your focus on them indicates a retreat to symbolism rather than effect. the primary appeal of masks is for quelling fear and anxiety, not preventing spread.
the one common place they would help, the private social gathering, is where they're donned the very least, because masks have strong connotations of mistrust, which is antithetical to socializing. so masks won't save us, no matter how much force is put behind them. even in countries commonly cited for high mask usage, other more primary mitigative measures are what led to propagation control, not masks. masks are marginal.
walking through a lobby/store or sitting at a table in a restaurant with your family isn't a significant risk, no matter what the other patrons are doing, as long as there's a little distance between (no, the virus is not floating around in significant concentrations to probabalistically infect you from across the room; it falls to the ground and dies quickly). the only other person you should worry about there is your server, who, out of at least "corporate necessity", will likely be wearing a mask, a decent use of masking as someone who interacts closely with lots of strangers (rather than, say, outside, where they're wasted).
this kind of moralizing is not out of a cohesive worry for others, but a divisive fear (anger is a primal reaction to fear). so why are we so fearful and anxious? deconstructing that would be a more fruitful discussion than dwelling so much on the anxiety itself.
> the primary appeal of masks is for quelling fear and anxiety, not preventing spread.
The appeal of masks for me is definitely to lower spread. Yes there is signaling, but also because masks reduce amount of possibly covid-infected droplets expelled from the mouth and nose while breathing and speaking.
It is not possible to have a 6 foot bubble around everybody at all times. It is possible to always wear a mask.
that's rationalization, not science. feel free to wear a mask everywhere if it makes you feel better and aligns with your mediosocial affiliations, but the breadth of science show that masks are effective in specific, marginal situations, not everywhere, and that its population-level effects are drowned out by other, better mitigations.
Maybe we’ve been reading very different breadths of science. Saying masks only work in a small number of situations sounds more like rationalization for not wearing one when we know aerosols are a major source of spread, and that masks significantly reduce aerosol transmission.
1) I don't think its consensus that aerosols are a MAJOR source of spread.
2) Masks are much less effective for aerosols than for droplet transmission. I think the consensus is they at least somewhat reduce aerosol transmission. Only n95 w/o exhale vents that are properly worn are believed to be good at reducing aerosol transmission.
The fact that your glasses fog up shows that surgical masks certainly are very leaky.
aerosols are not a significant source of spread. otherwise, we'd have been inundated with specific stories and studies proving it. distancing overwhelms the effects of masks in nearly all common interaction cases.
I see this perspective a lot on social media and I think it just adds to the corona response culture shock. No one ever seems to understand each other better when this is brought up.
People seem to always assume/project the other party is controlled by high levels of anxiety around using masks when in reality I see most people know that distancing/masks are a risk mitigation technique (NOT a one-stop-fix, but a risk mitigation) used to bring virus spread rate down and flatten the curve. Instead of being an emotionally charged subject, I think most people see distancing/masks as a tool to reduce the spread of the virus so that we can go out more often as opposed to taking no mitigations and contributing to exponential rates of virus spread.
With this perspective, I think feeling violated by people avoiding masks is a healthy, normal response. It's not about feeling anxious for going outside, but that we have been violated by people spreading the virus to others causing us to have to extend the lockdown and keep our economy dead in order to not over-burden the hospitals.
distancing (indoors), yes. masks everywhere, not so much.
it’s important to dig into these nuances to dispel the anxiety and fear we have against each other (like feeling violated). and lockdowns (in the US at least) are political theater, accruing benefit to a few and wreaking discriminate havoc on the many. the mediopolitical apparatus deserves that blame, not the vilified ‘other’.
The whole “just be 6 feet away and it can’t get to you” is not reality, despite what the CDC or WHO says. Sure, keeping 6 feet apart helps reduce exposure compared to being 2 feet apart, but droplets containing the virus don’t all just magically hit the ground within that radius. Ventilation of fresh air is critical because of the buildup of aerosols that occurs indoors: https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-a... I’ll be blunt. Restaurants are not a good idea right now; when people are eating and talking they are filling the air with spit, and you can’t wear a mask while eating. And even with masks, prolonged exposure indoors without any fresh air will expose many if one person in the room is contagious.
Masks are one additional piece—and truly one of the easiest measures—to reduce overall exposure. It’s been well established that even basic masks significantly reduce the amount of aerosols emitted as we talk, so when I’m in a grocery store surrounded by others, I do feel unsafe if people aren’t wearing masks, because it means far more of their airborne spit emitted when they breathe, talk, cough, or sneeze is reaching my eyes and lungs than if they would just wear a simple, cheap surgical mask. Medical personnel don’t wear masks for the hell of it; they wear them because it substantially reduces the amount of transmission, and does provide some small amount of protection to the wearer versus wearing nothing.
I don’t even blame people for coming to the conclusion that masks don’t need to be worn. The science has gotten much clearer over the past year and yet our governmental leaders have not only failed to accurately convey what we’ve learned, but have actually lost the trust they may have had. It’s no wonder people are confused about what works to reduce risk and what doesn’t, and how significant the risks are, when our leaders fist told us masks only protect doctors, then told us we could stop the spread with short, poorly enforced lockdowns that maximized economic harm without sufficiently quarantining the population, and now are telling everyone to wear a mask without properly acknowledging that aerosols are a major mechanism for superspreader events.
note that care workers interact intimately closely with others, and are a good example of the marginal case where masks are a primarily effective mitigation. most common interactions don’t fit this profile.
"...case-patients were more likely to have reported dining at a restaurant (aOR = 2.4, 95% CI = 1.5–3.8) in the 2 weeks before illness onset than were control-participants."
as an instance of seeing what we want to see in what is otherwise a random event (like flipping 6 heads in a row is not that uncommon over lots of flips).
the simpler, more likely explanation is that those were three different sets of transmissions that happened to be sitting next to each other in a restaurant at the same time, with a clever narrative tying it together. cleverness restrains our otherwise natural skepticism.
we'd likely have seen dozens of similar stories if this was a significant mode of transmission. and nyt is biased and partisan enough to have featured those stories prominently if they'd have been available.
My friend works in the covid ICU here in Michigan and told me yesterday that she's seeing a dramatic increase in patients who are getting angry at her and still believing that covid is not real. When she asks where they may have caught it, they sometimes say at a wedding with 100 people where no one was wearing masks.
I can't imagine how emotionally taxing it was to be a healthcare worker attending to people with covid in the beginning, but at least then they received a lot of gratitude from their patients. I cannot fathom how these healthcare workers must feel after 8 months of this and then getting yelled at by patients who don't think this is real. I almost don't even want to imagine how much pain they might be feeling.
I don’t know how these healthcare workers do it. Why would I put my physical and mental health in danger to save people who are that selfish? I suspect many of them need the job. But those who do it out of a sense of duty are better people than I am I guess.
Ambition leads people to med school, med school brainwashes people into the sense of duty thing, and then the first ten years of clinical practice unravel that into a jaded spiral of misanthropy (but by that point you're sill paying off interest on that 100k debt, so what else are you going to do?).
I have an aunt who was forced to come into work at her hospital before stay-at-home orders were in effect in Florida. Not complying meant professional consequences.
I think it's the number of people they have to save in such a short time. Using the firefighter example, it would be like all of a sudden, the whole city caught on fire. And then once the city is out, the next city catches on fire and because there aren't enough firefighters there, you go to help. And then once that city is out, the next, etc.
Added on top of the fact they are worried they'll catch the virus and maybe even spread it to their loved ones. In the US at least, I imagine most nurses thought they would work with less or non-infectious diseases, like cardiovascular diseases, not an outbreak that could lead them to infecting and killing people they loved.
Again, I think there are just some variables that make this situation different than what they thought they were signing up for.
This is a harsh thing to say, but I understand where you're coming from.
We....all of us, all human beings...need to be very patient and merciful with each other.
My wife and I know good, honest and smart people who are fully convinced that Covid19 isn't that dangerous, that it's a hoax, etc.
I'm not saying "smart" lightly.
All humans...even the best of us...are at our core deeply irrational most of the time. Different groups of us are irrational about different things.
Saying all of this, I do not mean to minimize the focused, concerted actions of a relative few who have taken advantage of not just human weakness but also the new communication technologies available to them.
We should reserve our ire for those who pull the strings of manipulation to the detriment of many.
Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.
Not the original poster, but I would imagine it echos what I have seen (and believe myself) in that it’s not a hoax as is normally defined, but a mass hysteria fueled by a media that needs clicks to survive. The risks are real for certain demographics, we need to take precautions to help vulnerable people, etc. however the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and deaths of despair.
I have been called a denier, and have had my beliefs references as “believing COVID is a hoax”, which is far from the truth. From what I can tell a huge portion of the United States is engaged in a mass delusion, and is actively handing over all the prosperity for the next decade to large corporations who benefit from COVID, while risking the future of kids with mostly worthless remote learning.
Focus the effort required to create lockdowns / restrictions on providing relief for elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people, etc.
If some misguided old people in the Midwest want to pretend they are not at risk, it’s their life and their body to do that with. Sucks for the healthcare workers tasked with dealing with that, but you can’t legislate away life, risk, etc.
> the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and deaths of despair.
None of these things are inevitable. For example China arguably implemented some extremely drastic policies and they are doing just fine now. New Zealand did the same. In the United States we are just doing an incredibly bad job at this.
Too many people talk about controlling the virus and protecting the economy as if they are polar opposites but the aren't. A month or two of drastic lockdowns early on would have saved the years of slow bleeding we are currently facing.
The way China controlled the virus is legally impossible in the United States. You simply can't confine someone to their home without due process.
New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Early in COVID, everyone suddenly became statisticians and had opinions on exponential growth, and while most of their proclamations were ill-informed, the truth remains that one infection can spiral out of control quickly. With a disease that exhibits nearly 40% asymptomatic rates and is aerosolized, there is no eradication. It will be with us in waves until we are immune via natural immunity or vaccinations.
If New Zealand opened their ports today to the same levels as the United States' ports, they would quickly see a spike.
> New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Firstly, New Zealand is not closed to human travel. It has mandatory quarantine for inbound travelers.
The US can do the same. It is in an even better situation to do so than New Zealand, because its economy is less dependant on tourism and imports.
It would be utterly pointless, of course, because nearly anywhere in the world has less COVID-per-capita than the US. A random traveler from Kentucky, or New Jersey is just as likely to be a COVID carrier as someone flying in from Paris. Keeping Parisians out isn't doing anything to stop spread, at this point. [1]
As for the legality of locking people in their own homes, the US is no stranger to blanket curfews during a state of emergency... Or for imprisoning symptomatic, or asymptomatic carriers of a disease.
[1] In a stroke of brilliance, travel from China to the US is still banned. Can anyone puzzle out how this policy is currently helping improve American health outcomes?
New Zealand has really 2 truly international airports (Auckland and Christchurch). The United States has over 50. In 2017, the United States saw over ~70,000,000, tourists through her ports of entry, while New Zealand saw 3,700,000 . These statistics are for tourist entries, so they don't even include repatriating citizens who traveled internationally. To institute the same quarantine rules in the United States would be untenable. Furthermore, inbound travelers to the United States _are_ supposed to quarantine for 14 days, there is just no enforcement mechanism.
And regarding the per capita infections, the most important figure is tests/1M population. We both know that testing doesn't cause infections, and tests only tell you what already exists. However, it is equally as true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So just as some nations may be reporting lower per capita infection rates, they also have a lower per capita test rate. You can't, with a straight face, say that India, which has performed 91,359 tests per 1m has fewer cases than the United States, which has performed 516,656 tests per 1M population. Put another way, 50% of Americans have been tested at one point in the past year, whereas only 9% of Indians have been tested.
Before just shitting on everything and having strongly held opinions strongly held, actually research the data and understand the tectonics underlying the world's response. It is not nearly as black and white as you and others seem to think it is.
The number of tests isn't the only relevant factor. Positivity is, as well. When positivity is near zero, either health authorities are incredibly, shockingly bad at picking who to test... Or Covid is not very prevalent in that community.
Per capita, the tourism numbers you cited are similar across the two countries. I am not sure what your point is.
> There is just no enforcement of quarantine
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This is why the virus is out of control in the United States. Even when rules are put in place to control it's spread, enforcement of those rules is incredibly lax.
> If some misguided old people in the Midwest want to pretend they are not at risk, it’s their life and their body to do that with. Sucks for the healthcare workers tasked with dealing with that, but you can’t legislate away life, risk, etc.
I think we do legislate away life and risk quite a lot. I imagine you may have already heard the arguments about laws for seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, and more. Even suicide is illegal.
> From what I can tell a huge portion of the United States is engaged in a mass delusion, and is actively handing over all the prosperity for the next decade to large corporations who benefit from COVID, while risking the future of kids with mostly worthless remote learning.
For me, this hits on where I think the US government has failed the most. I believe we should treat this virus seriously and I also believe we should treat the economic crisis seriously. I believe we need not only medical interventions but economic ones and it baffles me the US Congress has not created and approved a new stimulus package.
In summary, I think some people only focus on the medical crisis, others focus on the economic crisis, and that we would probably resolve this a lot better if we provided help both medically and economically.
Fine, we believe that you believe it's not a hoax.
But calling it a manufactured mass hysteria/delusion is just as absurd and conspiratorial. Was AIDS a manufactured mass hysteria in the '80s? People are rightly concerned about COVID because it is relatively new, we don't have super great ways to treat it yet, and in addition to being deadly, there is good evidence of lasting health impact to people who survive it. It doesn't sound like you're denying the disease, but you are downplaying it.
The public health guidance isn't just about protecting a handful of "elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people." People in all age groups, with and without pre-existing co-morbidities are getting the disease and dying of it--albeit in smaller numbers. And if not, they're spreading it to people who are dying of it. Even if we just for simplicity's sake, pretend that only the "elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised people" are literally the only people who are at risk from it: you still need to have everyone observe the same precautions, or you risk infecting the at-risk group.
If this were like seatbelt wearing, I'd be totally on your side. If someone chooses to put their own life at risk, fine, it’s their life and their body. But it's not like that with a highly contagious disease. People's personal choices are having a direct effect on other people's health. Your right to do something personally risky should end when it puts others at risk. There's a reason we don't let people fire guns around randomly as long as they don't happen to hit others.
The economic hardships are temporary. You can't bring people back from the dead and you can't (as far as we know now) reverse the long-term damage done to survivors.
I strongly disagree. “Some misguided old people in the Midwest” are not like heroin addicts quietly overdosing and dying out of sight, they are drunk drivers careening down the highway in a twenty ton truck.
I worked with a guy named Danny many years ago. He was one of the smartest programmers I'd ever met. Not only did he write great code, but he also always maintained an excellent connection to the his customers who would use the programs he wrote. This was in a hospital.
Personally, he was kind, generous, excellent family man. He never really talked too much about politics, didn't care too much for it. He also helped me order the parts for and showed me how to assemble my first intel based desktop computer, an amazing 486-DX2-66!
It's been years but I recently communicated with him, and we had a great e-mail exchange, caught up. He was surprised and pleased that since I left I'd not only gotten married but now have an adult son. Surprised because back >25 years ago when we hung out I was very much not a "family man" kind of person.
I asked him in passing how he'd been holding up with the pandemic, and suddenly, there it was.
Covid19 was a hoax perpetrated by China to help Joe Biden get elected.
It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
As the old saying goes, There but for the grace of God, go I.
You and I can't imagine falling prey to such a thing, but I can assure you that my old friend Danny had and has the same mental facilities as you and I.
He caught this particular cancer, and you and I didn't.
What's worse? He doesn't even know he has and is subject to this psychological malignancy.
I wonder if there are any psychological cancers you and I are subject to, right now, that we don't even know about or suspect?
One thing that I have noticed myself and some other engineers I know being susceptible to is the desire to view the world as systematic, ordered, certain, and understandable. It’s a desire to find the root cause to everything, to understand the reason behind everything, and to package that up into a chain of causality that fits within my mind.
The positive side of this is that many of these attributes are needed to be a good engineer. The negative side is, at least for me, trouble dealing with chaos or ambiguity in the world or anything that has an unclear explanation.
Maybe this contributes to being more susceptible to conspiracy thinking. I am not sure; that’s a question for social scientists to uncover.
Thanks for the answer mate. I now understand what you mean. I guess we need to just reach out to people more and see if slowly we can cure them out of their thought cancers and they can cure us of ours. Different perspectives make all bugs shallow. I very much like this & thank you for giving me a new way of thinking about something today!
Snow Crash refers to a virus, that in the book, only works on "hackers", since their brains understand code, and just need to see the raw bitmap of it for their brain to stop working.
The book contains alot of analysis on the nature of information and how it spreads, and the methods in which you can literally re-program a person with language.
I think its an apt analogy, your buddy is a programmer that has been exposed to Snow Crash, a virus of misinformation, and has shut down a part of his functioning.
======
"You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry about, too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
I think it is, but the real virus is the Media and Big Tech. The Ministry of Truth in 1984 was government, but the version we see today is Big Tech + Big Media, backed by the political party that is encouraging the censoring and labeling of information they don't like.
You assume the nam-shub are the conspiracies, but what if it's what MSNBC/FOX/CNN are pumping into your brain?
Sorry, that means they're not smart. They might be a good programmer and a family man, but they're not smart. If you are able to fall for "Covid19 was a hoax perpetrated by China to help Joe Biden get elected" in the modern day, then you are not smart.
It's one thing when you're not able to get information, like way back in the day when we had no real world explanations for lots of things, and had to work with what you've heard from word of mouth. But now? There's no excuse.
> It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
You're applying your view of the world to him. You're also condemning him in your mind.
How about you do this instead: you know he's a smart, honest person. Listen to his argument, see where he's coming from, and try to understand _why_ he choose that conclusion.
Nothing is all cut and dry. I do think CoV2 is a real virus, but I think our reaction to it has been absolutely disastrous. We're seeing lowering fatalities rates. Some of that is due to better treatment (early on doctors were just putting people straight onto ventilators, which was a death sentence. Since then ventilators aren't used immediately and we've seen survival go up).
With all the measures put in place, people who do get exposed are also getting low exposure, which can result in minor infections/cough/cold and quicker recovery and possibly even resistance. We've known for a while the amount of exposure matters. No one is talking about how the NYC/Michigan/Kirkland (Seattle) high death counts were directly the result of issues with elderly car facilities and cramming tons of old people into places not equipped to handle them.
I have a Bachelors and Masters degree, have published several papers, and consider myself a reasonable person, and my person view is that we are overreacting. I've been writing about it just to see if what I write tracks in 5 years:
We've watch the media go into a crazy hyper-overdrive mode on almost all information, with headlines that are contradicted by the actual text of the story. We also see zero coverage of the insane 40~50 cycles used in the current PCR tests, which generate tons of false positives. Every media outlet is focusing on "cases" but what if that "case" had minimal symptoms and required 45 PCR test cycles? That's either a very low viral load or a false positive, a good thing. But no one is covering that data.
Elon Musk found issues with the rapid test; and yes the rapid test is used for antibodies and has its limits. Instead of kindly explaining it to him, someone ranted on Twitter insulting him, implying he was a fool. But many people are buying these tests and are not aware of their limitations, so from that perspective, Elon did something good for bringing the issue to light, and he was insulted by someone who wanted to shame people into a certain narrative.
Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.
> Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.
I completely agree. All 'sides' are greatly over-reacting to this and most everything else. Yes, this is a very serious situation, and requires serious and well considered discussions and actions.
A great way to get groups of people who are naturally somewhat suspicious of government mandated activities, like wearing a mask, to never ever consider wearing a mask is to over-act and react irrationally. It's a pretty miserable, self-sustaining cycle.
Having said that:
> You're applying your view of the world to him.
You wrote that in response to my statement:
> > It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
As stated, I was talking about a belief that Covid-19 was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government to help Joe Biden get elected.
That's Alex Jones level bullshit.
It doesn't break my heart to see someone I care about having a nuanced, non 'party-line' view of this whole situation. That's healthy.
To believe that people who are actually dying of Covid-19 aren't actually dying of Covid-19 is another matter entirely.
> You're also condemning him in your mind.
Not in the slightest. If you note my other comments, you will see that I'm not condemning anybody. I know that every one of us is subject to and impacted by different kinds of irrational thinking.
Reading your links, I don't agree with all of your conclusions, but that's fine. Like you, I "continually reevaluating the information".
Beliefs don't exist in a vacuum - hoax memes spread much like COVID itself. Media literacy is scarily low among most people, even those who are brilliant in other ways. Metaphorically we are failing to vaccinate against misinformation in primary education, leaving tech giants the impossible task of policing misinformation on their platforms designed to maximize engagement for profitability. 'The Social Dilemma' documentary (Netflix) dips into this if you haven't seen it.
PhD involves years of thinking very specifically about an extremely narrow set of problems, not building a robust set of reliable heuristics about how the world outside of that field works.
I know plenty of brilliant PhDs and Physicians who couldn't real-world their way out of a paper bag. They're dumb as a rock when it comes to anything outside of their field, because their field has vacuumed up all of their mental energy over the decades.
By comparison, I'm pretty mediocre at what I do because I read widely, follow the news, and have elaborate political discussions for fun. By their standard, I'm dumb as a rock because I'm up late reading about the Soviets in Afghanistan, instead of yet another journal article.
I wouldn't say that. There are different kinds of "smart", and then there is "poor analytical skills". There are "smart" people, for many values of "smart", that still have such poor analytical skills that they think Covid is fake, the earth is flat, bigfoot is real, Elvis is alive, etc. Just calling them 'dumb' doesn't get to root cause.
I would describe what is happening as rationality 'blind spots' -- everyone has them about different subjects. It's not a matter of smart vs stupid. That framing of the world is too simplistic to be valuable.
I appreciate this. It says to me that we humans are very emotional beings, whether we want to admit it or not. I think many cultures have a tendency to forget that emotions drive our behaviors, or are afraid to admit—feeling about feelings :-)
I wish we would spend more time talking about what people were feeling more so than what they were believing. Like you, I know many people whom I admire for their intelligence who seem to have fallen into a deep distrust of many institutions and individuals in society. How we feel can really distort how we think and what we believe.
Not only do our feelings distort how we think and what we believe, they (along with our personal background, evolutionary history, etc) also pretty much transparently and automatically create the foundational reality upon which we stand, moment by moment.
> Not only do our feelings distort how we think and what we believe, they (along with our personal background, evolutionary history, etc) also pretty much transparently and automatically create the foundational reality upon which we stand, moment by moment.
Yes. So much yes.
No, I hadn't heard of the book, but I'm excited to check it out more. I'll add it to the queue! Hopefully I start reading from the queue soon lol. Thank you for recommending it.
>One of the first things Trump said about SARS-CoV-2 is that it was a 'Democratic' 'hoax.'
No, Trump did not say that. Trump said that Democratic criticism of his administration's response to COVID19 was a hoax, comparing it to the Russian and impeachment "hoaxes".
>How do you focus on educating against that, when any contradiction of Trump will be seen by his followers as a purely political act?
You can see a lot about someone's political leanings by where they place the blame for turning an issue political.
To state the obvious counter, Trump has politicized mask wearing by setting an example of refusing to wear one, and resisting being seen taking any personal virus precautions at all.
>we have made a very big mistake by turning this issue into political one. For example, by criticizing Trump on his COVID-19 plan
Huh? "We" have made a very big mistake by turning this issue into a political one. However, the mistake was in failing to criticize Trump from the very beginning. Twitter should have canceled his account when he put out that tweet calling COVID a hoax (in March?). Corporate America should have stood up in a united fashion and put out a pro-mask/anti-Trump message. Every health care administer should have put out PR immediately debunking Trump's nonsense. The idea that we should have avoided criticizing the guy who stupidly made this thing political in the first place is just crazy to me.
Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture.
Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses.
Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death.
This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of not a single pop culture depiction that looks anything like what we have now, except maybe the movie Contagion. And that's really a stretch.
So a lot of people have a problem when they see dire predictions and statistics that bear no relationship to what their own five senses are telling them.
There's also the problem of previous pandemics that sounded the alarm, but amounted to little in the US. SARS-CoV-1 and the Swine Flu.
All of this leaves the US with a population primed to expect a very unrealistic kind of pandemic, and already skeptical from previous false alarms. Throw in a president who not only sympathizes with the "hoax" perspective, but actively encourages it, and it should maybe not be surprising that we are where we are.
I don't know stuff has been pretty apocalyptic the past 9 months. In San Jose a normally busy clean commercial street was boarded up on every store front with graffiti on most boards(BLM riots/protests). Trash was everywhere. Everyone was wearing masks. In NYC in April mobile morgue trucks flooded the city as the dead exceeded the capacity of the city's morgues. Drive by some parking lots and see hundreds of cars waiting to get covid tests. During the spring many stores in major metro areas ran out of basic supplies like paper towels/tiolet paper, cleaners, meat. A friend of mine had to wait 3 hours to get toilet paper at a target(3/20). In Italy and Europe busy tourist areas were empty and soldiers were patrolling the plazas with rifles. This stuff is like nothing I have ever seen in my life and my parents and grandparents lives as well.
This probably somewhat explains why people in rural and suburban areas are quick to dismiss it as a hoax. None of what you seen is present outside of coastal American cities.
I vacationed in rural Wisconsin this summer. Felt like every other summer I spent there.
I think it was a mistake to lockdown many states in March that didn't really have a large number of infections. They spent 2-3 months lockdown for a virus that didn't really exist in their world yet. They formed their opinion that it was FRAUDVIRUS at that time. And aren't reevaluating now that they are finally getting their huge wave.
Maybe a mistake in hindsight, but part of the point was the we simply didn't know which parts of the country did and didn't have a large number of infections and couldn't afford to have several more New Yorks.
Agree, its why at the time a national lockdown made little sense(early March/April timeframe). Britain did that and its GDP dropped 20%. Now in the US the virus is running rampant due to increased spread, lower humidity and colder weather so will have to see what Biden does in the coming months but I expect a nationwide mask mandate at the very least and probably 1-2 months of the entire country under a strict lockdown. And this is with a vaccine somewhat widely available.
> This stuff is like nothing I have ever seen in my life and my parents and grandparents lives as well.
My personal experience doesn't match that. I'm German, so my grandparents on both sides were involved in WWII. I grew up with the stories of what they had to go through. My grandmother had to flee after the war when she was ten on a 24h notice, being allowed to carry only one suitcase and give up all other possessions. Hunger was rampant, people foraged in the woods for acorns. Bread with mustard was a delicacy.
I think we should be grateful that for most Western countries, the last 2-3 generations have seen an incredible, unprecedented period of stability and peace.
While maybe there is some truth to what you say, it doesn't justifies being an idiot that cant distinguishing reality from tv. Furthermore denying evidence because it doesnt align with how it happens in the movies
"One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that."
He literally says "this is their new hoax." Referring to COVID.
I never said the president called the virus a hoax. I said he sympathizes with and encourages the "hoax" perspective.
And that perspective is that concern about the pandemic is a plot against his presidency just like the Russia investigation was. Go back and watch the speech. It's clear as day. The way he puts the pandemic in the past tense ("We did one of the great jobs..."). The framing of the issue as a foreign invasion. Mission accomplished guys, what's the big deal? This hoopla is just another hoax.
The broader context is important here as well. The speech was delivered in front of a packed auditorium as calls to avoid such gatherings were being made, to little avail.
The president has repeatedly doubled-down on this stance that the pandemic is being blown out of proportion, both in words and actions.
How do you square minimizing the threat of COVID with the news recently that some hospitals are running out of beds, getting mobile mourges, and running their staff to the point of exhaustion and breakdown?
That is easy to fix. He should send a clear messages about the virus, but he keeps has downplaying the severity of the outbreak. Even calling the medias reaction to the virus a hoax is wrong.
Contagion feels like a stretch because everyone has PPE.
News teams aren't sending camera crews into the overflow hospitals being setup. Hard to show full hospitals ("rooms are full" doesn't look good on TV), nor could TV crews go into Patient rooms and show what it looks like (social media is doing this, but typically for patient's who are surviving as personal accounts).
This is what happens when politics becomes religion, then pollutes things where religion should have no place, namely science.
I just recovered from Covid, and I can tell you although some symptoms indeed are similar to a normal flu, and although I wasn't heavily hit by the virus, there are others that I never experienced in my life, like squishing a fresh basil leave right under my nose and smell absolutely nothing, or eating potatoes that tasted like cardboard. Only somebody whose critical thinking has been completely annihilated could think there wasn't something serious going on.
This has happened frequently in history. Separation of church and state is a relatively new idea. The fascinating part to me is that this appears to be the first time the religious people are demanding the right to effectively kill themselves as well and not just others. Seems like a self defeating strategy.
I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.
Sounds like you're coming at this in good faith so thanks!
OK, so your paper only takes about mortality. It's a good point that a low percentage of people die from this. Great news. However there's growing evidence pointing to long-term health problems for survivors. Elevated risk of stroke even among young people, heart damage, and long lasting respiratory problems. Since the disease is new, we don't really know the long lasting effects yet. Maybe they will go away after years, we'll see. My neighbor had it and still struggles to breathe and has that widely-described "mind haze" many months later. Point is you can't just look at death rate.
But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you personally are fortunately in the group that won't experience any of these problems. How do you know that everyone you encounter are also in that lucky group? Same for the people they encounter after they encounter you? You don't, and by not following the basic guidance of staying at home and wearing a mask when you have to go out, you're increasing the likelihood that others you meet catch it, and then either die, have long-lasting health problems, or spread it to others.
Now, let's talk about 60-80+ year olds. "They're gonna die anyway so..." So, what, exactly? Increase their chances of dying because we don't want to close Starbucks? I don't think I can really even put myself in the shoes of someone making this argument. Almost everyone has someone in their family or acquaintances in this age range. A mother or grandfather. Maybe a teacher. I don't think you're really saying downplay the virus even if it throws these loved ones under the bus. If this was the year 2060 and you were in this age range (I'm assuming), would you still make this argument?
One thing we can agree on: We're glad it's not more deadly than it is. If COVID were 10x deadlier, or affected people uniformly across age ranges, or if it were 10x more transmissive, we would have been in a world of shit, because people evidently don't have the character to make small uncomfortable sacrifices for the greater good. Even with a 10x worse COVID, we would have just kept insisting on going shopping and partying and accepting more people dying. Which is appalling, really.
Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day.
Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September.
What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow different than today?
We don't know for sure. But several hypotheses are being thrown around:
- when the virus hit the first time, the age group of those affected was higher, hence the high initial mortality.
- hospitals have better protocols now to deal with the disease. They learned a lot over the past months wrt to treatment. For example not putting people on ventilators that fast.
- through natural selection, a milder strain has managed to be more contagious but less lethal overall.
- some of the mask ordinances were effective in reducing the viral load
We certainly weren't doing enough testing in the Spring to know the true case numbers.
There's a number of reasons that explain the lower death rate now.[0] The population getting infected now is younger, and less likely to die. We've also gotten much better at treating patients once they're sick enough to wind up in the hospital.
A much lower fraction of the new cases today are old folk, who have a much greater likelihood of dying from it. We've also learned not to do stupid things like send infected old folk back to group homes.
We've also learned how to treat severe cases better. We have a few therapies now that we didn't then like remdesivir and antibody serum, and know when & when not to use them. But mostly we know what doesn't work well, like hydroxychloroquine and early aggressive use of ventilators.
More testing and the PCR iterations are off the scale (over 40). They're basically picking up tons of false positives. With that type of PCR testing, it's like picking up background radiation with a Geiger counter and saying you've been exposed to deadly radiation.
I feel like I've seen versions of this story pop up throughout the year, and it seems that others have too [0]. I guess I remain skeptical as to whether this actually happened until more proof can be provided.
Nowhere in that article does it say that he went to urgent care insisting that covid isn't real. The link that the OP posted says that dying patients are insisting that covid isn't real. Your own link says that the kid thought that it just hit older adults, not that he thought it was fake or a new world order conspiracy or any garbage like that.
While politics are being hotly debated I came here to say that I am again and again fascinated by the ability of the human mind to delude itself.
You might be quick to argue that these patients aren't smart, and there will likely be a correlation, but being smart does not protect you from delusion.
This is evidenced by a number of Nobel prize winners who have gone on to peddle pseudo-science. E.g. Kary Mullins, 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry for the PCR technique, went on to deny the link between HIV and AIDS [1]. This New York Times article has more examples [2].
So there is a non-zero chance that you and I might find ourselves in similar situation of denial, and we shouldn't be too quick to judge.
To set the perspective for those not familiar, the population of the state is close to 900k, roughly the same as the city of San Francisco. The normal pace of all-cause deaths is about 24 per day, so with COVID-19 killing off 15 people per day it is probably the leading cause of death in that state today.
Definitely. The die, as they say, is already cast. Remember, too, that the trailing 7-day average of an exponential process is incredibly misleading. If it's 15 deaths per day by that measure, that means it's really 50 today and 100+ soon.
According to the South Dakota Department of Health site, they 36.2% of the ICU beds are currently available [1]. According to this article [2], that count includes NICU (infant) beds, which will not be very helpful for COVID-19, which mostly seriously infects adults.
I've looked into these states and its really hard to get a good idea how close we are. There are easy solutions to quickly expanding ICU beds:
1) moving patients who don't need to be in ICU back to the regular wards. Hospitals tend to have a "use it or lose it" view of ICU beds.
2) you can turn regulars ward beds into ICU beds fairly quickly.
The limiting factor is essentially the doctors/nurses/staff. They are able to squeeze more space by forcing doctors/nurses/staff to work longer hours. But you can't shift radiology doctors/nurses to ICU since they aren't qualified.
We'll know things are bad when there is a call for doctors from less hard areas to fly to the infected areas.
Long story short, its hard to know as layperson what % is bad, so we should just listen to the experts.
I have wondered that myself, and it's a valid consideration.
Anecdotally, I've seen quite a few people who work in and around ERs and ICUs reporting a sharp increase in 'business', which follows (but trails) Covid19 positive test data.
We obviously don't know with any degree of precision how bad things are at the macro scale, but I think it's undeniable that the current trajectory is pretty scary.
In the US we seem to either focus on the medical crisis or the economic crisis. I wish we would focus on both.
How I understand it, how to resolve this would require medical interventions (shutdowns, testing, tracing, therapies, vaccines, etc) and economic interventions (stimulus, deferrals, forgiveness, etc) and yet we seem to mostly be doing the medical ones and getting pushback on it.
I could be wrong on this, but I think one of few institutions in this country that can provide economic interventions is the US Congress. They provided one stimulus bill that helped to provide the economic safety net while we worked on the medical safety net. It shocks and angers me that they haven't provided another one.
I struggle to see why they don't provide more economic stimulus. HN, can you help me understand why Congress isn't providing more financial help to the country?
More precisely, the majority of the US Senate (republican) opposes another large COVID bill. In contrast, the majority of the US House (democrat) has proposed new bills at between $2-3 trillion.
The GOP is currently under control of the current President. Until he leaves, they will not act independently. After January 20 (and after the Georgia Senator runoffs are over), republicans will fear Trump's wrath less. But will that be enough to shift those politicians' sentiment? Only the impact of enough lives lost to COVID in the next two months will tell.
But why does the Republican majority oppose another large COVID bill? I guess I just haven't heard or understand their arguments for why they think giving more economic stimulus would be a bad thing.
- Is it a moral one? "Giving money makes people lazy, people should work for their money."
- Is it a financial one? "If we give more money, this country will go further into debt."
They say that "it's a bunch of radical left-wing priorities disguised as a pandemic bill".
What they mean is that they really don't want to give money to states and local governments, because they believe it will be poorly spent. This is problematic because these governments can't borrow, so will need to cut services in the midst of a pandemic.
Additionally, the Republicans are pushing strongly for a liability shield for employers from Covid deaths/cases, which the Democrats don't like.
Additionally, a bunch of Republican senators have found debt-reduction Jesus again, in the midst of the pandemic (even the IMF, those bondholder-buring, water-privitising backstards have said that now is not the time to worry about debt).
I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost.
The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs.
The US did not. We were creating homeland security departments and starting stupid trillion dollar wars.
How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is
Do you see anything happening in the US public sphere to make you particularly hopeful about how we’ll handle the next one? These people are literally dying on the hill of “covid is a hoax”. Half of the country claims they won’t take a vaccine, and the leadership of half of the country has learned they can gain power by downplaying covid.
I expect this will go like Watergate—-it’ll be unclear and confusing for the people who lived through it, but clearer to subsequent generations with the aid of historical perspective.
I’m not hopeful at all about the US (RE: SARS-Cov2 or otherwise). I think we should have pulled the plug on this version of the Republic when we gave up on reconstruction after Civil War I.
I saw some people say there were two different strains. One that went East and one that went West. I don't know how accurate that is, but it may not be identical.
I have three small children who have not been sick ONCE since the lockdowns started. They barely have seen another child, let alone played with them in close proximity. Do you think this is good news? No, it actually puts them at much higher risk of childhood leukemia and that scares me much more than them getting covid 19[1].
Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. Our actions have consequences. There's no free lunch here.
> Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe.
How is this article propaganda? The nurse said, "many of her patients don't believe they are dying of COVID-19".
The patients weren't arguing against the lock down, they were arguing that the virus isn't real.
If it helps, this is from the same article (here again: [0]) and sounds like you do not have to worry too much about this. All the best to you and your family!
"Can I reduce my child's risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia?
The evidence isn't well enough established to suggest definitive recommendations that will reduce risk of child leukaemia.
[...]
Obviously, parents make their decisions about childcare based on a number of factors. They should not worry that they are endangering their child by not sending them to a nursery or day care.
And while most childhood infections are benign, some less common ones bring their own set of serious risks. So this review certainly shouldn't be taken as an encouragement to ditch important methods of infection prevention, such as frequent handwashing and making sure your child's vaccinations are up to date."
At this point my sentiments can be summed up thusly[0][1]. Although I'm the fortunate few who could work remotely -- and I've been doing so since the beginning of the year -- my job[2] still bounds me to CONUS. I'm beginning to entertain the thought of quitting so I could move to one of the few Asian countries that takes COVID-19 seriously.
The absurdity of the irrationality at play here is just surprising. It's like the bystander effect, except it's all about being right and also involves risking yours and other people's lives. Unbelievable.
Obviously, it isn't right to be rude to nurses but it probably also isn't right to sneer at people on their deathbed who don't want to accept that they're dying or really understand why, and blame them for their disease even though we have no idea how they got it.
I think some people dying in hospitals from COVID have a right to be mad at the medical system. Did these patients get any of the 5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs? Did they get prophylactic antithrombotics? Did they get good advice on a healthy diet and medical care throughout their life? Probably not, and I don't think a judgmental tone towards them helps anything.
A quote from the article: "It just makes you sad and mad and frustrated..." That's not sneering. That's being in a shitty situation and reacting as a human.
>5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs
I don't think that number is at all accurate. Dexamethasone is really the only thing that fits your description. People think of remdesivir, but the data on that are still quite ambiguous.
Though, sadly, some people here that are going to see that, combined with seeing "news" in the domain, and will start preaching it as fact to their children: "Dont worry, news says it's just like a flesh wound."
Yes, the pandemic fatigue is real. Yes, it would be wonderful to hang out with my friends in person, or to drive 100 miles crossing the border to go visit my children.
But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.
Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.
And the people who don’t believe that it’s real? All I can say is that it’s extremely clear that we are living in a second Cold War. But instead of fighting with nukes, we’re fighting with misinformation, and Russia is winning.
the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already
This isn't supported by the available evidence. Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths. Many other countries also had stronger lockdowns that have not spared them from winter surges.
You can say that they didn't do "real" lockdowns, and that if people would just sit quietly in their homes for six months then it would have gone away. Which is about as useful as saying that if everyone ate less and exercised more then obesity would be eliminated, or if everyone stopped having sex outside of marriage then STDs and teenage pregnancies would no longer be problems. Humans do not have infinite willpower, and if your plan is to assert that they should and then shame them for their horrible selfishness of wanting to occasionally visit their families, it is going to fail.
> Spain was forbidding people from leaving their homes except for essentials, and now they're worse off than the US in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.
That second wave has started months after Spain lifted all those restrictions.
It was only ever supposed to buy us time (to develop treatments, vaccines, reorganize workplaces) and avoid overwhelming the capacity of services like hospitals.
I don't think anyone credible has said that lockdowns were going to put the genie back in the bottle. It is only one component of a complete response.
They _have_ argued that a complete response might permit more economic normalcy somewhat sooner, and that appears to be bearing out.
It didn’t solve the problem, meaning, unless you are willing to lock down indefinitely, the virus will come back. So in the pedantic sense you are right, lockdowns work, but clearly are not a solution.
I was there and remember the sequence of events clearly. The lockdown worked and cases across Spain were very low right after the quarantine. Then tourism opened back up, because the economy, and tons of people from countries that did not quarantine all flocked to Spain. Spain’s numbers started going up immediately.
Lockdown works; Spain would have been fine by now if they were more careful with opening (not allowing the British in for instance). But alas it is worse than ever and there is no stomach for another lockdown so people wear masks but restaurants are crowded every day and there are few travel restrictions so...
Clearly it is a solution. The problem is that places like Spain stopped their lockdowns. What we really need is a flexible and informed approach, where the stringency of lockdowns is implemented on a sliding scale determined by actual real-time case numbers. Masks and other basic measures should be everywhere and always required and more stringent steps applied proactively as hot spots emerge. This coupled with rapid testing and contact tracing works. It has been proven multiple times in multipel places.
The actual problem with Spain is that they have a decentralised system of contact tracing (which is normally good), but which didn't really get implemented quickly enough.
Madrid in particular did pretty poorly at this.
Additionally, their economy is so dependent on tourism that they felt they needed to open back up to avoid ruination.
This lead to loads more cases, coupled with pandemic fatigue and here we are.
Depends on what problem you are trying to solve. If you are trying to make COVID19 go extinct then yes, lockdowns aren't sufficient. If you are trying to avoid overwhelming health care resources (so they are available to dying patients of all kinds) then it can help as it reduces the hospitalization rate.
The lockdown brings the numbers down. Contact tracing, quarantines and testing keeps it down. If you do not follow up the lockdown with these measures, you are bound to fail.
The country dealing better than any other with Covid has been Taiwan. No lockdown and > 200 days without new Covid case [1] see e.g. [2] for how they did it. It probably helped having had an epidemiologist as vice-president [3].
Russia is winning.
Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-times debunked conspiracy theory? May I recommend removing the last paragraph?
It's not just Taiwan, it's all of East Asia. At this point it's beyond irresponsible for people to keep comparing the US's handling to other Western nations – EA showed how it's done (in both democratic and autocratic societies), but we have some weird cultural blind spot that makes us not want to see.
The problem is, there is no “how it’s done” to point to. All of the east asian countries did radically different things.
Taiwan slammed it’s borders shut before cases got into the country, and hasn’t done much else. Korea adopted large-scale contact tracing and isolation interventions. China uses authoritarian rule to lock people up when they have it. Japan hasn’t tested much at all, kept offices and restaurants open, and never even came close to “stopping“ the virus. And yet, even there, the fatality level isn’t nearly what we’re seeing in the west.
It isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that something else is going on.
As outlined in [2] I linked to above, Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [1] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. So at least in the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan was not closing the doors. Today, Taiwan has essentially the same 14-days entry quarantine as most countries. Another important difference is that Taiwan takes quarantine very seriously and monitored those sent into quarantine via mobile phone location tracking. That too is outlined in [2]. Police will talk to you if mobile phone movements indicate that 14 day quarantine is violated. In contrast, quarantine is de facto voluntary in many European countries.
There is no good reason as far as I can see, why other countries don't adopt similar policies.
I must admit, I am not pleased that I am loosing 1 year of my life because the countries that I live in are not adopting best practises. Indeed, are mostly not even aware of them.
It seems to me that the one difference that is just stark, between the US and all of those cultures, is that they already had a system wherein it was acceptable (or even encouraged) to wear a face mask.
Is it that? Is it that simple? Those are honest questions.
The quarantines are only one tool in China’s response. They were also quick to adopt masks and contact tracing.
Characterizing quarantines as “locking people up” seems to me the root cause of the mass deaths in the West. The iconography of individualism has trumped the idea that walking around expelling a cloud of deadly material makes you a threat against the life and liberty of others.
>Why did you have to end an otherwise insightful post with a many-timed debunked conspiracy theory?
I believe they're making the extraordinary claim that Russia is solely responsible for Americans not believing in mask wearing, as if Russia is in total control of the most wealthy & strong country in the history of the planet. Americans love a bogeyman to distract from the reality of a completely politically split country who create their own misinformation and spreads it under their own power through domestic social media.
I oppose lockdown/shut down, doesn't mean I don't believe that covid is real, nor I believe there is 0 risk from covid but simply I'm comparing the cost/risk of lockdown vs cost/risk of covid.
I acknowledge though that this cost/risk can be very subjective.
So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy? Also, what is the cost you speak about? How many minutes of Bezos income? How many F35? How many days of US budget deficit?
I mean avoiding lockdown is possible at a certain time. After a certain threshold of infection it becomes unavoidable. But lockdown or no lockdown, this must be done right. A few places have not done it right, for example Spain letting people party in the summer or France with packed cafes.
A friend of mine explained it well. When treated, COVID has a mortality of .5%. We are doing better than in March because for example elderly care person wear masks and isolate properly the risk population. If they wouldn’t, the mortality would be in the low percents, which would already be a lot. But when you are running out of ICU capacity, then you land in the 10% deaths. That’s what everyone is trying to avoid at the moment.
>So what do you think of intensive care bed running out and people dying at the hospital entrances like in Italy?
It is bad, I didn't say nothing should be done about it. Some that can be done: Increasing intensive care capacity, redistribute capacity to other hospital, do not admit patient with mild symptom, increasing effort for better treatment/vaccine, etc.
I'm still open to lockdown but certainly not for this virus. Doesn't make sense if the cure is worse than the disease.
Keep in mind vast majority cases is asymptomatic or only have mild symptomp.
Lockdown cost: unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids receiving poor education because they can't go to school, delayed treatment for other diseases, suicides, domestic violence, etc
> Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good.
Or even temporary constraints in favor of better things. In New Zealand you wear a mask but at least you can hang out with your friends. It's not even selfishness at that point, just denial and stupidity!
Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.
It's also weird to see Canada among your success stories. Their 'worst of it' is right now.
> Masks and social distancing and banning birthday parties are not about speeding up or ending the pandemic but slowing it down (to minimize deaths) until a vaccine is ready. This is what 'flattening the curve' is all about.
Not quite. NZ took the route of hard lock down early, 30 days (2 infection cycles). They basically managed to get covid to burn itself out, so they're just dealing with imported cases, and contact tracing the heck out of out them to bust any potential clusters.
Canada's lockdown isn't nearly as long, and people didn't take it nearly as seriously. PHAC dragged their heels on mask use; and now on rating COVID as potential aerosol risk. We did it all half-assed, the province didn't use the time to really amp up contact tracing, learning techniques from jurisdictions that had success, such as South Korea, or Taiwan; nor did we really make testing work during the summer lull. The Feds didn't / can't squeeze some kind of national standard in dealing with things, in part because of the minority government, and in other parts of not knowing when doing the right thing matter more than dealing with idealists bitching about divisions of power.
We get cold faster and longer, and people tend to stay inside, so there can be more clusters. I'd expect things to get worse.
In this situation, NZ has unique geographical advantages. Others that have tried similar measures without those advantages haven't found the same success. I think most European and North American nations recognized very early on that NZ-style elimination was not a viable choice for them.
I agree with everything you say about Canada, which is another reason why I wouldn't put it in the same category as NZ.
It kind of sounds like you're just describing the vulnerability that other state actors can exploit... Which doesn't argue against point in the parent post.
Right, but the supposition is that such exploits are the source of mass delusions. There are plenty of people who think COVID is a hoax who didn’t arrive at that kind of thinking because of foreign intelligence operations. It’s regurgitated daily by right wing American politicians and media.
> But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already.
This is untrue to the point where it hurts. The reason it's lasting so long is because covid-19 is a highly infection virus that's already out in the wild, and it's going to spread despite our best efforts to contain it until a vaccine is invented and deployed or until we reach herd immunity.
We are not gods. We can't wave our hand at biology and make the virus disappear. We must take all necessary and sane precautions, and accept the consequences of our life.
So it turns out this post is likely complete disinformation and made up. This nurse likely hasn't treated very many dying patients. Wired did a followup:
Progressives, specifically progressives focusing on class and economics (as opposed to culture and identity) and conservatives tend to see "mainstream" news the same way: aligned with Democratic establishment, wholly center-left and actively hostile not only to their political goals, but hostile to them personally through actions like pushing social media to ban their speech.
That’s not how HIPAA works. There is a huge difference between knowing a specific person has a specific disease, and talking about a case without identifying the specific person.
A case study is very common and gives a great deal of information about the medical side of what someone has gone through, without identifying them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_study
Yeah, if you fully grasped what he was saying it was actually a funny joke. The person substantiates by revealing the identity, and that's the hipaa violation.
So how would she substantiate these claims without committing the violation, again?
Assume just for this answer that she's not an institution conducting a case study, but an individual conducting a TV interview. Tell me what evidence she sends to the station that substantiates the story but does not violate HIPAA.
The same basic things you do to substantiate any story. Verify the details you can such as does this person work at that location, and verify as much as possible with other coworkers.
I mean...many uncomfortable truths ARE HIPAA violations. What makes it NOT a HIPAA violation is that it's just general/anonymized anecdata.
I can't go up to someone and be like "Alice Rosenstein has cervical cancer, sorry if that's an uncomfortable truth, but the law wasn't written to protect your feelings." That would, in fact, be a HIPAA violation.
There is a difference between saying, Mrs. Jones has a bad yeast infection and there are many yeast infections this time of year. The one is giving patient information the other is discussing the disease.
HIPAA is a US law that's focused on protecting the privacy of a person's medical history. In SQL terms you can't JOIN a person's identity with their medical history (unless explicitly authorized). However aggregated data is allowed, as long as it can't be easily reverse-engineered.
You acknowledge that HIPAA doesn’t allow identifying specific patients. Are you under the impression that she named a identified a specific person in that article?
> I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days.
Frivolous travel for the express purpose of not social distancing during the throes of a pandemic... smh, what a prick.
Coronavirus enters the body through the eyes as well as mouth and nose. If it gets on your hands, you can put it on your face. Only 1000 virons are needed to establish an infection.
If you're wearing KN95 mask with a beard on, your mask isn't working properly anyway and you could be unwittingly spreading the virus, further delaying a reopening.
Traveling makes absolutely no difference when both the place you're traveling from and the place you're traveling to have widespread virus transmission.
Are there still people who believe it is just "a few eccentrics"? As someone who has a lot of them in my direct family, extended family, and even Facebook friends, my perception is that partisanship has reached a point where there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. And in the case of covid19, it feels like at least 10% don't fully believe in it (the level of doubt varying by individual and situational circumstances, like needing immediate medical assistance vs being in good health).
A super important component is that with these extremists, I can tell them exactly what I think and believe, and they will contradict me to my face and say no, that is not true, you believe x y z. And the criteria for the claim is simply that I'm not in wholehearted agreement with them. The degree doesn't matter, the ideology demands absolutely submission.
It is a mass delusion to say a substantial portion of the population is unable to self report their own beliefs - to say that your group knows better what millions of outsiders to the group think
I think the attacks on an honest intellectual interested in the truth not the answer an ideology demands, specifically the attempt to cancel Steven Pinker is an ideal example of this
I believe it’s a platitude of “fair centrism”, not for its concrete weight but it’s symbolism in addressing “both sides”. Veracity and sincerity come to question, when I see this.
From personal experience, most leftists seem to despise the concept of "fair centrism" as far as centrists themselves see it as being somehow balanced, or fair (they are neither)
That everyone who voted for Trump is a white supremacist. I've seen that attitude quite a bit on this site in the days after the election, and I've seen journalists call minorities white supremacists because they didn't vote for Biden. Some people just refuse to believe that he's anything but a wannabe Hitler, and use that as an excuse to say that they have no reason to try and come together as a country.
Intention matters less than material consequences.
Consider the fact that this last year was the worst for hate crimes for at least a decade.
If a whole group of people is propping up a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles, what else could you call them?
>a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles
This is where the rift is. This is not true. Yes, some could take that sort of interpretation of what he's saying, and that sort of interpretation being taken by lots of white supremacists regardless of intention, does mean something. But it doesn't mean much, at least, I don't see why we'd expect that to be any significant effect. Just to bring an example, at least, ime the most common "but he said.." claim. The "fine people on both sides" quote. Many misunderstand what he was actually saying there and actually what happened - the event started with a wide range of people on the right, a general conservative gathering seeming thing. It was organized by white supremacists, which lots attending did not realize until some time passed and they started getting uncomfortable and leaving, by the time people were chanting slurs and all, it went full on neo-nazi rally. Trump clearly did denounce that, and what happened that night, and was speaking to the normal people who had attended in the beginning and left later.
The people in attendance have the personal responsibility to associate themselves and their actions with movements that reflect their beliefs. "Boo hoo, I didn't know the KKK was racist when I joined" is not a defense that folks will treat with any sympathy. Even if it wasn't their intention, they still messed up, and that onus remains on their head.
Either way you look at it, those "fine people" are not fine -- they propped up white supremacists, culminating in the brazen murder of an innocent, non-violent counter-protestor and the random assault of numerous others. Even if they didn't know, their actions contributed to that, and they are to blame as are the outspoken racists. What you are saying is, "those people had the privilege to join that march and support those sentiments because they are not threatened by what the march explicitly represents." This is an inherently racist mode of interacting with the world, because it opens avenues for racist violence and oppression, and emboldens more outspoken racists to commit atrocities.
Again, intention matters little when lives are at stake. Your argument enables the banality of evil to persist.
The #1 delusion is reporting case numbers as a cause for concern instead of deaths and hospitalizations. The others are the inconsistent science behind government orders, like closing restaurants after 10PM, allowing patrons to go maskless when sitting at a table but not when standing, etc. The last would be lying by omission. Florida had 50% deaths per capita vs. NY but NY is lauded as a shining example of how to handle a pandemic.
Please don't escalate rhetoric like this on HN, or do ideological battle here generally. It's against the site guidelines, makes discussion more boring (even as it creates a feeling of activation) and leads to predictable places, regardless of how right you are or feel.
The delusion of the left is that central planning and control will prevent the spread of the virus. That's not exactly wrong -- it just has to be the level of government control that China has. A lot of Americans, myself included, won't tolerate that. (And for the record, I wear a mask.)
It's more of a battle of public opinion -- if people on the right were consistent about mask wearing, and didn't believe that they are immune or the virus is fake or whatever, our ability to contain this would be much greater. Sure, we can't force mask wearing at a federal level, but it sure would help if everyone on Fox and Newsmax were working to encourage the use of masks. That would have more weight than any federal or local mandate unfortunately, so it's unproductive to raise the point you're raising, though I agree.
This also comes down to enforcement. Even if a federal mandate were somehow passed, if the people's hearts aren't in it in red areas, cops won't enforce it in those areas and it will be a joke. It really is 100% about public opinion.
To your point though, I'm pretty extreme left, and I don't think we are going to have an easy time containing it by any means. It is going to continue to rise months and possibly years into a Biden administration, but I think we'll still have a lot less deaths. No one on the left thinks this is magically going away, even with a vaccine. Distribution and production of a vaccine is incredibly difficult logistically, and these things need to be refrigerated. So at best we're looking at like a year from now we all get a vaccine imo.
What a bad take. Disregard for covid precautions is the reason we have an outsized outbreak in the US. The outbreak in SD, despite the state’s low population density, will spread to other states.
I'd still say ours is outsized, because the US outbreak is essentially the same outbreak we had months ago. Those other countries are on their second or third outbreaks.
Their outbreaks reach higher peaks than ours, but only for a month or so, and then come down to a much lower level than ours, making our one outbreak worse than any of their outbreaks.
Look at Australia and New Zealand. Both free and open societies with high per capita GDP. They both have achieved zero community transmission through stringent travel restrictions and a nationwide strategy. It’s disgraceful that we can’t do the same or better in the US.
In the US we have real anti-leadership. Our leaders repeatedly cast doubt on science and common sense in order to reduce their own culpability. They spread the myth that there is ‘nothing we can do’ about COVID until we have a vaccine when other countries have proven this to be false.
I think we should look at the case rate for measuring outbreaks, instead of the death rate. I wouldn't say "outsized", but the US' incidence rate is above most developed nations'.
Also, I didn't know that Austria and Switzerland were having such a problem.
This is not meant to be a rebuttal to your comment, but a discussion.
Consider the case of South Korea and Japan.
1. Dense populations.
2. Very little Covid19.
3. Relatively low lock-down related economic impact.
4. Nearly universal mask wear.
Honest question: what else do we need to know?
I strongly suspect that if the United States, or any other country, had nearly universal mask wearing, we'd have a strong economy AND pretty low infection rates.
I'd love for somebody 'in the know' to modify/correct any of my assertions.
Masks are the thing you do if you cannot socially distance. We have good evidence for social distancing, we don't yet (for a variety of reasons) have good evidence for mask wearing.
You point to South Korea, and then claim it's the masks. But there's a bunch of other stuff they're also doing (because of their experience with coronaviruses): earlier lockdown, harder lockdown, much better test trace and isolate programmes, more social adherence to prevention measures such as hand washing and distancing and mask wearing, people with symptoms choosing to self-isolate, travel restrictions, etc.
You need all of it at the same time, but especially distancing.
This broadly supports what you're saying. Their success has been due to many rigorous and (near?) universally adopted protocols, not just mask wearing.
Yeah, and they take all the camera data from CCTV and all the mobile phone data, as well as the contact tracing data (with QR codes to a central system) and use that for contact tracing.
They are trading off liberty for security, and it seems to be working out well for them.
I can only imagine how crazy the US would have gone if the government had tried to do any of this.
Want more positive cases? Use a higher threshold. Want to scare the population into compliance? Use a higher threshold. Want to demonstrate that person X or policy Y was effective against stopping spread? Use a lower threshold.
A few eccentrics? Like someone who will, say, deliberately drive to an area without adequate legal orders in place in the middle of a sharp uptick in cases during a pandemic, just to "feel normal?"
>It’s such a basic concept that a child would have the solution, and you need to do mental gymnastics to convince yourself otherwise.
Mental gymnastics are precisely what's happening. When confronted with an uncontrollable horror, people generally have one of two possible reactions. The first is to accept it, and do what you can logically to minimize the risk, but to then live in perpetual fear and anxiety. The second is to begin rationalizing the problem itself away, as a defense mechanism to the anxiety and fear, and flocking to others who have made the same choice to mutually affirm each other and make themselves feel better.
I don't really think there's a correlation between general intelligence and which one of those two people gravitate towards. It's an emotional response that has a lot more to do with personality types. You see it in everything, not just with COVID. It's the same divide that exists between religious/non-religious.
The public health authorities in the United States spent 6 weeks pretending the coronavirus didn't exist, then another 6 weeks publicly saying masks didn't work, before saying that you must wear them and if you don't you're stupid and dumb (without really bothering to explain why or ever admitting they had changed their opinion), and then 4 weeks later said that it was OK to shout and march in the streets by the tens of thousands but only for particular reasons. It's a trust issue. Usually when a place is out of order, it isn't an employee problem but a management problem. Isn't it the job of the authorities to understand their population and know how to communicate important things to them? Or maybe millions of people are just stupid and deserve to die.
Also, nonsensical restrictions mixed in with reasonable restrictions in a seemingly ad hoc way have eroded trust in local leadership.
Around here, government construction projects were allowed to continue while private ones were halted. Outdoor walks encouraged, but fishing disallowed. And plenty more.
Now, indoor dining and gyms are closed again even though they are not contributing to the recent spike.
Also, don't forget the well publicized disregard of restrictions by some politicians who enacted or advocate for those same restrictions.
The giant funeral for John Lewis was a special case too. Back then funerals for little people had severe restrictions.
The number of deaths in my 2.5million pop. urban county has been 1 per day since mid-June. The number of cases has gone up and down since then till now with no variance in deaths.
At a certain point people get tired of the bullshit.
I don’t know which country is being talked about here but if I had to guess why fishing is proscribed, I’d hyphothesize that fishing had alwasy been classified by the state as being a “sport” (allowing fishing bodies to apply for grants, licences, etc.). Then, when Covid-19 mitigation measures were being drafted, all sporting activities were proscribed (possibly because many sports involve risk of transmission between participants and/or spectators. This is what happened in my country (Ireland) with hunting clubs. Despite being an activity that is pursued by individuals or very small groups, they were caught under a similarly wide umbrella.
I don’t envy legislators the task of having to drill down into every aspect of human behaviour and make ongoing risk assessments for it. For Level 5 restrictions in Ireland, a huge amount of effort went into determining what goods should be considered as “essential” so that shops selling them could stay open. Needless to say, they didn’t get it right and there are inconisistencies. However, legislators have to react quickly to changing circumstances while maintaining the requirement that their work be legally sound. Under such circumstances, I don’t expect the new (and temporary) rules to be perfect in every way. The best we can hope for is that they get the big picture right.
It was in Washington State in the US. The shutdown order came from the Governor and was enforced by the state department of fishing and wildlife.
Now, guided fishing and fishing tours still have some reasonable restrictions but non-guided fishing and non-guided hunting are pretty much back to normal.
Strict lockdown rules were announced this past Sunday, I am not sure if they impact fishing or hunting -- it doesn't sound like it.
Recreational fishing was closed state-wide in Washington State for about a month as part of the initial lock-down. Granted it wasn't closed that long but the damage to 'follow the science' credibility was done. There were protests and public ridicule which probably led to the quick turn-around.
Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts?
It would seem like perhaps an uneducated but highly communal/cooperative/respectful-of-authority society would have better outcomes than one with well educated individuals who have a culture of disregard for institutional science or the idea of technocrats and bureaucrats that might know more than Joe Sixpack. You could argue that education is what creates the values we're hoping for here, but that is kind of what I'm questioning. Perhaps the culture itself is the problem not the test scores.
> Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts?
I'm sure poor education accounts for a lot of it, but it can't be the only factor - even here on HN (where I'd assume most posters are well educated) there are people claiming COVID is a non issue and/or claiming masks are dangerous.
Another example are countries other than the US, such as the UK. In the beginning there were plenty doubters (hardly surprising when you've got arguably the most powerful idiot in the world claiming it's a hoax), but I see/hear very little of that these days.
It could be a mistrust of authority, but a lot of people in the US seem quite happy to trust authority - as long as it's the "right" authority.
For example, in the USA, you have Trump telling the most outrageous lies on a near-hourly basis, and millions believe him. On a similar vein you have ludicrous conspiracy theories like qanon, and even just plain conspiracies (without the "theory"!) about the Clinton's eating babies! As I European, I might suppose that a lot of people in the US are batshit-insane, but there has to be a reason for all that lunacy.
>I might suppose that a lot of people in the US are batshit-insane, but there has to be a reason for all that lunacy.
Peter Medawar addressed this[0] quite some time ago:
"The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together."
That sort of stuff just breeds magical thinking, conspiracy theories and all manner of other sorts of malarkey, hogwash, balderdash and hooey.
In a lot of the same states that can't figure out how a respiratory virus comes in and out of your face, the general population and especially the elected officials and religious leaders are unsure of the circumstances under which a human female becomes pregnant. Not surprisingly, these states are also the national capitals of teenage pregnancy. Basic knowledge of biology would maybe clean these places up a bit.
> I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100. Nothing to me has demonstrated this more than the reaction to the pandemic. When you are so uneducated that you think a mask won’t help prevent a disease that is spread via respiratory droplets, that is a big problem and unfortunately those people are all sitting ducks. Of course many won’t believe the doctors when they don’t have the capacity to understand even the basic concept?
Maybe the problem is they spent too much time listening to the apparently sub-100 IQ public health establishment in March?
Lots of people have IQs of 100. If you have a moment, I'd like to understand why you think half of the population has an IQ below 100, and why that might be significant. Does an IQ of 98 or 99 deem a person a moron?
I agree that the US has an issue with how education is viewed in the popular culture. I would bet, without any acutal supporting data, that compliance with mask orders is highly correlated with the degree of education of a region.
'Not real' is a strawman fallacy argument.
The real argument against wearking masks is that Covid-19 is similar to Influenza: a dangerous desease, but still not dangerous enough to spend too much time on wearing masks/social distancing -- and keep living in fear.
The reasoning against wearing masks -- is that wearing masks and social distancing - hurts more than it helps.
Idaho is currently sending it's overflow COVID patients to Washington state.
Idaho's state health authorities are blaming it on a mysterious epidemic that is definitely not COVID, and that social distancing, reduced capacity, and mask use is unnecessary.
> "Something's making these people sick, and I'm pretty sure that it's not coronavirus, so the question that you should be asking is, 'What's making them sick?'" he told the medical professionals who testified.
We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit.
In Vegas the concern for masks started to wane. By Utah, no fucks were given and pretty much not a single fuck was given until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the lower peninsula of Michigan.
When I say no fucks were given - I mean that pretty much no one around me cared about wearing a mask, social distancing, etc. Hotels would participate out of corporate necessity. We drove hundreds and hundreds of miles sometimes and were the only people in stores with masks on. Sometimes I felt like an outsider alien, being stared at by the people around me. I was surprised yet not surprised at the same time.
So the surge and issues the comminuties up there are facing don't surprise me in the least.