How exactly would you confirm - beyond any doubt - that contagion happened outside? Most people live most of their lives inside a building of one sort or another, so it'd be almost impossible to 'document' a case of outside transmission.
Even people from remote Amazon tribes in the jungle have got covid.
Also in warmer countries outdoor/indoor is not all that different ventilation wise. It is not like I am magically getting covid if I am standing just inside the door and am suddenly immune standing on the porch.
The only people whose mental health I'm really concerned about are those who are obsessed with trying to get rid of masks.
If you are vaccinated and feel comfortable not using a mask, don't wear one. If you don't feel comfortable, then wear one. I literally have yet to hear someone complaining about someone not wearing a mask outside, but all you need to do is read this thread to see tons of comments complaining about people wearing masks.
Let people make their own decisions. They aren't cattle.
Why 'poor'? Have you factored in everything going on that person's life? Do you know if they have a friend or relative who might be at higher risk? What if they have a young kid and they don't want to risk it? What if they just consider wearing a mask a mild inconvenience when compared to - say - the risk of being intubated?
I honestly can't understand this whole obsession with shaming people for wearing masks. Who gives two shits if someone else is wearing a mask? How does it affect you?
Then you shouldn't use qualifiers such as 'poor' to describe their risk assessment. Don't give the idiots pushing anti-masking rhetoric in this forum more wind than they deserve by propagating their memes.
Nah, trust me, by treating it as a religious war you are a far bigger problem. Their identities as anti maskers are built in large part in opposition to people like you.
It's a little like how Republicans have a tendency to define themselves as in opposition to Democrats.
It makes it harder for me to communicate. If you want to wear a mask, that is fine, it is your perogative. But people should be aware of the risks, and I don't think most people do. Many people wear masks because they were told too, despite the fact that the people who said that know that masks aren't necessarily effective.
Meh, the outrage crowd in Hacker News is ridiculous. Any level of effort to make a company more inclusive as criticized as the company being 'too woke'. Meanwhile, Google's market cap has exploded in recent years.
Lots of people too scared of 'cancel culture' (read: being caught and having to pay the consequences) around here.
Disagreed politically? I’m talking about major markets like California opening up, not whatever happens already in Georgia or Florida. So I think these more risk averse jurisdictions will also have a few businesses that try to maintain independent restrictions without support from the state, and I think they will have lost tolerance from their entire population or market base by then (a few weeks from now). This is not political, as the Federal government and the state government will be of the same political leaning. Nice try though.
I think the parent's main objection is that you seem to be showing glee at the prospect of a business failing because it shows an overabundance of caution even after the state no longer requires it. That's... kinda petty, no? Especially when wearing a mask inside a store or whatever isn't a particularly difficult thing to do.
Not parent but although i disagree with them, i kinda get where they're coming from.
Some businesses give in to security theater and it is immensely frustrating. For example here in Belgium some shops force you to take a trolley even if you just want to buy a single item and have your own bag. They do this "because COVID". So what happens? A pile up of people at the entrance trying to move caddies over, leading to far more risk there than there otherwise would be if you left people to their own device.
Our swimming pools are open, but they closed the showers "because COVID". So what happens? People are gross, get in the water right away, don't soap up or whatever, and it's far less clean/healthy than it would be for no good reason.
Overabundance of caution is not always a good excuse.
I have no idea what happens in Belgium, but nothing like that happens here in the US. They barely ask people to wear a goddamn mask, and they are all up in arms about it.
So, nothing like Belgium then, and exactly what I described: people being asked to wear a mask and not doing it.
I don’t know the circumstances of the situation you mention, but it hardly qualifies as security theatre. Also, I doubt they screamed ‘not approved’ but I guess no anti-mask narrative sounds dire enough without a little exaggeration.
Oh, I knew. I was just pointing out that even in the scenario he described it didn't even approximate to what you describe as happening in Belgium (which to be clear, I completely believe).
I’m fine with a business underperforming when it’s due to an over-abundance of any type of decision making. Too large salaries, expand too quickly, charge too much, charge too little, ask too much of customers, whatever it is, I hope businesses which make better decisions do better.
I am expressing glee at the accelerated failure of barely viable businesses.
Its 100% Machiavellian.
Many businesses could have made their patrons equity owners but instead went for the gofundme as nondilutive capital. Many bad tastes in my mouth, so long and goodnight. Evictions restarting soon too.
This is such a bullshit strawman. Most of my friends are family are very liberal. Most of them are already vaccinated. Not a single one of them wants to wear a mask unless absolutely necessary and everyone is ready for this to be over.
If they've been vaccinated and still insist on wearing the masks, I kinda think you're proving OP's point here. What do you even mean with "waiting for this to be over"? You're vaccinated, it's over, are you now waiting for a super-vaccine or something?
You are kind of proving my point by reading 'unless absolutely necessary' (meaning: they don't want to use a mask and they don't most of the time, except when there's a rule saying they should) as 'THEY TOTALLY WANT TO KEEP USING A MASK!!!'.
Fortunately, we’re not. In between, there was a vaccine developed and deployed and the science strongly (overwhelmingly is probably more precise) suggests that fully vaccinated people are at minimal risk to themselves and minimal risk to spread, which is of course the entire point of vaccines and entirely unsurprising given our understanding and long experience with other vaccines, which almost all exhibited the same disease control properties.
Getting vaccinated seems to me to be the exact opposite of throwing away all caution.
I quite agree, but I think the message from health authorities has also been problematic here: they repeated that "vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection".
That is true of course: some vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection because efficacy is not 100 %. But the public has, predictably, got this message wrong: I keep getting told that "vaccinated people will get the infection and spread it just the same".
No, not just the same. Vaccinated people are radically less likely to infect others. I do understand that the officials wanted to be careful and not encourage people to move around after being vaccinated, but perhaps they could have again worded their message differently, to be more honest and direct.
Then in March the CDC's guidance was to continue wearing a mask after vaccination, except in situations where transmission risk was minimal (such as when everyone present has been vaccinated). They said we should do this while we're still learning about how vaccines affect the spread of the virus (https://web.archive.org/web/20210308164227/https://www.cdc.g...).
Now the CDC is saying fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear a mask (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...), but no reason has been given for the change on that page. Were they wrong on asymptomatic infections in fully vaccinated individuals, or has the risk of spread simply been lowered because of the number of individuals who have received a vaccine?
Without knowing the reason behind the change in guidance (I'm sure there is one), I find it easy to be cynical and distrusting.
The changes can be explained by two simple factors, without the need for some grand nefarious conspiracy:
* The CDC's default position is caution
* We know more now than we did in the past
In February, we realized vaccinated people could still get asymptomatic infections. Out of an abundance of caution, the CDC recommends vaccinated people keep wearing masks because the vast majority of the population isn't vaccinated.
As evidence accumulates in the intermediate time, we realize that vaccines also lower the percentage of people with asymptomatic Covid-19 [1]
With even more evidence, we realize vaccinated people overwhelmingly avoid hospitalization, which is the real issue we are trying to avoid [2]
With those two pieces of information, the CDC can now change their recommendation. Nothing nefarious going on, nothing 'unknowable' to anyone paying attention.
The problem is when people who are already predisposed to distrust the CDC - most likely due to their media diet - and put 0 effort in understanding the changing landscape see the CDC change the recommendation and assume it must be 'something political'. Those of us who were paying attention weren't that surprised about the announcement.
I don't have a source for you, but my understanding is that the main reason for the change is that very recent studies have shown that people with vaccines and asymptomatic "breakthrough" infections carry a much lower viral load + viral shedding than previously thought. So even those vaccinated people who may have an asymptomatic infection are really at an extremely minimal chance to spread it to anyone else; they just aren't shedding enough virus particles to make the risk high.
I think many of us on HN object to imprecise messaging, sometimes to the point where it’s technically incorrect.
But I also have to admit that “Defund the Police”, “Flatten the Curve”, “I have a dream”, “Think Different” are more effective than a precise 2-page memo laying out a concrete plan.
Some people struggle with nuanced, complicated messaging. Others struggle when messages are over-simplified. I posit that the first group is a few orders of magnitude larger, at least in terms of effect of public comms.
There's almost a year between the time we originally went into lockdown to 'flatten the curve' and the time a significant part of the population got vaccinated. You can't pretend that not using a mask now - once someone is vaccinated - is the same as not using a mask back then.
So basically what you are saying is that you drew your conclusion back then - who knows based on what data - and you are so set in your ways, there’s nothing that will change your mind.
Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.
That's the harm to the economy. That's not the cost of masks.
Providing everyone in the US with two high-quality N95-equivalent masks each week for a year would be at most $60 billion. ($2 per mask * 100 masks * 300 million people, at retail prices).
We didn't do that. Our kids have a half-year of learning loss. Small businesses around me closed, and a ton of people fell behind on mortgages. We're looking at pretty high inflation from how we've expended our money supply, eventually. Etc.
Part of the reason these things look like bad use of funds is that people don't do ROI calculations, and confuse millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is a thousand times more than a billion, and a million times more than a million. But to everyone a MILLION dollars looks like a big number, as does a TRILLION dollars.
People also confuse the ridiculously high effectiveness of proper masks with the fairly low effectiveness of cloth masks.
Can people not in the US harbor the virus? I assumed you were trying to eradicate it and to do so with your original figure of $2/day/person masks, it’s trillions per year worldwide. You later silently amended (not sure if in error or moving the goalpost) that figure to 2 masks/week in your $60B/yr estimate to cover most, not all, of the people in the US.
$2/day/person * 365 day/year * 7.5 B people/world -> over $5T/year/world
Thanks for the unneeded lesson on powers of 10, though.
* My comment was about the US. See the last line of my comment.
* In the US, the economic gains of having rolled out N95 and equivalent masks when they become widely available would have cost orders-of-magnitude less than the masks. Ending COVID19 sooner would still pay for a program like this today.
* Whether or not the vaccine will stop COVID19 is still TBD. We don't have good numbers on impact on spread, on ultimate vaccination rates, nor on mutations. It seems on-track, but still TBD.
* Yes, similar measures would need to be taken elsewhere to fully eradicate the virus, and that's assuming no animal stores. Doing math there brings up a million apples-to-oranges comparisons.
* Numbers in second post were was based on similar (successful) programs implemented in Taiwan and Korea, which did stop COVID19 (pre-vaccine) and allowed those economies to continue functioning, while ours imploded. Quotas were 2-3 per week, and everyone was required to use (and reuse) them. My second comment was more precise, if anything.
Meh, I understand your point, but as someone who follows the conspiratorial world passively, I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people.
In reality, the usual suspects were pushing conspiracy theories about the CDC even before they determined masks were useful. A famous conspiracy peddler famously claimed the CDC was downplaying how bad the virus was and 'it was over for humanity, it'll only be lone survivors' when we only had a handful of cases in the US.
In other words: the CDC could've nailed every single guideline and we'd still have half of the population making up conspiracy theories about it. It's just too politically convenient.
> I can tell you the whole 'but they told you masks were useless' thing is a post-facto rationalization to gain some common ground with the less conspiratorial people.
So is the post-facto realization of "we knew masks work, we just didn't want the people to grab all the supply".
That's an oversimplification. The first thing to consider is that there's two types of masks:
* N95 masks
* Everything else
We knew N95 masks worked because that's what professionals use in hospitals. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of PPE so telling people to buy them would put them in direct competition with professionals treating very sick patients. In April 2020 we were looking at a really bleak scenario so there was a very strong incentive to keep professionals alive even if it came at the expense of some citizens (think: doomsday scenario).
We also had no idea whether 'everything else' helped at all. Recommending non-N95 use might have given people a false sense of security that might have played against more effective measures such as extreme social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms.
As knowledge improved, guidance changed. Nothing crazy to see here.
As I explained in another post, originally the consensus was that only N95 masks were somewhat effective. There were no studies on the effectiveness of other masks.
Recommending people use masks could've given people a false sense of security in people and probably acted against more effective measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms matching those of Covid-19 ('well, I know I have a cough, but I'll just wear a mask and it'll be fine').
Recommending people use the only masks we knew to somewhat work - N95s - would've created a huge problem for hospitals that already were having issues procuring PPE to protect the professionals who were dealing with Covid-19 patients.
Basically, there was no reason for the CDC to recommend masks. Again, there's no need for some nefarious explanation.
This, so much this! I had a friend (who unfortunately has become completely lost to conspiracies) tell me, that the German government was incompetent because they did not take the virus serious enough and that covid was overblown and much less severe than the flu, in the same argument! When I pointed out the contradiction he said "you just think there is a contradiction because you have been indoctrinated by the MSM".
The exact same thing is happening with the mask discussion. The people who say the CDC lied about masks and it was obvious that they help, are the same who strongly refuse to wear them because it's a security theatre. It's completely dishonest argumentation.
It's honestly been fascinating to watch the conspiracy world twist themselves into logical pretzels to fit their narrative to both reality and the political landscape. At some point, Alex Jones - who unfortunately is a weather vane for all the crap circulating in the conspiracy world - claimed the following within the span of a month:
* The virus is lethal and the government is hiding it
* The virus is just the common cold and tests are a conspiracy to make Trump look bad
* The virus is lethal and a conspiracy by dark forces to kill people
* The virus doesn't exist and people wearing masks are idiots
* The virus is lethal (again!) and a conspiracy by the Chinese to destroy the world's economy
It's no surprise that people who are marginally sucked into the conspiracy world have their brains completely fried by the constant narrative shift.
The closest thing we have is homeless populations - they spend most of their time exclusively outside - and they still get sick: https://www.sfpublicpress.org/covid-19-cases-spike-among-hom...
So making some big claim about how outdoors transmission is impossible is kind of preposterous.