4 ms·
My main question is: For how long? First, presume COVID will never be completely eliminated. (Certainly it will never cease to be detected by widespread RT-PCR
by zaroth 6y ago
My main question is: For how long?
First, presume COVID will never be completely eliminated. (Certainly it will never cease to be detected by widespread RT-PCR testing with a 1-2% FP rate).
If you won’t grant me that, presume that equally deadly (to certain demographics) diseases will always exist.
Do we never get to go around outside without a mask on again?
Some cultures think that’s the right choice. Some do not. There are valid arguments on both sides, so I think it’s not appropriate to belittle either perspective.
Being required by law to wear a mask whenever you are out in public (and not eating?) is a major cultural shift. It’s reasonable that people will have different readiness to enact, e.g. a Federal law with major financial or criminal penalties involved.
My ancillary point would be that COVID is not the same level of risk in all places and at all times. So, e.g. a Federal mask policy with a $1,000 fine that applies in FL and MA all the same, where MA cases are basically at the noise floor of the test right now, is not justifiable. Or, likewise, a single policy which applies to nursery schools and nursing homes.
Particularly for large heterogenous countries, there is a huge benefit to local and regional government being able to set appropriately strict policies for their own jurisdictions.
There is also absolutely the need to be dynamic in your level of response. Look at Melbourne for example. You can’t lock down as hard as they will be doing indefinitely. Perhaps you can do it for a short time in response to an acute event. That’s just an extreme example in the overall scale of phased response protocols. Legally mandated masking is just somewhere further down that spectrum.
- patrick451 6y agoThese have been some of my main concerns in the beginning. What is the exit strategy? Nobody can tell you. Back in March, I get a phone alert ordering me to start inside. For how long? What criteria must be met for this order to no longer be in effect? There was no mention of that. It was neither time limited, nor data limited (e.g., automatically goes out of effect when infection rates drop below x per million). Furthermore, this was an executive order by our governor, not passed by the legislator, which make it all the more unpalatable. Yes, covid is deadly. More deadly than the flu. But the flu is also deadly. We take none of these precautions for the flu. How much more deadly than the flu must a virus be for all of this to be justified.
- zaroth 6y agoWorth noting there have been multiple flu strains throughout modern history which have been more deadly than COVID has been so far. Aside from 1918 Spanish Flu there was also the 1958 Asian flu which killed ~2 million. COVID is also less deadly than even an average flu for about half of people who get it, but many times more deadly than the average flu in about a quarter of cases. The bottom line is unless you have a set of sustainable measures which can keep R below 1, then you’re back to just bending the curve to keep hospital capacity available. Realistically I think that locations that have a very low herd immunity percentage cannot be successful in keeping R below 1 without intensive shutdown and lockdown measures, which of course must be sustained indefinitely. However once a certain level of herd immunity is reached in a community, a more sustainable set of measures can be enough, in concert with the innate benefits of herd immunity, to keep R below 1. I believe this explains the current dichotomy we see in places like NY and MA versus FL and CA. It’s not a question of “MA does better wearing masks than CA” it’s a matter of masks plus MA’s herd immunity keeps MA below 1 while masks with the lower herd immunity in CA keeps them above 1. You don’t have to be much above or below that R=1, after 30 days the results compound either way.