4 ms·

I wonder then, why would the vaunted CDC change their policy to no longer test everyone? If we aren't doing this, then why bother with masks? No one is going

• shadowgovt 6y ago
  > I wonder then, why would the vaunted CDC change their policy to no longer test everyone? If we aren't doing this, then why bother with masks? Great question. The CDC is an arm of the Executive Branch and beholden to orders from their bosses; I have disquieting hypotheses (people want to pretend COVID-19 is a solved problem because masks and social distancing are inconvenient, it's an election year, being popular wins elections) but no hard evidence to confirm or deny such a hypothesis. It's unfortunate to observe that such positioning of personal political goals above public health has happened in the past; Philadelphia was the site of an unusually deadly outbreak of the 1918 flu (that killed so many people the city ran out of coffins) because the mayor decided not to cancel a military parade due to federal pressure. > No one is going around the country forcing at-risk people out of their homes. Those very few should stay home and let the rest of us get on with our lives. As we are a deeply-interconnected society, it's not that simple. People need food. They need medical care, they need trash taken out. They need repairs done to their homes. Plus, I think a case can be made that it's a lot more humane to spread the pain out a little by having everyone wear inconvenient masks for awhile than for most people to go about business as usual and a few to live like they're incarcerated. China and other countries did the latter, and Americans I talk to aren't a fan of the "your door gets welded shut and martial law is declared" solution. We like to think ourselves better than that. That's to say nothing of the fact that we're still not clear how at-risk anyone is. There's obviously a curve of probability, but it can strike young people down badly enough to cause permanent damage and, in some cases, death also (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-and-covid-19-younger-adults-are-at-risk-too https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...). It's unclear to me that we know enough about this disease for individuals to actually make an educated guess as to whether they're "at-risk." > And besides, if I've already had COVID, I wouldn't need a mask either way. Hey, if there were a hard-to-forge mechanism for easily identifying people who already had the disease so that store owners and service providers could know quickly whether they're extremely low-risk to move around without a mask on, I'd be in favor of it. We should write our Congresspeople.
  • Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Again, I will redirect you to this well stated argument that illustrates how low risk the store owners and service providers really are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290681
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      The crux of that argument is that people would be dying anyway; the response to the argument clarifies that 100,000-+200,000+ additional deaths is worth adjusting behavior to abate (especially since those are the numbers with adjustment; the R0-value on the disease was high enough that it was on track to become another Spanish Flu without mitigation). I have relatives who were old enough to remember the Spanish Flu. Spanish Flu was enough to mean that every family you ask from that era had someone who died of that flu. That, qualitatively, sticks with people. It becomes a stain on the memory of a generation. It is the kind of fate we form governments to avoid. We can't conquer death, but we can mitigate COVID so that it's not another Spanish Flu. And people want that. In general, people want to avoid having a generation where everyone knows a relative who died from COVID. "Well, people die of something, so..." isn't an acceptable response to people.