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This framing is patently ridiculous. Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively. Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 mas

This framing is patently ridiculous. Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively. Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 masks forever. "Science and stuff" and "for our own good" are not actually bad things. "We did what we had to when we needed to" is not true yet. We need to finish the job, instead of half-assing it. The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
"Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 masks forever." Don't say this. Among the scientific advisors to governments, there have been a few (thankfully a fringe who don’t have any real influence) who in media interviews have advocated mask wearing and even social distancing in perpetuity, even after COVID is long gone. This is because they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all.
- wetmore 6y ago
  Do you have any links? Sounds interesting. I definitely don't want mask wearing and social distancing to continue in perpetuity but I do hope that wearing a mask when you are feeling sick but still out in public becomes normalized.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    I do agree but even better would be universal paid sick days so they don’t have to even go out. I wonder if masks are a cop out for real, effective disease mitigation. (BTW I’ve been called an anti masker for asking this.)
- hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
  > even after COVID is long gone COVID is very likely to become an endemic disease, so it probably won't be going away. Of course the best way to deal with that is vaccination, but there are anti-vaxxers so masks will probably become more of a fixture. Not because of an overzealous adviser, but because of people's stupidity.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    What is the case for it not being endemic now?
    - hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
      The fact that variants are already rife, all coronaviruses are globally endemic so far and the impossibility of the required global coordination of all countries to eradicate it.
- SavageBeast 6y ago
  I'm curious and Im not putting you on the spot here but I wonder from what law does the government derive the authority to force people to wear masks in order to prevent a common virus which all of us have some immunity to? To me this seems to be another over reach emboldened into existence by COVID measures. Im not making the argument these measure were unnecessary at the time. I am making the argument that we do in fact live in an imperfect world filled with both natural and man made threats. Bad things are going to happen and thats a fact of life. > "they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all." Until domestic and international travel is banned this is a pipe dream. In a matter of months anyone who wants a vaccination will have had one. Time to get on with the business of living in an unpredictable world filled with new threats.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    The power to enforce quarantines goes all the way back to the founders.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Perpetual mask laws aren’t quarantines, though. Quarantines are limited-time emergency things. Consider how Poland's Supreme Court, for example, recently found that the government had no right to close businesses or require masks without declaring a state of emergency (which is necessarily a short-term thing). In the USA, with its even more litigious culture and judges favouring limited state intervention, I would expect long-term public-health laws to face even more legal opposition.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        Quarantines as considered by the founders were far harsher than the mask mandates we have now. This all seems like just-so logic to me.
        Mediterraneo10 6y ago
- FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
  That would be very fragile. For thousands of years, Native Americans maintained comparatively low densities and longer distances between people. Large cities existed in the Mississippi basin, but that was the exception. From a "public health" perspective, this was great. Then they encountered a population that had been living in denser conditions, both with other humans and with animals. These people had been a breeding ground for pathogens, a big gain-of-function experiment, for thousands of years. They even smelled bad. The population with the good public health was ravaged by the worst plague the world has ever known, a plague that makes the Black Death look like the common cold, a plague that killed 90% of people in many places, that destroyed cities, that nearly emptied continents ("providentially", from the invaders' point of view). To this day, it is a tragedy whenever an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is met by an outsider, because within a month 90% of the tribe is dead of disease. It is very good for a society to embrace vaccines. It is very bad for a society to sit out the next rounds of evolution, or of immune learning. You'll end up with Galapagos syndrome. Consider the Indian symbol of the lotus. (It is the sign of the BJP.) It symbolizes "beauty growing from the muck". The "muck" is important. Drink the water. A society that really wants to win, should have viral research facilities, well protected in their deepest deserts, where gain of function experiments speed evolution and produce ever more dangerous threats. At the same time, they should develop vaccines for these viruses, and include them in peoples' regular shots. If it wants to go on the offense, all this society has to do is release its pathogens. It will be protected; its enemies will not. Lockdowns can be accepted as one-off responses that preserve population while a vaccine is developed. Since you end up with the same (or even better) immunity but less death, it's a win. So just be patient; we're almost there. But as a long term solution, a society that embraces lockdowns over immune learning is going down the wrong path.
- maximente 6y ago
  there are also eg privacy advocates who may now be able to wear masks without too much hassle for the foreseeable future to defeat mass surveillance. for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Masks don’t help for privacy, and already privacy advocates are becoming aware of this. The extensive networks of surveillance cameras in e.g. Russia and China are now able to identify people wearing masks – this was recently used in Moscow to go to the homes of masked demonstrators a couple of days after the protests and arrest them there, for example. Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.
    - maximente 6y ago
      > Masks don’t help for privacy alrighty then. glad that's cleared up. seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help." how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public? Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
> Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively. And if politicians had acted effectively, would zero people have died? We're talking about a mostly invisible natural killer. It's going to kill people, regardless of who does what. Influenza has killed thousands every year since the dawn of time, but we don't blame anyone for it.
- kaba0 6y ago
  Death toll is a number, and the smaller the better I would say..
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
But this kind of rhetoric is exactly what I find concerning. The arguments I've seen on this issue seem to be driven by soaring rhetoric about finishing the job and trust for the science and respect for the dead, rather than a practical analysis of the risks and tradeoffs we face today. It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture. (This is an observable trend in international comparison of news coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting...)
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  >It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture I've noticed this as well among many in my social circles. Every time I discovered some new scientific study which helped to dispell some degree of the FUD surrounding covid, the people who had adopted that heuristic always responded with more negativity and FUD, and never relief. A great example of this was how early on, when looking at data from Italy, there was FUD suggesting that the death rate could be 10-15%. When more data was collected which dispelled that great fear, Fauci said "It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death".
tharne 6y ago
> The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens. Fair enough. But to their credit, at least the WSJ has the decency to clearly distinguish their Opinion page from their actual news. The NYT seems to have given up maintaining any such separation.
- cr1895 6y ago
  Aside from the large “Opinion” text above the title and the clear delineation of sections?
  - nybble41 6y ago
    I think the point was that there is quite a bit of opinion to be found outside the designated opinion section, not that the area for officially acknowledged opinion pieces isn't clearly marked.
SavageBeast 6y ago
"Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively" I couldn't disagree more with this. Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Sadly, the predictable occurred and no politician was going to do very much about it. Looking back on it, the only effective preventative measure that had any chance at all of working in the US would have been to totally seal the national borders about mid January 2020. At the time the politicians were too busy trying to impeach the executive office holder who may have debatably held the authority to accomplish such an action. When there finally were inbound travel restrictions implemented the leadership was yet again accused of Xenophobia and Racism per usual opposition schtick (farcical as US residents returning from abroad were just as much of a risk). In my opinion, with the benefit of hindsight, this could have all been avoided in the US had such an action been taken. It wasn't and here we are. The world is poorly made I regret to report.
- simonh 6y ago
  The impeachment was over by mid-January so that timeline doesn't line up. As for the executive office holder, he spent the next several months on the one hand telling a journalist the virus was a dire national security threat, much worse than flu and really nasty, while at the same time telling the public is was just a flu and a hoax, and blocking emergency preparations because he didn't want to spook the markets. Nice priorities there. A prerequisite to taking any kind of coordinated or effective action is actually treating the threat as a priority. Clearly the chief executive, while being completely aware of the threat and its severity, had other things on his mind that took precedence over the risk of half a million dead Americans.
- kaba0 6y ago
  > Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Of which many would have been preventable. Do you think the mass protests, calling it a hoax (yeah I know the usual rhetoric, he didn’t explicitly say it to COVID, but come on, he did try to half-ass two things with that), the useless too little too late closing of borders, some states going on as if nothing happened, sunbathing on the beach and I could go on. All that with a pandemic that is known to have an exponential growth rate - that is even doing very little in the beginning will save many many people.
mrfusion 6y ago
What did you want politicians to do?
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
The problem in your scenario is that "finishing the job" was always about not letting hospitals be swamped That's the false premise that we accepted as true when the majority of the electorate agreed to allow this shut downs to happen. No one justified lockdowns with "we need to eliminate covid" or "we need to vaccinate 50% people". That simply did not happen. The literal premise used by all govt officials was that all forceful covid mandates were only temporary and only to avoid healthcare collapse and to have time understand the virus. We are well past that point. The restrictions are still in place. The only thing being half assed is the job, as ny state aptly showed, and most of the federal vaccine distribution rollout continues to demonstrate. The truth is reasoned thinking was never part of the equation. If i am wrong, then please define "the job", and then find quotations from April or May 2020 stating that the "job" did not mean understand the virus and avoid hospital collapse.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

"Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 masks forever." Don't say this. Among the scientific advisors to governments, there have been a few (thankfully a fringe who don’t have any real influence) who in media interviews have advocated mask wearing and even social distancing in perpetuity, even after COVID is long gone. This is because they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all.

wetmore 6y ago
Do you have any links? Sounds interesting. I definitely don't want mask wearing and social distancing to continue in perpetuity but I do hope that wearing a mask when you are feeling sick but still out in public becomes normalized.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  I do agree but even better would be universal paid sick days so they don’t have to even go out. I wonder if masks are a cop out for real, effective disease mitigation. (BTW I’ve been called an anti masker for asking this.)
hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
> even after COVID is long gone COVID is very likely to become an endemic disease, so it probably won't be going away. Of course the best way to deal with that is vaccination, but there are anti-vaxxers so masks will probably become more of a fixture. Not because of an overzealous adviser, but because of people's stupidity.
- ddingus 6y ago
  What is the case for it not being endemic now?
  - hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
    The fact that variants are already rife, all coronaviruses are globally endemic so far and the impossibility of the required global coordination of all countries to eradicate it.
SavageBeast 6y ago
I'm curious and Im not putting you on the spot here but I wonder from what law does the government derive the authority to force people to wear masks in order to prevent a common virus which all of us have some immunity to? To me this seems to be another over reach emboldened into existence by COVID measures. Im not making the argument these measure were unnecessary at the time. I am making the argument that we do in fact live in an imperfect world filled with both natural and man made threats. Bad things are going to happen and thats a fact of life. > "they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all." Until domestic and international travel is banned this is a pipe dream. In a matter of months anyone who wants a vaccination will have had one. Time to get on with the business of living in an unpredictable world filled with new threats.
- tptacek 6y ago
  The power to enforce quarantines goes all the way back to the founders.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Perpetual mask laws aren’t quarantines, though. Quarantines are limited-time emergency things. Consider how Poland's Supreme Court, for example, recently found that the government had no right to close businesses or require masks without declaring a state of emergency (which is necessarily a short-term thing). In the USA, with its even more litigious culture and judges favouring limited state intervention, I would expect long-term public-health laws to face even more legal opposition.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Quarantines as considered by the founders were far harsher than the mask mandates we have now. This all seems like just-so logic to me.
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
That would be very fragile. For thousands of years, Native Americans maintained comparatively low densities and longer distances between people. Large cities existed in the Mississippi basin, but that was the exception. From a "public health" perspective, this was great. Then they encountered a population that had been living in denser conditions, both with other humans and with animals. These people had been a breeding ground for pathogens, a big gain-of-function experiment, for thousands of years. They even smelled bad. The population with the good public health was ravaged by the worst plague the world has ever known, a plague that makes the Black Death look like the common cold, a plague that killed 90% of people in many places, that destroyed cities, that nearly emptied continents ("providentially", from the invaders' point of view). To this day, it is a tragedy whenever an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is met by an outsider, because within a month 90% of the tribe is dead of disease. It is very good for a society to embrace vaccines. It is very bad for a society to sit out the next rounds of evolution, or of immune learning. You'll end up with Galapagos syndrome. Consider the Indian symbol of the lotus. (It is the sign of the BJP.) It symbolizes "beauty growing from the muck". The "muck" is important. Drink the water. A society that really wants to win, should have viral research facilities, well protected in their deepest deserts, where gain of function experiments speed evolution and produce ever more dangerous threats. At the same time, they should develop vaccines for these viruses, and include them in peoples' regular shots. If it wants to go on the offense, all this society has to do is release its pathogens. It will be protected; its enemies will not. Lockdowns can be accepted as one-off responses that preserve population while a vaccine is developed. Since you end up with the same (or even better) immunity but less death, it's a win. So just be patient; we're almost there. But as a long term solution, a society that embraces lockdowns over immune learning is going down the wrong path.
maximente 6y ago
there are also eg privacy advocates who may now be able to wear masks without too much hassle for the foreseeable future to defeat mass surveillance. for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Masks don’t help for privacy, and already privacy advocates are becoming aware of this. The extensive networks of surveillance cameras in e.g. Russia and China are now able to identify people wearing masks – this was recently used in Moscow to go to the homes of masked demonstrators a couple of days after the protests and arrest them there, for example. Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.
  - maximente 6y ago
    > Masks don’t help for privacy alrighty then. glad that's cleared up. seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help." how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public? Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.

theandrewbailey 6y ago

> Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively. And if politicians had acted effectively, would zero people have died? We're talking about a mostly invisible natural killer. It's going to kill people, regardless of who does what. Influenza has killed thousands every year since the dawn of time, but we don't blame anyone for it.

kaba0 6y ago
Death toll is a number, and the smaller the better I would say..

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

But this kind of rhetoric is exactly what I find concerning. The arguments I've seen on this issue seem to be driven by soaring rhetoric about finishing the job and trust for the science and respect for the dead, rather than a practical analysis of the risks and tradeoffs we face today. It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture. (This is an observable trend in international comparison of news coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting...)

loveistheanswer 6y ago
>It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture I've noticed this as well among many in my social circles. Every time I discovered some new scientific study which helped to dispell some degree of the FUD surrounding covid, the people who had adopted that heuristic always responded with more negativity and FUD, and never relief. A great example of this was how early on, when looking at data from Italy, there was FUD suggesting that the death rate could be 10-15%. When more data was collected which dispelled that great fear, Fauci said "It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death".

tharne 6y ago

> The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens. Fair enough. But to their credit, at least the WSJ has the decency to clearly distinguish their Opinion page from their actual news. The NYT seems to have given up maintaining any such separation.

cr1895 6y ago
Aside from the large “Opinion” text above the title and the clear delineation of sections?
- nybble41 6y ago
  I think the point was that there is quite a bit of opinion to be found outside the designated opinion section, not that the area for officially acknowledged opinion pieces isn't clearly marked.

SavageBeast 6y ago

"Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively" I couldn't disagree more with this. Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Sadly, the predictable occurred and no politician was going to do very much about it. Looking back on it, the only effective preventative measure that had any chance at all of working in the US would have been to totally seal the national borders about mid January 2020. At the time the politicians were too busy trying to impeach the executive office holder who may have debatably held the authority to accomplish such an action. When there finally were inbound travel restrictions implemented the leadership was yet again accused of Xenophobia and Racism per usual opposition schtick (farcical as US residents returning from abroad were just as much of a risk). In my opinion, with the benefit of hindsight, this could have all been avoided in the US had such an action been taken. It wasn't and here we are. The world is poorly made I regret to report.

simonh 6y ago
The impeachment was over by mid-January so that timeline doesn't line up. As for the executive office holder, he spent the next several months on the one hand telling a journalist the virus was a dire national security threat, much worse than flu and really nasty, while at the same time telling the public is was just a flu and a hoax, and blocking emergency preparations because he didn't want to spook the markets. Nice priorities there. A prerequisite to taking any kind of coordinated or effective action is actually treating the threat as a priority. Clearly the chief executive, while being completely aware of the threat and its severity, had other things on his mind that took precedence over the risk of half a million dead Americans.
kaba0 6y ago
> Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Of which many would have been preventable. Do you think the mass protests, calling it a hoax (yeah I know the usual rhetoric, he didn’t explicitly say it to COVID, but come on, he did try to half-ass two things with that), the useless too little too late closing of borders, some states going on as if nothing happened, sunbathing on the beach and I could go on. All that with a pandemic that is known to have an exponential growth rate - that is even doing very little in the beginning will save many many people.

mrfusion 6y ago

What did you want politicians to do?

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

The problem in your scenario is that "finishing the job" was always about not letting hospitals be swamped That's the false premise that we accepted as true when the majority of the electorate agreed to allow this shut downs to happen. No one justified lockdowns with "we need to eliminate covid" or "we need to vaccinate 50% people". That simply did not happen. The literal premise used by all govt officials was that all forceful covid mandates were only temporary and only to avoid healthcare collapse and to have time understand the virus. We are well past that point. The restrictions are still in place. The only thing being half assed is the job, as ny state aptly showed, and most of the federal vaccine distribution rollout continues to demonstrate. The truth is reasoned thinking was never part of the equation. If i am wrong, then please define "the job", and then find quotations from April or May 2020 stating that the "job" did not mean understand the virus and avoid hospital collapse.