6 ms·

>Half the country is just stuck, focused on short-term and no attention paid to anything else and it's freakin disastrous. The pandemic is largely over cultura

by jowday 5y ago

>Half the country is just stuck, focused on short-term and no attention paid to anything else and it's freakin disastrous. The pandemic is largely over culturally and mentally for pretty much all of the country - I'm in the middle of San Francisco and the only real remaining enforced anti-COVID measures are flashing your vaccine card before going into bars, masks inside of gyms, and masking and demasking when you enter restaurants - although I remember a friend with kids telling me there's still some strangeness at schools. No one's really locked down anymore outside of a few holdouts in each state.

rayiner 5y ago
> The pandemic is largely over culturally and mentally for pretty much all of the country - I'm in the middle of San Francisco and the only real remaining enforced anti-COVID measures are flashing your vaccine card before going into bars, masks inside of gyms, and masking and demasking when you enter restaurants - although I remember a friend with kids telling me there's still some strangeness at schools. That's a real understatement. Here in Maryland, my 8 year old is still in a mask at school both inside and outside. She's been a trooper with all the precautions over the last year and a half, but started crying when she heard her school was going to do masking again in the fall, because it means probably another year of social distancing in schools (not being able to play with all your friends, etc). The masks really interfere with her gymnastics class, because of O2 restrictions as well as difficulty hearing/understanding what instructors are saying. My 3 year old is masked all day in preschool, as well as at his extracurriculars. He does a "toddler crossfit" type class where all the kids and instructors are masked, and it's a disaster. At this age their ability to comprehend instructions is marginal to begin with. Add the muffled speech and inability to see facial expressions and it means the kids have a lot of trouble understanding what's going on. I've done A/B testing helping my kid with the activities. With a mask on, he has a much harder time understanding me, and also mistakes my mood--e.g. he can't see me smiling so he interprets my giving him directions as yelling (it's loud in the gym obviously). Wearing a mask, as we did for 4-5 hours on a flight recently, weirds out my 2 month old since he can't see my face. We are not going to even try to send him to daycare with masked caregivers. I hate to sound like a nutter--I'm a STEM major, I know how to "science"--but I don't trust that they actually have considered the developmental effects on infants not being able to see faces for 8 hours a day at daycare.
- jowday 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't have kids so I'm sort of out of the loop on what's still in place at schools, like I said. Stuff like "social distancing" when they already have the kids sitting in rooms for hours at a time seems silly, just like masking and unmasking only to enter and leave bars.
- chana_masala 5y ago
  > I hate to sound like a nutter--I'm a STEM major, I know how to "science"--but I don't trust that they actually have considered the developmental effects on infants not being able to see faces for 8 hours a day at daycare. It's a shame that you have to defend not being crazy to say that a child not seeing faces won't have some kind of psychological impact when for all of human history (the biological perspective) we have seen the faces of our elders, peers and parents.
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    Absent any scientific evidence, it's a rather extraordinary claim. There had been no human flight throughout human history until ~100 years ago, yet GP did not have any fear about flying with his family.
    - isoskeles 5y ago
      I suspect we will never run this through a controlled scientific experiment and thus will never 'know' what could be the long-term effects of partially hiding human faces from children, because very few people would sign up their children for such an experiment. (And I would urge any intellectually curious people who are also laser-focused on empiricism as the only valid way to acquire knowledge, to instead apply rational thought to the question. Why don't we have any scientific evidence on the matter?)
      - jgwil2 5y ago
        > apply rational thought to the question. Okay, I'll give that a try: the benefits of wearing masks in public during a pandemic are known, whereas any harm that might be caused by occasionally exposing children to the sight of partially covered human faces is unknown. Therefore, to minimize harm, we should favour masking.
chana_masala 5y ago
Papers please hardly sounds like it's over.
prh8 5y ago
It is not even remotely close to being over in the US. After visiting SF for a week this month, I don't even know how someone in that bubble could think that, since it's clearly not over there either. It's much different and less problematic in SF than many other parts of the country, but absolutely not over there or anywhere else.
- jowday 5y ago
  What's the most onerous restriction you saw in SF while you were here, I'm curious - maybe I'm biased from living here, but like I said for me it's been limited to masking and flashing my vaccine card at bars. Unless you consider indoor masking a big deal, in which case sure, it's nowhere near over in SF.
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    Clearly a large part of the country finds masking indoors onerous, ridiculous as that may seem. Edit: look no further than the fact that this comment is downvoted for confirmation that some people feel this way.
    - prh8 5y ago
      It's being downvoted because it's silly to equate the pandemic with wearing a mask indoors. There's so much more to it than that and if nothing in your life reminds you of that, you're incredibly lucky.
      - jgwil2 5y ago
        But that, along with vaccine mandates, was cited by OP as the only visible reminders of the pandemic in SF. Where on earth did I equate the two?
pfdietz 5y ago
California is ahead of the rest of the country on Delta. Rates have fallen considerably there. They are only just starting to fall elsewhere; in some places they are still rising.
evancox100 5y ago
I am not in Bay Area, but a coworker who is just told me today his ~4 year old in day care has to be masked all day.
worker767424 5y ago
> masking and demasking when you enter restaurants I've seen it, but this just seems silly. I think the way bars work is you walk in with a mask, take it off, and put it on when you go to the restroom?

by jowday 5y ago

rayiner 5y ago

> The pandemic is largely over culturally and mentally for pretty much all of the country - I'm in the middle of San Francisco and the only real remaining enforced anti-COVID measures are flashing your vaccine card before going into bars, masks inside of gyms, and masking and demasking when you enter restaurants - although I remember a friend with kids telling me there's still some strangeness at schools. That's a real understatement. Here in Maryland, my 8 year old is still in a mask at school both inside and outside. She's been a trooper with all the precautions over the last year and a half, but started crying when she heard her school was going to do masking again in the fall, because it means probably another year of social distancing in schools (not being able to play with all your friends, etc). The masks really interfere with her gymnastics class, because of O2 restrictions as well as difficulty hearing/understanding what instructors are saying. My 3 year old is masked all day in preschool, as well as at his extracurriculars. He does a "toddler crossfit" type class where all the kids and instructors are masked, and it's a disaster. At this age their ability to comprehend instructions is marginal to begin with. Add the muffled speech and inability to see facial expressions and it means the kids have a lot of trouble understanding what's going on. I've done A/B testing helping my kid with the activities. With a mask on, he has a much harder time understanding me, and also mistakes my mood--e.g. he can't see me smiling so he interprets my giving him directions as yelling (it's loud in the gym obviously). Wearing a mask, as we did for 4-5 hours on a flight recently, weirds out my 2 month old since he can't see my face. We are not going to even try to send him to daycare with masked caregivers. I hate to sound like a nutter--I'm a STEM major, I know how to "science"--but I don't trust that they actually have considered the developmental effects on infants not being able to see faces for 8 hours a day at daycare.

jowday 5y ago
Yeah, I don't have kids so I'm sort of out of the loop on what's still in place at schools, like I said. Stuff like "social distancing" when they already have the kids sitting in rooms for hours at a time seems silly, just like masking and unmasking only to enter and leave bars.
chana_masala 5y ago
> I hate to sound like a nutter--I'm a STEM major, I know how to "science"--but I don't trust that they actually have considered the developmental effects on infants not being able to see faces for 8 hours a day at daycare. It's a shame that you have to defend not being crazy to say that a child not seeing faces won't have some kind of psychological impact when for all of human history (the biological perspective) we have seen the faces of our elders, peers and parents.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  Absent any scientific evidence, it's a rather extraordinary claim. There had been no human flight throughout human history until ~100 years ago, yet GP did not have any fear about flying with his family.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    I suspect we will never run this through a controlled scientific experiment and thus will never 'know' what could be the long-term effects of partially hiding human faces from children, because very few people would sign up their children for such an experiment. (And I would urge any intellectually curious people who are also laser-focused on empiricism as the only valid way to acquire knowledge, to instead apply rational thought to the question. Why don't we have any scientific evidence on the matter?)
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      > apply rational thought to the question. Okay, I'll give that a try: the benefits of wearing masks in public during a pandemic are known, whereas any harm that might be caused by occasionally exposing children to the sight of partially covered human faces is unknown. Therefore, to minimize harm, we should favour masking.

chana_masala 5y ago

Papers please hardly sounds like it's over.

prh8 5y ago

It is not even remotely close to being over in the US. After visiting SF for a week this month, I don't even know how someone in that bubble could think that, since it's clearly not over there either. It's much different and less problematic in SF than many other parts of the country, but absolutely not over there or anywhere else.

jowday 5y ago
What's the most onerous restriction you saw in SF while you were here, I'm curious - maybe I'm biased from living here, but like I said for me it's been limited to masking and flashing my vaccine card at bars. Unless you consider indoor masking a big deal, in which case sure, it's nowhere near over in SF.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  Clearly a large part of the country finds masking indoors onerous, ridiculous as that may seem. Edit: look no further than the fact that this comment is downvoted for confirmation that some people feel this way.
  - prh8 5y ago
    It's being downvoted because it's silly to equate the pandemic with wearing a mask indoors. There's so much more to it than that and if nothing in your life reminds you of that, you're incredibly lucky.
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      But that, along with vaccine mandates, was cited by OP as the only visible reminders of the pandemic in SF. Where on earth did I equate the two?

pfdietz 5y ago

California is ahead of the rest of the country on Delta. Rates have fallen considerably there. They are only just starting to fall elsewhere; in some places they are still rising.

evancox100 5y ago

I am not in Bay Area, but a coworker who is just told me today his ~4 year old in day care has to be masked all day.

worker767424 5y ago

> masking and demasking when you enter restaurants I've seen it, but this just seems silly. I think the way bars work is you walk in with a mask, take it off, and put it on when you go to the restroom?