5 ms·

A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion. Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quaran

A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion. Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever. Millions died in the US alone, and a non-trivial percentage of them would likely still be alive if our public officials did a better job of respecting the medical professionals and their recommendations.

anthonypasq 3y ago
Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year). The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  > The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future. Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.
- Mechanical9 3y ago
  Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public. heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron... also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
    - boston_clone 3y ago
      About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%. County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism). 0. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
      - anthonypasq 3y ago
        im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
        boston_clone 3y ago
- boston_clone 3y ago
  > Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed. But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
    - thedrbrian 3y ago
      give how many people seem to catch covid after having the vaccine, was it worth it?
      - boston_clone 3y ago
        Considering the risk of dying was unequivocally reduced, this is an obvious “yes”.
- revelio 3y ago
  > Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong. Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded: 1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect. 2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible. This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.
spookthesunset 3y ago
> Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever. You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it... "Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.
- boston_clone 3y ago
  > A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline. Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. It’s why we have speed limits. It’s why you have to wear a seatbelt. It’s why you can’t shoot fireworks off during a drought. It’s why products are restricted from being sold. The concept is fundamentally the same. It’s also the same reason I’m glad cybersecurity policy, strategy, and operations are not a truly democratic process.
  - spookthesunset 3y ago
    > Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. This might be true for like the first week or two of march but after that... the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts". Those people were never elected, are not accountable at all for their actions, and were granted virtually unlimited control. That is what we call a dictatorship. I would much, much rather have a diverse party of people calling the shots and not just one very specific niche class of "expert". Without a diverse set of people involved you'll wind up where we got... an extremely myopic fixation on exactly one single respiratory virus for two+ years to the complete disregard for the damage it caused to our children and communities. I used to think technocracy would be awesome. What better than to have a bunch of experts doing things "the right way". But covid opened my eyes to how incredibly bad of an idea that is. Experts are only expert on one specific thing. All their advice and mandates are made through that narrow lens. > You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline. But you also chatted with business people to get insight into the costs of forcing multifactor auth on people would be worth the security gains? Right? Because forcing 2FA is absolutely not something a security expert gets to decide. A good security expert would realize they are an advisor and not the person calling the shots. They know their role is to outline "what would happen if we did blah blah" and then let the business people know the pros and cons so said business people can make a decision. The business people, if they are any good, realize that there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are. Experts don't get to decide those tradeoffs at all... I mean, could you imagine if the only input you got for a product, say a car seat, was just from a bunch of lawyers? The product would be absolutely lawsuit proof but I bet it would suck as a car seat.
gmarx 3y ago
I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong. I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing. But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much
- boston_clone 3y ago
  Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant. The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.
  - revelio 3y ago
    No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data. But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD... Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.

anthonypasq 3y ago

Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year). The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.

whimsicalism 3y ago
> The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future. Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.
Mechanical9 3y ago
Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public. heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron... also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
  - boston_clone 3y ago
    About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%. County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism). 0. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
    - anthonypasq 3y ago
      im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
      - boston_clone 3y ago
boston_clone 3y ago
> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed. But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
  - thedrbrian 3y ago
    give how many people seem to catch covid after having the vaccine, was it worth it?
    - boston_clone 3y ago
      Considering the risk of dying was unequivocally reduced, this is an obvious “yes”.
revelio 3y ago
> Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong. Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded: 1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect. 2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible. This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.

spookthesunset 3y ago

> Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever. You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it... "Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.

boston_clone 3y ago
> A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline. Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. It’s why we have speed limits. It’s why you have to wear a seatbelt. It’s why you can’t shoot fireworks off during a drought. It’s why products are restricted from being sold. The concept is fundamentally the same. It’s also the same reason I’m glad cybersecurity policy, strategy, and operations are not a truly democratic process.
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  > Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. This might be true for like the first week or two of march but after that... the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts". Those people were never elected, are not accountable at all for their actions, and were granted virtually unlimited control. That is what we call a dictatorship. I would much, much rather have a diverse party of people calling the shots and not just one very specific niche class of "expert". Without a diverse set of people involved you'll wind up where we got... an extremely myopic fixation on exactly one single respiratory virus for two+ years to the complete disregard for the damage it caused to our children and communities. I used to think technocracy would be awesome. What better than to have a bunch of experts doing things "the right way". But covid opened my eyes to how incredibly bad of an idea that is. Experts are only expert on one specific thing. All their advice and mandates are made through that narrow lens. > You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline. But you also chatted with business people to get insight into the costs of forcing multifactor auth on people would be worth the security gains? Right? Because forcing 2FA is absolutely not something a security expert gets to decide. A good security expert would realize they are an advisor and not the person calling the shots. They know their role is to outline "what would happen if we did blah blah" and then let the business people know the pros and cons so said business people can make a decision. The business people, if they are any good, realize that there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are. Experts don't get to decide those tradeoffs at all... I mean, could you imagine if the only input you got for a product, say a car seat, was just from a bunch of lawyers? The product would be absolutely lawsuit proof but I bet it would suck as a car seat.

gmarx 3y ago

I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong. I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing. But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much

boston_clone 3y ago
Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant. The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.
- revelio 3y ago
  No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data. But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD... Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.