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People are free to make their own decisions on the basis of unscientific thinking. The issue is when decisions are made for you, and you’re told there is a scie

People are free to make their own decisions on the basis of unscientific thinking. The issue is when decisions are made for you, and you’re told there is a scientific basis, and there isn’t.

stahtops 2y ago
So 4 years later you’re going to tell me that you believe we would have reduced covid infections by gathering closely together indoors with no masks?
- gnicholas 2y ago
  Terrific false dichotomy — bravo. The post I was responding to was critiquing the prior post on the grounds that people make decisions without a scientific basis all the time. My point was that people are free to make these decisions, but that governmental mandates should be held to a higher standard. I of course would not have said that we could have reduced covid infections by following the steps you suggest. But governmental mandates need to take into account both sides of the ledger. If having kids in school could have prevented massive learning loss and not resulted in significant additional deaths/hospitalizations, then that's something worth considering.
  - stahtops 2y ago
    Ok so you admit that social distancing and masks help reduce the spread of covid-19. That’s great to hear. What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet? I’d like to hear from each of you what you hope to learn, and why you think it would have been worth intentionally infecting people with covid-19, as that’s what would be required for a conclusive scientific study.
    - gnicholas 2y ago
      > What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet? I don't know anyone named Jim, nor am I saying we need to have definitive studies before giving out guidance. However, if we are going to give out guidance that ends up requiring schools to space out kids' desks in a way that makes it impossible for many of them to open, I think that guidance should either be grounded in science or admitted to be a best-guess. This is about transparency and honest, which are especially important when the government issues mandatory rules that upend life as we know it.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Reduced, no. The best available evidence is that it would have made no difference either way. Sad and depressing but that's where the data takes you. This is physically possible for any virus that can spread long distances on air currents including through air ducts, as SARS-CoV-2 can (just like its predecessor SARS-1). As it's not possible to be outside 24/7 nor to wear a mask inside 24/7 regardless of mask type, the chance of not being exposed fairly quickly is pretty low. The epidemiology of airborne respiratory viruses is not the same as measles. The best evidence of this is still the nearly controlled experiment that happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship early on, which was completely ignored afterwards due to what it showed.
  - stahtops 2y ago
    I mean I honestly don’t know how there are people still repeating this lie that masks didn’t or don’t work. Hundreds of thousands of people spent days in our hospitals. If PPE was not effective, every doctor and nurse in the country would have been sick by week 2.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Doctors and nurses did get sick. There were plenty of reports in the very early days about doctors dying of COVID, or mass absences of nursing staff. Then they got immunity and went back to work. Masks had no effect. This isn't a lie. Look at any graph of cases from any country you care to pick, then try and draw a line where mask mandates were added or removed. You won't be able to, because even when a whole population was forced to start wearing a mask overnight there was no inflection in the graphs. The point of everyone wearing masks was to slow down the growth in those graphs, or even put it into reverse. Yet nothing happened. This is absolute proof that they did not work. That's why the argument for masks always ends up relying on invalid lab studies using mannequins, or self-reinforcing models that just prove their own assumptions, or arguments of the form "people just didn't wear the right kind of masks". When you look at what was actually tried, the ground truth data doesn't show any effect.
      - gnicholas 2y ago

People are free to make their own decisions on the basis of unscientific thinking. The issue is when decisions are made for you, and you’re told there is a scientific basis, and there isn’t.

stahtops 2y ago

So 4 years later you’re going to tell me that you believe we would have reduced covid infections by gathering closely together indoors with no masks?

gnicholas 2y ago
Terrific false dichotomy — bravo. The post I was responding to was critiquing the prior post on the grounds that people make decisions without a scientific basis all the time. My point was that people are free to make these decisions, but that governmental mandates should be held to a higher standard. I of course would not have said that we could have reduced covid infections by following the steps you suggest. But governmental mandates need to take into account both sides of the ledger. If having kids in school could have prevented massive learning loss and not resulted in significant additional deaths/hospitalizations, then that's something worth considering.
- stahtops 2y ago
  Ok so you admit that social distancing and masks help reduce the spread of covid-19. That’s great to hear. What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet? I’d like to hear from each of you what you hope to learn, and why you think it would have been worth intentionally infecting people with covid-19, as that’s what would be required for a conclusive scientific study.
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    > What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet? I don't know anyone named Jim, nor am I saying we need to have definitive studies before giving out guidance. However, if we are going to give out guidance that ends up requiring schools to space out kids' desks in a way that makes it impossible for many of them to open, I think that guidance should either be grounded in science or admitted to be a best-guess. This is about transparency and honest, which are especially important when the government issues mandatory rules that upend life as we know it.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Reduced, no. The best available evidence is that it would have made no difference either way. Sad and depressing but that's where the data takes you. This is physically possible for any virus that can spread long distances on air currents including through air ducts, as SARS-CoV-2 can (just like its predecessor SARS-1). As it's not possible to be outside 24/7 nor to wear a mask inside 24/7 regardless of mask type, the chance of not being exposed fairly quickly is pretty low. The epidemiology of airborne respiratory viruses is not the same as measles. The best evidence of this is still the nearly controlled experiment that happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship early on, which was completely ignored afterwards due to what it showed.
- stahtops 2y ago
  I mean I honestly don’t know how there are people still repeating this lie that masks didn’t or don’t work. Hundreds of thousands of people spent days in our hospitals. If PPE was not effective, every doctor and nurse in the country would have been sick by week 2.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Doctors and nurses did get sick. There were plenty of reports in the very early days about doctors dying of COVID, or mass absences of nursing staff. Then they got immunity and went back to work. Masks had no effect. This isn't a lie. Look at any graph of cases from any country you care to pick, then try and draw a line where mask mandates were added or removed. You won't be able to, because even when a whole population was forced to start wearing a mask overnight there was no inflection in the graphs. The point of everyone wearing masks was to slow down the growth in those graphs, or even put it into reverse. Yet nothing happened. This is absolute proof that they did not work. That's why the argument for masks always ends up relying on invalid lab studies using mannequins, or self-reinforcing models that just prove their own assumptions, or arguments of the form "people just didn't wear the right kind of masks". When you look at what was actually tried, the ground truth data doesn't show any effect.
    - gnicholas 2y ago