I feel like a bad liberal for saying this, but I’ve recently been pretty happy about living in a red state. That’s a problem.
I don’t know how to make this happen, but we have to find a way to get masks off of the poor service workers. They’re miserable, and the ones that I know are sick to death of wearing them while few of the customers do (again, red state).
Agreed. It really is disgusting to see/attend events in which (fully vaxed) server class is uniformly masked, while (fully vaxed) attendees are not. It is amazingly and odiously classist. Remember the whole controversy about AOC's "Tax the rich" dress at the Met? To me the despicable component was seeing the contrast between the uniformly masked servants (whom I would wager all the tea in China had to present proof of vax for that gig) and the unmasked elites in attendance. WTF.
It's not classist, it's just practical. You can wait tables while wearing a mask. It's harder to eat a hamburger while wearing a mask. I mean, it is also true that dentists tend to wear masks while their patients do not, despite the fact that I would be that most dentists are wealthier than there average patient.
Also, it isn't like going to a restaurant is something that only the 1% does. I suspect many of those waiters themselves go to restaurants on occasion.
Go look at the pictures of the Met Gala. What's striking is not just the contrast between the masked workers and the unmasked guests: it's that all the workers are wearing black masks. Not N95's or KN 94's, much less masks of their own choosing. I cannot find a single picture of a server there in anything but a black mask.
The masks are part of their prescribed dress code.
If you're OK with that, then fine, but let's not pretend that it's purely about safety. They're clearly being told to wear a particular kind of mask for the aesthetics of the event. I think that adds to the ickiness.
That said, it remains true that, since people at the Met Gala were eating, it was a less reasonable to expect them to wear masks than staff. I'd add that I'm pretty sure that there wasn't even a mask mandate in effect in NY in September.
Also, dress codes are kinda standard for wait staff in black-tie events (I'm sure most people would be pissed if a waiter at their wedding showed up in an "I'm with Stupid" t-shirt) so I would expect that masks would also be uniform at such an event.
So it seems like you're acknowledging that it was okay for any given person to not wear masks at all at the event (not just while eating), and that the wait staff were just wearing them as part of a dress code. You don't see why people would object to requiring PPE as meaningless workplace attire for service employees? In a pandemic, can't we handle workers wearing masks or not depending on their preference? That seems a lot less obnoxious than an "I'm with Stupid" tee.
Matching masks was dress code. Requiring masks in the first place was an effort to reduce transmission.
And the fact that it is OK for a given person not to wear a mask is different than saying that we shouldn't do it all. While I would expect everyone being masked is more effective than some people being masked, I would also expect that some people being masked is more effective than no one being masked.
Never ceases to amaze me how determined progressives are to make everything class warfare. Now the Met Gala stands for 335 million Americans? I live in a upper middle class area in the rich sf Bay Area, and absolutely everyone wears a mask indoors, and probably 85-90% outdoors! Most people I see not wearing them are gardeners, construction workers, and trash collectors. But I’m not inclined to think that says anything about class war, just that situations vary.
Why are people wearing masks outdoors in the Bay Area? To first approximation, you can't catch Covid outdoors. I know people who wear masks outdoors because it is below freezing, but that can't be true in the Bay Area right now.
My particular KN95 masks are black, so there is always the possibility (though it's not one I believe) that the servers were given something similar for the dress code. "Here's the most effective mask around, please wear this type as part of your dress"
Well, dentists only started wearing masks to protect themselves from AIDS, not to protect their patients from them. Prior to 2020, if you went to a physician's office your doctor wasn't wearing a mask.
If servers want to wear masks to protect themselves that's fine, they should be encouraged to do so. But in fact they're being made to wear masks when patrons are not, as a way to protect the more elite patrons from the possibly germy servers.
Your argument is the same "well it's no big deal to wear a mask so no one should complain" when in fact lots of people think it's a bigger deal and the cost of that bigger deal is higher than the benefit.
While that AIDS crisis may have triggered more PPE use among dentists, the particular trigger was David Acer infecting several of his patients rather than the other way around.
With respect to servers, this idea that patrons are thought of "more elite" than servers is dumb. Going to a restaurant is a fairly common activity for people of all economic levels, even if some people might go to McDonalds while others go to the French Laundry. It's just that businesses tend to be a bit stricter on how their employees act than how their customers act. I mean, there's a reason why the sign behind the sink says "Employees must wash hands," rather than "Everyone must wash hands." The server is getting paid to be there, the customer is not.
I'm a lawyer. When meeting with clients, I tend to wear a suit, while they wear whatever they want and I tend to try to accommodate their schedule rather than vice versa. this isn't because they are "more elite" than me, it's because I'm getting paid, while they are paying me.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things masking servers isn't all that helpful. If so, and if it bothers enough servers, maybe we should stop. But making this a class thing is dumb.
But it seems like a good thing that employers are protecting their staff, no? In my experience, safety requirements for the workplace are at a higher level than in life outside work, and that's probably a good thing.
If employers gave a crap about protecting their staff, they would mandate vaccinations among the staff and the patrons, not hang a lampshade on the problem. I encourage them to do so.
The thing to do would be to tackle ventilation, which not enough people are doing. I visit companies that are still doing a lot of performative surface cleaning. Those companies are never exploring ventilation improvements.
The problem is that ventilation improvements usually involve substantially invasive modifications of the building, unless you're in a space that is already designed for indoor-outdoor use in good weather. This is especially true with recent buildings, that often have fire codes and/or energy efficiency codes that prevent windows from being openable and make most doors remain closed and block airflow.
o Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people; and
o Masks have never been very effective at slowing the spread of the virus. What they are very good at doing is signaling compliance.
Once everyone pulls their heads out of their asses and admits these facts, we can get rid of the masks.
But then, the folks who promulgate mask policies really seem to like swanning around maskless while their social inferiors are clearly identified by their masks. Maybe it will never go away.
You are a victim of propaganda. The data out of South Africa and the UK make it clear Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people regardless of vaccination status.
Also, prior infection with Omicron provides better protection than the vaccines. So a person who has survived Omicron infection (ie, almost anyone who catches it) will enjoy relative immunity from subsequent infections, free of charge. You can't say that about the vaccines, which today do not provide any protection from Omicron infection.
And I can't begin to address your ideas about the efficacy of masks. I don't know where you are getting your information. In any case, here's more than you ever wanted to know about masks in the age of Covid: https://hectordrummond.com/the-face-mask-faq/
"Vaccines do not provide any protection against infection" is an egregious falsehood, but I suspect you know that and are stirring shit for some reason.
Not an falsehood, an exaggeration. Current vaccines provide very limited protection against Omicron infection. All you have to do is look at the Omicron infection rates in highly vaccinated places like Israel and Denmark.
All you have to do is look at the difference in the case rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Last I checked it was 3x for the unvaccinated.
My brother and several other people I know were knocked on their ass by omnicron. So I’m not sure where you’re getting “harmless” unless you define harm as to only encompass hospitalization and death.
Certainly true that many vaxed/boosted have had tough ten day stretches with Omicron. The statistical evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death from omicron (or delta, for that matter) is overwhelming. Everything in life is a cost-benefit analysis, including speed limits and legality of pools that conceivably could be accessed by toddlers. For those who want to continue Zero COVID fight against less acute but still difficult sub-hospitalization cases, please wear an N-95 and protect yourself. Others can make their own choices.
It's true that there are real harms from the vaccine side effects. But they tend to last a day, and can be scheduled in advance, while the harms from illness usually last closer to a week, and don't get scheduled in advance.
Well, because of my elephant-like memory I recall way back before 2020 this sort of thing happened to me and everyone I knew once every year or two. As I recall, we managed without masking in public, lockdowns, vax passports, demonization of the unvaxxed, quarterly GMO boosters, banning from social media of discussion of cold or flu remedies, etc.
I agree. But we also managed without calendars on cell phones, video meetings, ride-hail cabs, or shared scooters. Just because we used to deal with all the problems of something doesn't mean that they weren't real problems.
Saying that we should go back to not expecting people to wear a mask or get vaccinated sounds to me like we should go back to not expecting people to have calendars on their phones or have an easy way to hail rides.
Being in a blue city in a red state (in my case, Austin) seems like the best situation. Most people are conscientious of others and wears masks in crowded locations, but without the burdensome requirements.
I definitely felt that very strongly the first half of last year, when I was living in Austin too. (Now that I'm back in Bryan/College Station, I no longer get those benefits.)
My Brother in Law owns a restaurant. My wife and daughter are servers. Luckily we live in Idaho where they aren't mandatory. But the day they because optional... not a single employee chooses to wear one.
Fellow Boisean here. (Love your comments, by the way!) Among restaurants in general, I haven't yet seen much consistency here. I can think of some places like your brother in law's, and those are awesome. There are some others where they clearly aren't required but still plenty of staff are wearing them. This can get frustrating when it's loud and you can't clearly hear or lipread what they're saying. And among the corporate chains, it's clear they are getting edicts from the top that they still have to wearing them.
I should pledge to go to Bad Boy Burgers on the grand opening day, and stay far away from the ninth circle of traffic hell that intersection already is.
+1 on your assessment of Eagle Rd. It was originally designed to be a semi-freeway with interchanges at every section mile road, but ITD chickened out and cowered to all the developers who saw an opportunity to sell stuff with all those eyes traveling down the road. Just piss poor infrastructure planning, that road.
I'll have to get back around to trying them, can't remember the last time I have. We have a plethora of hyper-local burger joints here so there's fierce competition when that strikes my appetite.
And what I appreciate about your contributions is how different they are to the typical Slow Boring reader/commenter, whose backgrounds and sensibilities tend to have plenty of common with Matt's. I apologize if this is too glib, and correct me as appropriate, but "working class/blue collar" are the sensibilities I sense from you, and I think that's a very valuable perspective that needs to be heard--not just among us here but of large swaths of society.
I would say that philosophical blue collar is definitely the vibe I go for. I was enlisted military. My wife is a cashier. My daughter is going to CWI for mechatronics. I do have a Bachelors degree... that I earned online in the Military that has nothing to do with my actual job. My job is skilled technical in the energy sector. I travel all over the country and work with millwrights and welders and pipefitters. On a typical job there are two engineers and 20-30 techs/blue collar workers of which I am one.
When I am in Boise, not a single person I associate with regularly has a college degree. Both my Brother in Laws are HS drop outs. One has a Construction business (successful) and one owns restaurants. Successful. The hardest working person I know is my wife. She is 50 and works circles around the other cashiers/servers.
But in some ways I straddle the fence between two worlds. I am an avid reader. My parents were both computer programmers. Dad got his Masters in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon. Brother is a top engineer at Boeing. Sister is a Tenured College Professor. I read Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. I work internationally. My ex-wife is English. My wife and I make a decent living (six figures).
But at the heart of it, I have this blue collar view of things. If all the bankers and lawyers in the world disappeared... oh, we would have a melt down, but civilization would continue.
If all the welders and electricians in the world disappeared. We would be in the dark ages within a week.
I share your worldview. My father was an Ivy League professor, but every time I walk out my door for a smoke and look at the sidewalks, streets and buildings that make New York, I bless all the men without fancy degrees who built them, and all the women without fancy degrees who raised the men that built them.
Boise is a corruption of the French "les bois" (a common phrase to name things here), meaning "the woods", apocryphally said by French explorers when they found a lush area after long travel in the semi-arid environment of the Snake River Valley. Trees are pretty awesome, so in thinking for a username here I went with this as a way to identify with where I live while hopefully not identifying much more.
I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now. Personally I have been using N-95 masks as PPE for over four decades as does virtually everyone who works in dusty environments. All day every day where conditions demand it. And doing physically demanding work while they are at it. If it poses no inconvenience to myself, a senior citizen, then a little less whining about it would be in order.
I am happy that you find mask-wearing to be not in the least bit onerous. You should keep wearing an N-95 in order to protect yourself -- which is far more protective to you than someone else wearing a cloth mask. Maybe you think I am ludicrous, but it breaks my heart that my seven-year old daughter never sees another human face during her seven hour school day, not even during outside recess (exception for brief lunch at which silence is enforced). The entire K-12 school is vaccinated: from 5 year old kindergarteners to the head of school. Whom is my vaccinated seven year old daughter protecting by wearing a non-N-95 mask, especially give overwhelming evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death? Couldn't staff so inclined wear N-95s and therefore protect themselves above and beyond the triple dose of vaccines they have received, if they want further protection? Why does my seven year old, who is an only child, have to pay the price of not seeing the faces of peers?
There is no such price. But maybe you could teach her that what she is doing is protecting other people. Just like they do when children in classes have severe allergies to things like milk or dairy products and these are banned from school lunches. Children can and do catch covid. And while they may be asymptomatic they can certainly transmit this to others who are more at risk.
I disagree with you profoundly. My daughter has one childhood; two years of it have been materially impacted by masking or zooming -- sacrificing for those far older than she, sacrificing for those who now can be vaxed and boosted and therefore, according to overwhelming statistics, avoid acute outcomes. Even more so if they wear N-95s like you You arrogantly say "no price" with 100% confidence. How could you possibly know that? You have never met my daughter. Goodbye.
One thing about Covid that has been annoying is having random people (with no/limited experience) tell you what to do in your personal life with no knowledge of your personal situation. "There is no such price" is a strong assertion with no justification, and I disagree.
A dirty secret about COVID politics. Both the right and left coalition have busybodies.
When the Right or Left coalition feels government action is necessary, the busybody subset of the coalition will use that as an opportunity to meddle in people's private affairs.
A portion of the COVID NPI forever crowd is the busybody contingent of liberals who really want to tell you what to do. They are also disproportinatly likely to favor "deplatforming"
It's disingenuous to claim that wearing an N95 mask isn't inconvenient. N95 masks are of necessity uncomfortable, they have to be to maintain a tight seal. The first thing anyone who has to wear them does is take them off as soon as practicable.
People in Asian countries often wear masks when they themselves are feeling a bit under the weather. It isn't the norm in Asia to wear a mask all day in public when they are feeling healthy. And it seems to really just be a thing in East Asia anyway.
I’ve traveled a fair amount of east Asia a fair amount. On the other hand I was in Korea a couple months ago and people were following the outdoor mask mandate but the moment you entered a bar or restaurant the masks came off. Clearly it’s performative.
Moreover, if we had the means to enforce universal N95 mandates, then we’d have the means to enforce a far more effective, briefer, and less irritating vaccine mandate.
Mandating N95 Masks is far more of an infringement than mandating vaccinations.
The only justification for an N95 Mask update is if we were in the middle of a COVID vaccination mandate period and were waiting to finish the vaccinations.
Since we're not mandating vaccines we shouldn't mandate masks
I'm glad that you have been able to properly use your PPE during your long career. It has undoubtedly protected you. But there is a huge difference between wearing required PPE and walking around in a N95 to alleviate the anxiety of others. Worried about COVID? Stay home or wear a N95, but don't ask me to wear one.
Peter, weren't you the other day talking about how Americans wouldn't stand for eating less beef for any reason and it would be political suicide to take that as a goal? No one responded "well then people in India must be made of sterner stuff, they never eat beef." Because that wouldn't be responsive: people are more or less okay with a certain practice depending on their cultural expectations. Resilience has nothing to do with it.
"I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now."
I remember reading an article [1] from long before the pandemic talking about masking culture in Asian countries. One of the points it made was that many people wore masks **specifically to prevent person-to-person interaction**. To quote [1]
"Juvenile psychologist Jun Fujikake has made similar observations. “When we deal with others, we have to judge whether to do things like smile or show anger,” he explains. “By wearing a mask, you can prevent having to do that. The trend of wearing a mask to prevent directly dealing with other may have roots in the current youth culture in which many of them are more accustomed to communicating indirectly through email and social media.”"
Such people aren't "made of sterner stuff"; they just had a different cost-benefit analysis than many of us do.
I find it amusing (and frustrating) that it used to be widely acknowledged that masks degrade or outright stop human interactions --- indeed, that was often their purpose! --- but now people will twist themselves into pretzels to deny such an obvious truth. Go ahead: tell me with a straight face that masks do not in the slightest impede human interactions.
The article goes on to note a bunch of other non-disease reasons to wear masks. Again, it's a different cost benefit analysis not toughness.
EDIT: The point is echoed by many in the comment section of [1]. To quote the highest rated comment:
... No, in a land where so many are cripplingly shy, this device [a mask] offers a shield against the scary outside world. For the socially inept, it's like a cloak of invisibility, helping you to hide and live inside your solipsistic cocoon.
A girl worked in my office l for twelve months, and we never once saw her face, she was never hear to speak above a whispered squeak, and she never once made eye contact with a living soul. A healthy society would fear for her mental health. Here, she was praised for being kawaaiiiiiiiii.
Hey whippersnapper. I had to walk uphill to school both ways in snow when it was 120 degrees, carrying my horse while babysitting my seven siblings with no clothes. And by god we were thankful for the opportunity.
Yeah, and the very first thing you did when you could scrape together a couple bucks was buy a car with snow tires and air conditioning --- and you were even more thankful then..
Yes. But my first car was a hand crank. None of this fancy starter motor yet you young kids have today. We didn’t have ABS braking. We would just pull the lever. We were so poor, there was only one seat that we would take turns sitting in. The others would stuff themselves into the trunk. Now sonny boy, you complain if u don’t have leather.
Have you actually been to Asia? I visited Japan, China and Hong Kong pre-COVID. At any given time <1% of people were wearing masks. They were socially acceptable, but also quite rare in practice.
I have indeed been to Asia (not that lived experience matters for this purpose), and it is absolutely over 1% in many pre-covid contexts --- especially public transport. Seriously, just look at any stock footage of the Tokyo subway with a reasonable sample size.
I have a brother who has a very woo-susceptible girlfriend of the far left variety, and very regrettably they refuse to get vaccinated. And as an odd side effect of that, they are planning to move from the Bay Area, a region which otherwise has long satisfied their worldview, to the South, due to whether restrictions on unvaccinated people are being placed.
There is a burrito place near me that does everything by the book. You tell them what you want and they glove up and move down the line adding ingredients. Then they ring you up and take their gloves off. Then they got back to the order station and glove up and repeat the process.
How is that different? The customers never wear gloves - they just grab their burrito with their grubby hands and chow down.
It reminds me of all the guys saying schools and the government don't have a right to tell you what to wear. And women saying, "I was sent home from high school for not wearing a bra."
I get the sense that you would've been in the crowd that correctly said how insane and utterly inappropriate it would be to send home a woman for not wearing a bra in school though. So it's kind of bizarre to use that as an example of how schools and government telling people what to wear is totally okay and normal.
The burrito also seems like a particularly bad example. The whole point of the gloves is to protect from a particularly acute risk (food born contaminants being transferred from the hands of the people literally handling your food into the food itself, thereby making customers sick) that is posed by the service workers in the absence of gloves. The customer doesn't wear gloves, but the risk posed by that is borne solely by the person eating the burrito rather than being spread to others. In contrast, the masks protect everyone from a risk that everyone poses, so requiring them to be worn by some people who pose no additional risk than other people who do not have to wear the mask is arbitrary and creates a burden borne by a selective few (who also just happen to typically be lower earning members of society than the people who don't have to wear the mask).
I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree about these policies, but I just think you might want to come up with better examples or arguments than these ones. They're pretty obviously flawed.
This isn't really relevant to the discussion, but your comment just reminded me of the time the girls' soccer team at my high school was suspended because their school-issued soccer uniforms violated the school's dress code.
Yep. I've felt exactly the same way. I feel like a red state free rider. I'm in Texas, my whole family that's eligible is vaxxed (and the adults are boosted) *and* they've had it before.
Our two-year-old's preschool, though, has not shut down for COVID once, even when the principal got COVID. He (my two-year-old) does not wear a mask.
Honestly, I don't know what our family would do if it did regularly close down. Both of us work, and I work from home and have regular deadlines. We have a mortgage. I see on Twitter about schools in blue states closing down and that would just not be possible for us without my working until midnight every night.
What red state are you in? I’ve seen plenty of unmasked service people here—I assumed any service workers who are wearing masks want to wear them, and I should certainly think they should be allowed, though there’s no point wearing anything but a certified N-95/KN95/KN94 for personal protection.
Outstanding article. With over 250 comments already, and us Westerners regularly getting the short stick of these articles being published too early while we're still sleeping, I apologize if someone has already made this point or something similar to it, but here goes:
There's been a weird, disturbing, and bad strain of sentiment among some of the left that could be termed as a "politics of asceticism", an opposite of the politics of abundance Matt described here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/abundance-scarcity. The core of the strain is that the only solution out of major problems is to sustain long, indefinite sacrifice toward pursuing that sole solution.
This is seen all the time in global warming discourse: so much emphasis on solely reducing GHG emissions to the point that it would lead to a drastic reduction in the quality of life, as opposed to building as much clean energy as possible to create a cascading effect to address AGW even more furtively (again, as Matt said here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance). And you see it in the housing discourse where so many are convinced that building more housing of any kind doesn't work, and to the extent that you are going to be abundant, it has to be solely toward what's deemed as affordable housing, and barring that, you can only deal with redistributing the existing scarce stock. (There's a zillion articles from Matt I could cite so I won't bother here.)
And so it goes for covid. We've invented excellent vaccines that have significantly and consistently blunted the virulence of SARS-CoV-2. But that's not sufficient for the ascetic covid hawks out there wanting a sustained and vigilant abstinence from some very basic human qualities, like being around other people and seeing them smile. It is a dead end as far as politics and policy goes.
Covid as fun-seeking-missile was very definitely a thing, and it hasn't gone completely away. People on a REMOTE BEACH during a PANDEMIC, they might even be HAVING A GOOD TIME!
as User01 mentions, I don't think this is unique to any one side of the political spectrum. I think there's just always been an association of a certain kind of asceticism and "purity" types of moralism, and this has existed across the political spectrum in many different societies, and probably always will in some form or other.
I am increasingly certain that whatever the infectious disease and public health people tell themselves in their conscious minds, in their reptile hindbrains they’re just enjoying being *important* and want to spin that out as long as possible.
Even a well-versed layperson can see that there are no NPIs short of “China” which will have any impact on this going forward, and that therapeutics and vaccines have reduced the threat level to near-zero for all but the most extremely unhealthy or oldest of individuals.
Yet, we’re being told that all of this is now permanent.
The reaction to that idea should have been rather obvious.
Hopefully the next pandemic isn’t dramatically worse because these people overplayed their hand and will not be widely listened to again in living memory.
Addendum: I considered it preposterous, asinine, and laughable 12 or 18 months ago when I first saw it suggested that there was a subset of the general population that found a perverse pleasure in the pandemic and didn't really want this to end.
This now seems pretty clearly true, although it's hard to tell how much of it is 500 shouty people on Twitter.
Unfortunately I think it's > 500, though I have no idea how much. Coming back to NYC after a year and a half in a red area has been...interesting. At least in Manhattan (Ross Douthat suggested over the weekend that it's different in the further reaches of the other boroughs), not relaxed seems to be the default mode. I work for the city and am concerned that we will never be able to take the f***ing mask off at work, and I have similar fears about my building (I have to put the damn thing on to walk through the lobby and out the door, as well as do an insomniac load of laundry at 4.30 or 5 in the morning). It's like taking your shoes off at the airport, only constantly, every single day.
Like Randall above, I'm kind of missing that red area get-on-with-it vibe. This situation seriously detracts from the general benefits of being in the city as opposed to the boondocks. I couldn't wait to get back here, and now I am feeling, for the first time in my life, close to being what seems like actually clinically depressed, with nothing firm to be able to look forward to.
I'm moving away from my blue enclave for this reason. I don't want to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask if I have to go to the office, if I'm even allowed to go to the office at all. I'm worried that in the Bay Area, I'll never be able to see the faces of coworkers again in person and connect with them socially if I want to continue working for non-profits. Sending good thoughts your way.
I live in SF too and am thinking of bailing. I never see co-workers, most of my friends moved away.
It is hard to justify paying our housing costs with how little social amentities are available. If I'm going to have a suburban social life might as well have suburban cost of living.
Your last sentence struck me. A lot of people are feeling that way. Talk to others. Know you are not alone. If you have to take off the mask to keep yourself from an anxiety attack or just to feel the sun on your face, take off the mask. This is an important piece of the benefit-cost analysis now.
Exactly, lots of people who can do their jobs remotely, and appreciate the additional working flexibility that the pandemic forced employers to allow, and who don't want to lose that, have at least a subconscious conflict about whether things should go "back to normal".
BEcause a majority of the population wants to go back to 2019. You can see it in lobbying for schools being open, opposition to masking requirements, etc.
The minority who want less social interaction are just that a minority.
I somewhat agree with you. While I think the people who say "Politicians never want to end the pandemic" are morons because a permanent pandemic is awful politics. I do think there is a good portion of the general public that loves the "superiority" they feel when following every single public health guideline to an absolute T
It really is awful politics. I remember in the leadup to the election a lot of conservative commentators would speculate "just wait until Biden wins and then the whole pandemic panic will conveniently disappear".
Things would be much better for democrats if they really were that cynical, rather than this neurotic.
I'm surprised the politicians aren't doing more to stomp on it, given the narrowness of the demographic peddling it and how thoroughly they're locked into the Democratic coalition.
I don't understand this instinct to first exaggerate people's views ("all of this is now permanent") and then assume it's due to malevolent intentions ("they’re just enjoying being *important*"). The CDC has a laundry list of research indicating the benefit of mask wearing, for example.
When people say masking and other NPIs must continue because there are still immunocompromised individuals who cannot take the COVID vaccines, they are for all practical purposes saying the NPIs should be permanent because we have no timeframe by which immunocompromised-safe vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments are likely to be available to those individuals and, based on our experience with other diseases, it's entirely plausible that we will *never* have immunocompromised-safe vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments available for COVID for those individuals.
"'Are we going to get to the point where we won't have to wear masks on airplanes?”' asked ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who was filling in as host on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“'I don’t think so,” replied Fauci. 'I think when you're dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people — you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.'"
But presumably that is understood (yes I'm giving Fauci the benefit of the doubt) in the context of the then current case loads. Of course he should have said "Sure, when we have enough vaccinated and recovered people to reduce the chances of serious illness to result from close interactions of people."
How useful are masks when people are eating in a restaurant or drinking in bars? Given these are high risk activities that necessarily do not allow for mask wearing, what is the point of masks? How many infections do they currently avert?
Others have addressed this thoroughly, but I’ll reinforce: there are ways to say “this must continue forever” without explicitly saying “this must continue forever”.
I think I generally appreciate the sentiment of this post, but "no NPIs short of “China” which will have any impact on this going forward" and "reduced the threat level to near-zero" just seem blatantly false. If we could have used this pandemic to learn which interventions are moderately helpful for little cost, and could figure out how to implement them whenever we have a winter surge of respiratory illnesses, we could save a few thousand lives a year and many millions of sick days. But the fact that some people are maximalists who want to do everything always, and other people have become determined to learn nothing from the pandemic, makes me pessimistic.
That was meant with regards to omicron in particular.
I agree that we might be able to pump the brakes on flu season each year with a month-long mask mandate, but I have no desire to do so and suspect very few others do too.
Agreed. It's pretty clear both from bioplausibility and observational data that a high degree of compliance with layered NPI strategies (distancing, masking, isolation & quarantine, indoor ventilation & filtration) has a significant effect on the spread of respiratory viruses. The '20-21 cold & flu season in the U.S.A. was absolutely crushed by broad adoption of NPI measures.
But, as you say, we do not have a base of prospective, randomized evidence that identifies which components of that layered NPI package are most effective (+/- the Bangladesh masking study). Nor do we have a great set of evidence on what methods would be most effective to encourage compliance with NPIs (mandates vs education vs advertising, etc).
That said, I'm not sure evidence would terribly helpful - it hasn't moved the needle much in the vaccine wars either. As you've seen in David R.'s replies to you, I think the experience with COVID-19 has poisoned the well when it comes to many of these NPI measures. Which is too bad, because there's potential here to relieve a huge amount of needless suffering.
If we were to find that an improved technological response to winter respiratory illness season (ventilation and vaccination) were worthwhile, then sure.
There’s never going to come a day when I regard a universal mask mandate for one-quarter of each year as an acceptable means of saving 300,000 life-years or less. Let alone any kind of enforced social distancing.
The median age for a death of flu in the United States is almost 70, and a typical season sees 20-40k deaths.
Anyone who regards mitigating that as a convincing benefit set against the cost is frankly incomprehensible to me.
I would not favor mask mandates in most situations or circumstances, except maybe mass transit (buses, subways, trains, +/- planes). I do think a strong informal social effort to promote mask-wearing in communal indoor settings during the peak of respiratory virus season would likely provide substantial health benefit, and I suspect when you get closer to 70 you may feel a little differently about the marginal value of an additional year of life compared to someone's psychological distress over seeing a lot of masks.
Bottom line: both the COVID-19 neurotics and the COVID-19 contrarians are going to have to learn to live in a society where the distribution of risk tolerance has more visible consequences. I too wish we lived in a society where 'vaxxed + relaxed' was the norm, with a handful of exceptions for empirically validated, high yield interventions (over-30 vaccine mandates, selective masking in specific venues / times of year) but as with many areas of American public policy we are likely to have to muddle through with an unsatisfying hodgepodge of non-optimized solutions that overshoot and undershoot in different localities.
I find it intriguing that the only cost you can think of associated with mask-wearing is "someone's psychological distress over seeing a lot of masks".
It does tend to make me want to dismiss you out of hand, because it's just not even slightly even-handed.
I mean you come across as completely tilted by masks for some reason, when basic common sense seems to indicate that they would have always been a good idea in crowded indoor conditions, even pre-pandemic.
I think psychological dislike of masks is legitimate, and it is by far the largest (and easiest to prove) downside of widespread mask adoption. There's also physical discomfort with certain types of masks.
But for the kind of context-dependent masking I'm proposing, I struggle to think of any other real costs. I think permanent, universal masking (which I'm not in favor of) has some theoretical - although no empirical - concern for social and emotional developmental impacts on children.
The thing about vaccine mandates is that they're much easier and less inconvenient to implement for things like school enrollment or plane ticket purchase than they are for general presence of adults in crowded public spaces. I think vaccine mandate for some level of school attendance seems like it might actually be the least invasive way to get universal adult vaccination (in the long run).
I thought Biden was on the right track with vaccine mandates as a condition of employment, as most people have to work, and among those that don't, they obviously tend to be older and are more likely to vaccinate due to a sense of heightened risk with their age. A damn shame that the courts had to kneecap it.
As for the practicality of verification, I agree that it would be difficult in some venues, like small restaurants or retail with multiple entrances. But in venues where security is already needed due to some other form of verification needed, like tickets or age, that's where I see more potential.
Every time I hear someone say we're back to normal, I am 100% certain they do not have young children.
Someone in my three year-old's class room tested positive for covid. As a result, both she and my one year-old are at home for a ten day quarantine. And this is the second time this month. I remember 2019 and if someone got the flu on class, this did not happen.
I have two kids, one in school, one in daycare. This school year, between school vacations, unplanned “vaccine awareness days”, quarantines, and teachers union strikes, my school-aged child hasn’t had a five day week in school since early October.
Of course I believe I have the cost benefit analysis on my side in siding with a true “return to normal” post omicron. But really it’s the emotional weight. Two years into this, to have so many days balancing work and parenting - even with a good, relatively independent 6 year old, meetings and thinking are constantly interrupted.
And although I feel we’ve done our best in helping our kids stay normal through all of this, we went to a museum one recent “no school” day, and my son was clearly a bit anxious in areas that were more crowded.
He’s never been in school without a mask and no longer has many (any?) memories of being in crowded indoor places without a mask. It’s going to take time to unwind the sense things are “off” when being around lots of people indoors.
These stories make me really sad; these poor kids. Mine just turned 11, transition has been seamless. They currently have mandatory masks on the bus, but not at school. I’m told that none of the kids are wearing them. Right or wrong, I’m glad the masks are gone.
We haven't had the issue with school being closed this year yet thankfully, but we played outdoor soccer this weekend and I asked the kids to wear a mask because that's the rule when there was a recent exposure at school (the rule _actually_ is, I think, that the kid is supposed to stay home but that's _TOO_ abnormal). Had it not been for that exposure I wouldn't have even asked for a mask for the kids. (Side note: the masks are actually kind of nice in winter - keeps my face warm)
But anyway, none of the other kids were wearing masks and on the walk back to the car my son was anxious about that. I _think_ I successfully calmed his anxiety by explaining how open-air spaces are much safer, but I can see that returning to no-mask for them is going to take a while, even once it's the "normal" thing to do again.
I’m planning on helping her make a crown or something out of all the masks so she can wear them on her head to ease the transition. Fortunately she’s young, she’ll forget all about it eventually.
This is a downstream problem of FDA's hostility to screening tests. If everyone were tested either daily and or at least on suspicion of exposure and turned away or sent home only on a positive test, this would not happen. With testing, schools and day care would not have needed to close even in 2020. Romer and Tabarrok said it way back then and still no one pays attention.
Maybe I'm overly concerned about this, but how much waste (landfill) and congestion (traffic for delivery) would that much testing generate? Not to mention the input costs of materials and energy manufacturing the tests.
We're talking 330 million times 365 days in a year. That's 125 billion tests. If, optimistically, each test is costing society $10 a pop, we're talking 1.25 trillion dollars. That would go a long way just on other health initiatives.
I'm OK with that being part of the cost benefit analysis. You do seem to be assuming a lot of testing and maybe a pretty high marginal cost for tests. One tests on Bayesian priors. Testing on probable exposure or if every unvaccinated person coming onto the premises of a venue, would not be THAT many tests when community case numbers is low and the percentage of negative tests is high.
I understood it as daily preventative tests. Of course not everyone would do that even if it would be mandated, so the actual number of tests used would be far fewer. But still the way I was understanding it was that the goal was to use that many tests.
But even if it's just all school kids every day of the school year, we should factor in those costs and get a ballpark of what they are.
Like everything else we could test too much, too. But it think we are at present doing far too little intentional testing, testing that will determine whether to take a costly action or avoid a clear benefit.
I agree the FDA's screening test posture has been counterproductive for pretty much the whole pandemic. However, on the whole return to normal issue, I wasn't getting my kid flu tested if she was exposed to influenza at daycare in 2019.
I guess the side I'm coming down is basically get vaccinated and stay current with boosters. If you get sick then stay home, but it doesn't really matter what you're sick with.
Different guidelines would make sense if you're, for example, working at a nursing home or something.
I do hope we keep getting easy availability to rapid at-home test kits, but that these test kits start having multiple lines on them to identify flu, covid, and possibly a couple other things. And I hope that sexually active young people are more used to the idea of regular screening tests now, and become more likely to get regular STD tests.
I'd love to see the lasting result of the pandemic be that we collectively take infectious diseases more seriously and we're more open to testing, vaccines, and mitigation measures (some masking, for example).
My point is that the school should not send asymptomatic kids home w/o a positive test and a negative test should be enough to return in whatever number of days.
Where do you live? Because this happened recently in my three year old’s class too, but there was no mandatory quarantine and life went on like normal. I live in a red state. This may prove Matt’s point that it’s the rules that are disrupting life more than the virus.
I'm in Pennsylvania. I'm not completely up to speed on all the intra-agency details, but my understanding is that the state Dept of Human Services is just following the CDC's guidance for unvaccinated individuals. It wouldn't surprise me a red state department superseded the CDC rules.
There are some people who discovered that they like wearing masks and they especially like other people wearing masks, and they want "normal" to be "everyone wears a mask in public".
Not a mandate, but a normality - that not wearing a mask is weird and strange and is like not wearing pants.
Tbf I think that during periodic surges masks on subways and trains should be normal (dunno why people are so mad about planes, I mean how often do you fly? But planes are less of an issue), but that said I’m a mostly relaxed and Vaxxed, work at home, then meet friends/ go out to dinner every weekend.
I wish the class nature of this was being talked about.
(Not this poster)
But it is a bit much for upper income people on zoom who are not wearing masks for 8 hour shifts to constantly push that low income workers wear masks.
Maybe this is cultural but most restaurants in Madrid enforce masks when you walk around. It feels kind of dumb when you think about it, but this is specially the case in fancier restaurants
Sitting still on a plane for 3-4 hours with a mask on is lame as hell, partially because airplane rides are already not the most comfortable thing in the world. Additionally, the air in an aircraft, by design, is changed out about every 90 seconds. That's how its pressurization system works. So, aircraft are actually quite safe, masks or not.
THIS. It's not that I think masks everywhere should become normalized, but there are certain densely-packed transport situations where I DO want masking to become standard.
I understand this sentiment and don’t find it to be alarmist or crazy. But for a society that has always struggled with fraternity like the United States, the symbol of masks might be something that could add sterility and distance to our social fabric and I think we should work to remove them completely in time.
Start with banning windshields, if you want people to see each other. Masks are relatively innocuous compared to windshields in terms of the way they encourage dehumanization and hate.
If you want to wear a mask by all means do so. Leave me alone though with your mandates for my face.
The flu/COVID have a vaccine. At this stage concern about either is overwhelming unusually high risk aversion or unwillingness to get the jab. Neither should be the basis for public policy.
Colds are a price I'm willing to pay for casual social interaction.
Why not clothes, while we're at it? Why not mandate nudity? Scandinavians have long known that you build fraternity by being buck-ass naked with each other. How far do we take this?
I think “over time, we should revert to the way we conducted ourselves 2 years ago” is far cry from canceling clothes. But real answer Justin, is that I fly a desk all day, get just enough workouts in to maintain my college pant size, and won’t be doing myself any favors by sporting my birthday suit everywhere.
But what's so great about "2 years ago" that it should set the standard for society going forward? There are actually things we've improved on, since then - like the prevalence of mask wearing during flu season. Remember how flu season more or less completely disappeared? When was the last time you had a cold? Or hay fever?
Those things are better now than they were in 2019. Why should we go back to the bad old days just for sake of "normalcy"? Why wouldn't we try to preserve the gains?
It really comes down to risk aversion and introversion. The people who want to make masking permanently on the bus, trains, airports, planes, offices etc disproportionately introverted. They don't enjoy casual conversation and don't consider it a cost to reduce it.
They also have higher than normal risk aversion and are much more comfortable telling people what to do to mitigate risks.
Good for them on both fronts but reasonable for the rest of us to say we don't want our mouths covered everywhere we go but restaurants, outdoors and home.
It's quite pessimistic to think that this will be cost effective. There will be even "densely packed transport situations" that are as bad as a hospital operating theatre?
You don't need to think a situation is as risky as a hospital operating theater to warrant mask use. Public transit is a particularly low-cost place to wear masks, because many people are specifically trying to avoid eye contact and social interaction anyway.
Fair enough, but It still feels pretty dystopian to think that we'll never get to a point where the marginal cost of masking exceeds the marginal benefit from the reduction in spread.
I don't see why it's any more dystopian to say that crowded subway cars are always a place for masks than it is to say that automobiles are always a place for seatbelts, or even that you should always wash your hands after holding onto a subway pole.
Obviously it's different when you're talking about places where people actively want to be social, but the subway was never that.
It would depend on the level of cases in the community. If the community spread numbers are low even a packed subway would not be THAT risky. But it's ultimately a calculation. I'd hope that we could eventually get to a no-mask point, but biological parameters that go into a cost benefit analysis will give the answer.
This is essentially my feeling. We need to recognize that COVID is going to be with us for a long time, and that we can't live in emergency conditions forever. At the same time, we are going to have periods with higher case loads and more dangerous variants and we should be ready to be less normal during those period.
We should aim to remove mask mandates and open up indoor public gatherings, but we should also be ready to put those restrictions back in place when we get another big wave (which is frankly what seems to have happened in Blue States). Ideally, the Government should try to work out fairly objective criteria for doing so, as I suspect people will be more willing to put up with restrictions if they know that it wont be a battle to remove them and people will be more willing to relax restrictions if they know it is based upon an objective criteria rather than because of political pressure.
FWIW, I'm not sure we are quite at the point where we should be relaxing restrictions. Omicron seems to be waning and it seems not to have been that bad a variant, but we are still at or near record highs for cases, deaths and hospitalizations.
I would love statistics on how many extroverts are still not socializing in person and how many introverts are still avoiding it. Surely there are some extroverts under the boot of covid zero universities, but I suspect a very high correlation.
I find it strange that the pandemic has seemed to redefine introvert as people who enjoy lockdowns and not interacting with strangers. I used to be a regular at a few meetups that were populated by tons of introverts. Introverts meeting up to play board games with strangers was not uncommon prepandemic. These people, like me, slightly shy, relying on organized meetups for an amount of socialization, have been devastated socially by the pandemic.
This is true but shyness =/= introversion. A lot of shy people are extroverts who draw energy and enjoyment from being around people but are uncomfortable in unstructured social environments.
Your larger point is correct and under-discussed. There are a lot of shy people out there who rely on offices, organized social clubs for human connections. They've been crushed. This is a real cost. And the COVID zero crowd ignores it.
"There are some people who ... want "normal" to be "everyone wears a mask in public"... [and] not wearing a mask is ... like not wearing pants."
I think you are making up straw-liberals in your head to get mad at. If there are 15 people in all of North America who have this whacky view, I'll be amazed.
I think this is pretty accurate -- besides some people explicitly saying it, it's also the implicit message of every statement that we have to continue masking until the immunocompromised, children under 5, etc. are protected via vaccines or comparably effective medical interventions because, SPOILER ALERT, there is no foreseeable timeframe for protecting them and it's entirely possible that it will *never* be possible to protect them. (For example, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends that the yellow fever vaccine never be given to children under six months and discourages it for children at age six to nine months: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2020/family-travel/vaccine-recommendations-for-infants-and-children )
So you know more than 15 autistic people who want to make mask-wearing as obligatory as pants-wearing.
I think your 15+ autistic friends are not a useful reference-population for thinking about politics, and are giving you a skewed view of what the majority of people think about masks.
The questions raised by MY's post involve mass politics, not the obsessions of the neuro-divergent.
Well, conversely there seem to be a bunch of people who look back fondly on the times when they just contracted diseases from people - even people who claimed to care about their welfare.
A new norm where we treated "communicated a deeply unpleasant sickness to another person" as a genuine interpersonal harm to be ashamed of when you did it, would be a good, socially-beneficial norm.
We have to be careful with this. One thing the gay community has been working on for decades is getting people to take the proper level of care and testing around HIV and other sexually transmissible infections, without stigmatizing people for getting infected. Stigmatizing the infected is one of the most counterproductive things in terms of getting people to test and provide useful informal contact tracing. It should not be embarrassing to text your hookup from last weekend to say, "hey, my gonorrhea test this week just came back positive so you should get tested and pause hooking up" and it should not be embarrassing to tell your friends you went to dinner with last night, "hey, my influenza test just came back positive so you should get tested and perhaps isolate for a day or two".
'A new norm where we treated "communicated a deeply unpleasant sickness to another person" as a genuine interpersonal harm to be ashamed of when you did it, would be a good, socially-beneficial norm.'
Sounds more like a dystopian nightmare. Passing on germs is not something people usually have control of, and such a norm would certainly rule out any kind of gathering of strangers, mass transit, meeting of more than one or two friends at a time, public schooling etc etc.
But it is something people have control over. That's the whole point of public health - disease isn't an immutable condition of the human experience. That's why we've skipped a couple of flu seasons in a row, now.
We skipped flu seasons by dramatically reducing social interaction. Way more people work from home. Way less people travel. Way less sponaentous social interaction in general.
Those are enormous costs that you don't even seem to care about. Especially since a flu shot dramatically reduces the risk of infection without any of the social costs.
It's far more likely to be used as a cause to shame those who aren't able to take off work when they're sick, by those who work from their own offices at home, than anything else.
I think this has already happened, though not for everyone. Two years from now, do you think anyone will be surprised to see a mask in a crowded public area? It will be very similar to Hong Kong pre-Covid, where public mask-wearing was normal by people who were feeling sick or were particularly germ-conscious.
Hats might be a better example. Before the war, only weirdos went out in public without a hat. (George Orwell wrote that middle class socialists, among other cranky things, didn’t like to wear hats.)
Of course, masks are a little more unpleasant than hats, and less likely to get baked into our culture, but it’s an example of how an article of clothing, even an inessential one (what were those hats for, exactly?) can become necessary in polite society.
My understanding is in some east Asian countries, it is already normal to wear a mask *when you are sick*. When I lived in Sydney, which has a lot of immigrants from east Asia, it was normal to see some of them wearing masks. I had a white, Australian born friend who expressed frustration that more people didn't adopt what he regarded as a sensible and polite practice.
I appreciate this is not the same as wearing a mask all the time but it's not so distant.
And the right answer is probably to wear a mask the 2% of the time when you're sick *and* the 2% of the time when there's a local wave of sickness, but not much more than that.
Actually, It was very common in asian countries (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan) to see a significant %age of the population ALWAYS mask up in very densely crowded places like the subway.
I started noticing this trend around 2003 and am told that the initial bird flu and SARS epidemics in that part of the country (which we in the US pretty much never experienced) sealed those habits.
But then the subways in these places make the NYC subways during rush hour (pre-pandemic) seem empty ....
Yes, as someone who has been hawkish on Covid measures (as in: generally please do more of them), it is interesting to see that there are clearly groups of people who have a cultural preference for certain Covid approaches almost irrespective of the presence of Covid.
It’s interesting because I have different reactions to different parts of the portfolio
Masks: no logical argument against but culturally rather repellent.
Stay home when sick: damn right, now and always
Limit own socialisation: hey, you do you
Limit kids’ socialisation/ school time - terrible
I live in a country where there is zero chance that any part of that package will remain in place for a second longer than necessary, but I can imagine that if you like these things and live in a sub-community where you have clout, you might want to try and permanently embed them.
A "normal" that includes a few people with exaggerated concern for my health is OK with me, so long as I'm not supposed to show exaggerated concern for theirs. I don't think we're at the point where I'm showing EXAGGERATED concern by wearing a mask becasue my cost of mask wearing is low (except for having to sing masked in church; that sucks).
My biggest concern about the divide within the left on this issue is that there seems to be a growing number of people who want to minimize risk and have no concerns about the extent to which doing so seriously burdens other domains of life. I attended policy school at UC Berkeley and the political scientist who really started the graduate program there was Aaron Wildavsky. He was gone by the time I arrived, but his reputation was significant, and it he seemed like he had become something of a crank at the end of his career, really disparaging the regulatory state as a tool to redistribute utility/wealth away from the working class and to the professional middle class by sapping the dynamism of the economy to mitigate small risks. This seemed to me a bit overly libertarian when I was a graduate student in the 90s and I thought he was underestimating the real harms of an unregulated market, but these days I find myself worrying that we just keep getting less and less risk tolerant as time moves forward, and that the costs of that creep are being dismissed -- it seems true with the focus on safetyism in ideas and speech (harm mitigation is more valued than the benefits of robust exchange) as well as this response to COVID (wanting kids to be in school in person without masks is seen as being a teacher killer). I think it's weird when people want proof that wearing masks all day is bad for kids mental health and education -- I think it pretty self-evident -- we shouldn't have to prove that masks are suboptimal, the burden should be on the mask advocates to show a meaningful reduction in spread and yet that data really isn't there. I am a pretty personally risk averse person, but I feel despair when people are attacking someone as sane and level headed as David Leonhardt.
Great comment—it hadn't occurred to me that the current moment was presaged somewhat by "helicopter parenting" among other signs of us "getting less and less risk tolerant as time moves forward." Also funny that anti-vaxxing (both pre- and post-Covid) is in a weird way another sign of getting less risk tolerant: anti-vaxxers aren't against mitigating risk, they just think the vaccine poses extreme risk, whereas in the past people seem to have adopted an "it's probably fine" attitude.
Most will immediately agree that they don’t want mask requirements to persist forever. I include myself in that group.
Antivirals are in very short supply, but that supply will greatly improve in a matter of months. Those drugs will make a big difference for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated—and while we should do all we can to persuade the latter to get their shots, as a practical matter, some of them will never agree to do so, and for them, antivirals will be the key to cutting death rates and limiting hospital load (irrational though it may be to eagerly take a new drug but claim there is too much risk being vaccinated). The point here is that there is a finite horizon to when antivirals will be in good supply, and thus a target date for when NPIs like masks can be relaxed and risk of severe disease still kept low for all.
Matt suggests setting dates for when masks will go in schools and on flights. That approach seems to ignore a principal lesson of the pandemic: that facts change unexpectedly, whether when vaccines turn out to be less effective against symptomatic illness and transmission than previously seen, or when a new variant emerges that is even more transmissible and more vaccine-evasive, and thus threatens to overwhelm hospitals. How can it possibly make sense to set dates for a change in posture far in advance, when uncertainty is a principal lesson of the pandemic? Policies must adapt to evidence and variants as they emerge. That is not a recipe for forever restrictions! It is a recipe for rational response to evidence. It is a false equivalence to suggest that needing to wait and see and adapt is tantamount to permanent loss of freedom.
The trouble is that if you don’t take a firm stance in favor of normality at some very well-defined point in the future, it may never happen. You can always find some reason to delay a little longer, till things get a little better.
It’s the “there’s no good time to have children” of public health.
Not to belabor the point, and I'm skeptical and don't want to contribute to the doom porn, but there is no guarantee that those metrics would ever be reached.
Yeah, Anthony Fauci said we can “pull back on the masks” when cases get below 20,000 per day.
In a country where 100,000,000 people are unvaccinated, with a disease as transmissible as measles, does anybody believe that will happen in our lifetimes?
Earlier in the pandemic, before vaccinations and when we knew less, it made sense to make policy based on total number of cases. However, I feel like now, especially with Omicron, I think we should make our policy more based on number of severe cases/deaths/hospitalizations
To that point, perhaps the metric should be something along the lines of measuring hospitalizations among the vaccinated for NPI maintenance, while quietly using the overall hospitalization rate as the yardstick for maintaining assistance to hospitals. (Just spitballing)
We were below 20,000 cases per day for much of June and July, if I recall correctly. It's possible that the increase in transmissibility of delta and omicron mean that their endemic levels will be higher than that of classic and alpha, so I don't *predict* we'll be at this level by April or May, but I wouldn't be surprised if we are.
(The number I've been aiming for in my own behavior is that I avoid indoor spaces and mask when I can't if the local case count is above 20 per 100,000 per day, which I think translates to 70,000 daily cases nationally - though of course local areas can be above or below this threshold independently of the national numbers, and local numbers are what's relevant outside of airports.)
The more transmissible a disease is, the higher level of immunity you need for herd immunity. For some diseases, herd immunity is impossible (say, if R0>10 and prior infection only gives 90% reduction in infection risk). I haven't thought about how *long* it takes to get to herd immunity, for diseases where it is possible - it's not obvious to me whether more transmissible diseases would get there faster or slower, or if there's some optimal transmissibility rate for fastest or slowest approach to herd immunity.
But if you don't reach them, you're not and will never be at "normal." It's actually deeply abnormal for thousands of people to be dying of the same cause every day; that's a bad thing, and we should be trying to stop it for as long as it's the case.
"It's actually deeply abnormal for thousands of people to be dying of the same cause every day"
No it's not. Deaths from infectious disease have been part of the human condition since time immemorial. Our threshold for what is considered a "normal" background level of death from infectious disease -- ie, the level at which people allow it to disrupt everyday life -- has been dramatically reduced since the advent of modern antibiotics, vaccines and related treatments.
Should that threshold be recalibrated a little in acknowledgement of the reality of covid, and what it reveals about the limits of our ability to master nature? It seems like that's an unspoken issue that underlies a lot of the disagreement here.
I think this particular strain of death-cult neo-Luddism is the most dangerous development during this pandemic, bar absolutely none. Even the anti-vaxxers actually think dying is bad, mkay - there's just going to be no reasoning with, or redeeming, the people who think it would be absolutely no big deal if we gave up the gains in hygiene and public health that have kept the graveyards from filling up with children since 1920.
This is a very fundamental disagreement. I am not trying to stop it anymore.
They have, pardon the pun, had their shot. To first order, I don't care, I don't feel obligated to care more about their lives than they do, and I will not lift a finger or pay a cent (except tax dollars to produce vaccines) to work around their problem.
We literally made it illegal to use certain kinds of cooking oil because of their effects on heart disease, and that's hardly the only effort we've made, societally, to address deaths due to heart disease. Remember how you literally can't smoke in any public place whatsoever?
If you are not reaching your metrics, then you should consider whether A) you set your metrics too low; or if you did not B) perhaps it makes sense to keep restrictions in place indefinitely.
I mean, during the AIDS crisis, people didn't come out and say "Well, we are never going to get infections down to an adequate level, so I guess we should stop recommending condom use."
But likewise, when it was partly unknown how HIV was transmitted, people didn't shut down the entire world for years at a time until they could verify that the sexually abstinent wouldn't be infected.
>>The trouble is that if you don’t take a firm stance in favor of normality at some very well-defined point in the future, it may never happen. <<
I think there's an inertial tug toward returning to normality. If we go 6 months with no horrible new variant and caseloads/hospitalizations/deaths dropping to near background noise levels, people will gravitate toward normality on their own, whatever public health folks are saying.
It depends on what you mean by "well-defined." I think that there is a lot to be said for "no mask mandates when cases are below X and hospitalizations are below Y." However, lifting restrictions on a date certain is just asking for trouble because you don't know if the next waive is going to just be cresting on that date, at which point you either have to look like a liar or make a policy blunder.
“unvaccinated—and while we should do all we can to persuade the latter to get their shots, as a practical matter, some of them will never agree to do so, and for them, antivirals will be the key to cutting death rates”
After 18 months of treating this situation with the seriousness it deserved, and then getting promptly vaccinated, I am no longer interested in making *any* sacrifices, no matter how trivial, to vainly attempt to save the lives of those who won’t even take the most common-sense measure they can to protect themselves.
I will not wait for therapeutics to become available in quantity.
If they die, they die; they’ve sacrificed the right to my concern and my effort. Nor do they want either.
Wearing a mask from the time I walk into the supermarket until I leave is a low enough cost to me to make to reduce the chance of death of even a "die hard" anti-vaxer. At today's risk levels; tomorrow is a different matter; we'll see.
My only remaining concern here is the kids < 5 who can't get shots (yet). If that vaccine comes out early March, then there's a slight argument for setting May as a "return to normal" date.
I understand that "unvaccinated 4 year old" is about at the same risk as "vaccinated 50 year old" but I can also sympathize with those parents who want to protect their kids and will get them vaccinated at the first available opportunity, and it has the benefit of a very clear date.
But I agree on not being that interested in waiting for more therapeutics. There are a few people who can't get vaccinated at all and I hope that they can get the therapeutics, but I don't know what to do for them.
I have a kid under 5. Fortunately, being able to read data at a basic level, I understand that she's at more risk from getting towed around by my bike last summer than COVID. I'm disinclined to pander to those who don't have that ability.
I cannot tell you how many people have *dared* to attempt to shame me for living a reasonably normal life with a child since the adults in our household were fully vaccinated. Virtually all in instances where they themselves were doing the same exact activity as my family. Virtually all without children.
I have developed zero patience towards virtue-signaling, and very impolitely told every single one of them to impale themselves on the stick up their ass or variations thereupon.
I always wonder how people like that justify allowing their kids to ride in cars. cars are far more dangerous to kids and many of those trips are not essential. COVID’s case fatality rate in kids is about the same as the flu.
I do understand parents who are worried about their kids’ lives being disrupted if they test positive. Or parents who are worried that their friends and neighbors will judge them harshly if their kids get it.
"Novel-ness" seems like such a simple concept, and "to very young children, every virus is novel" such a simple extension.
Truly, I remain baffled at how ineffectively these concepts have been communicated to the public. I don't know whether it's the public's fault that they're dense, or public health authorities' fault that they're bad communicators, or what. But there's just a vast, gaping disconnect and I don't know why.
It's partly that if Biden wants to pick a specific easily identifiable milestone for relaxing (and pushing back against) NPIs, that seems like a good one? It provides justification for changing without people saying "why not change it a month ago"?
I am not that kind of doctor, but I don't think it's obvious that a covid vaccine will (or should) ever be approved for <5. Obviously I hope that the big pharmaceutical brains come up with something that passes the effective-versus-safe criterion, but they might not.
Instead of setting firm dates when masks mandates will end in schools, trains and flights, they should set some simple criteria based on thresholds of Covid-related metrics to end these policies. It seems ill-advised to set a firm date when Omicron is just past its peak, death rates are still higher than the Delta wave, and more importantly when the future of the virus is impossible to predict. The criteria would be based on the daily death rate, number of hospitalizations, or number of severe/critical cases--something that is straightforward to communicate and for the public to understand when it will end. If we dip below this measure, then our masks can come off. Likewise, if there's a new development that causes things to get worse again (a new more virulent variant for instance) and we cross this threshold again, masking policies should come back to effect. That way people have a clear benchmark for when these policies will end, but also reasonable expectations that if things get worse again, some restrictions may come back.
The alternative is not to set dates, but conditions. But those conditions have to be realistic and achievable in a realistic timeframe - otherwise you end up with the situation in Afghanistan where we set conditions for withdrawal that were unachievable and so we stayed and stayed and stayed until we finally left in the worst way possible.
I think the _conditions_ of cutting back NPIs need to be pre-stated - I agree that the _date_ can't be pre-stated because to do so would mean we're letting the conditions be "whatever is happening on 4/4/23" or whatever date we hit on the calendar with a dart.
But the conditions should be pre-stated and should align with whatever goal we're trying to reach, and I think it's the failure to do this that makes people like MY write posts like this.
I looked at the Mass COVID tracker the other day and ... it was actually pretty alarming. Here in blue, vaccinated MA, we had a lot of COVID death post Christmas vacation.
If someone said "we need to do these interventions because look at these spikes on the graph"...I'd buy it - particularly if the corollary is "when the graph goes back to normal, we'll stop doing this and no one's gotta feel guilty about it."
“‘we need to do these interventions because look at these spikes on the graph’...I'd buy it”
I wouldn’t, because absolutely no one can articulate a mechanism by which any of these “interventions” is going to save so much as a single life.
Absent the complete collapse of a region’s healthcare system, which we really never came close to during omicron, all any of these NPIs do is shift disease burden to and fro.
I agree. At some point people (Including Yglesias) were arguing for setting and sticking to objective criteria (e.g. case load, hospitalizations, or deaths) for easing restrictions. This makes a lot of sense. The problem is that, even though Omicron wound up being less bad than it could have been, most of the country remains at or near historic highs on all of these metrics. The vaccines are great, and are probably a big part of the reason why Omicron wasn't worse, but its still just a tool for brining down those metrics.
Matt Yglesias always says this about economic policy - make your enhanced unemployment insurance phase out when unemployment is below a certain level, not on a certain date regardless of the unemployment level! Similarly, make your covid policies phase out when covid is at a certain level, not on a certain date regardless of the disease situation!
This seems reasonable if we were mandating vaccines. The objection I and other people critical of NPIs have is we aren't mandating vaccines.
What we are mandating is infringement on one portion of the population to protect another portion of the population that is completely unwilling to do anything to protect themselves.
And since the unvaccinated aren't willing these measures will have to continue until the end of time because COVID will be endemic.
But that seems weird, because we're at a worse point on any benchmark right now than we were at the height of delta, when I don't think Matt was saying we were done.
Although now that I think about it, Matt lives in DC, and DC is one of the farthest points along in the decline. I think last I checked, DC was still above my personal 20 cases per 100,000 per day threshold, but it looks like it could be below that threshold within a week. I'm expecting the rest of us to get there about three weeks later, and then I'm ready to be done (modulo future variants). But not yet.
From the article: "Then the administration can set a date much earlier than the beginning of the fall school year and make that the day that the mask mandate for airplanes, Amtrak, and federal buildings ends. They can coordinate with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to do the same for Congress."
Do not disagree! My biggest annoyance, especially with the CDC, is their complete lack of explanation for certain situations.
It seems to me that they are still operating in the mindset of Fauci who flubbed (for all the right reasons) in the early days of the pandemic in stating that masks are not needed.
Noah smith (I think, or was it MattY) had an article as to why organizations like the CDC were more effective in earlier communications. (TL'DR; Information was scarce to the general public)
I think it's time to retire the "they lied about masks back in early 2020" thing. As you say "for all the right reasons" and sure they took a believability hit because of that tough, and possibly defensible, call. But so much has happened since then, can't we move on from that?
It's like criticizing Eisenhower in 1946 for botching the battle of Kasserine Pass.
“the Secretary of Education can make it clear to the NEA and AFT that unless they enthusiastically agree to a return to normal schooling for next year, the White House is going to go nuclear on them.”
^THIS is the “sister souljah” moment I’m looking for.
also -- I think it's a bit unfair to pick on a tweet from AOC dating back to a time (Nov. 2020) when, in fact, she was *right* that it was important to maximize the non-pharmaceutical interventions, because **there was no vaccine yet**.
If you want to blame people for keeping that mind-set 15 months later when it's out-moded, then you should use a different piece of evidence.
I think Matt picked that tweet because that particularly intervention was a bit non-sensical, or at least it contained many more tradeoffs than the tweet implied. It wasn't selected and called out for being too covid-hawkish at the time.
I wonder why this (totally correct) message from center-left wonks makes that crowd *so* mad. Like, the internet is full of things that make people mad but telling COVID hawks that this has to end eventually is a particularly acute form of poking the bear.
I suppose the only thing that one might add to the above is that things really are back to normal in almost all respects in places like Texas and Florida, the main exceptions being areas exposed to the federal writ -- federal buildings, airports, and such. (This doesn't make their policies "right" or "wrong," just a description of them.) In such places, the federal rules seem ridiculous, and only amplify the contempt for "Washington," just as the absurd local rules that require one to wear a mask for 18 seconds between entering the door of a restaurant and reaching the table only amplify the narrative that the "experts" are woefully out of touch.
What do you mean? I live in Texas, and a substantial fraction of the population is masked everywhere I see them. We're not allowed to say anything that could be felt to be demeaning to students who choose not to mask, and we're not even allowed to ask anonymously to get statistics on whether our students are vaccinated, and still a significant fraction of students are wearing masks in class (even a substantial majority right now, in my classes).
I live in Austin, actually, Old West Austin. Virtually nobody wears a mask outside, and people (in my experience) don't do the goofy thing where you wear a mask as you stroll through the restaurant or bar, only to take it off for three hours of eating and drinking. This is all a far cry from New York and Boston and even (curiously enough) New Orleans. I have been to all three places a bunch of times this year. So even Austin is very open compared to the coastal cities, and once one steps outside Austin it seems to disappear. You don't see a lot of masks in Wilco...
Right - no one wears masks outside. But even here in Bryan, probably a quarter of the customers in businesses are wearing masks. In New York and Boston you have the rule requiring the mask for the walk to the table, so you get that behavior there, but I don't think "back to normal" is an accurate description of even what we've got in Texas towns. (The person at the counter in the gas station across the street, who refused to wear a mask for most of the duration of the mask order, is now wearing one during Omicron!)
Today is a strange day to switch to vax and relax. The NYTimes says an average of 2,254 Americans are dying of covid every day. New therapeutics that will sharply reduce the odds of severe outcomes once infected will be broadly available in a couple months. The idea “we’re going to have restrictions for a few months to save 200,000 lives” still applies.
Still, a lot of people, including smart center left people like Matt, are switching to vax and relax. I suspect this is because of all the breakthrough infections. I recently had one, together with my wife, a third of her company, and a few of our neighbors. It wasn’t a big deal. So many respectable people have gotten the nerf version of covid and been just fine that it has been impossible to keep up the drum beat of fear which worked earlier. What this shows is that the politics of restrictions are more about the subjective fears of moderate voters than mortality statistics. 200,000 additional deaths is politically tolerable when they are almost entirely confined to the very old, very weak and very stupid.
That chart is too early into Omicron (data ends Dec 4th) to pick up a surge. More recent data shows there has been an increase in deaths of the vaccinated, although starting from a very low level. Deaths by vax status is in the weekly rates section, mid-page.
Vaccinated people were more likely to be international travelers or connected to international travelers? It took a week for Omicron to make it into the outer boroughs? But that's just a crazy guess, it probably is just mostly noise.
The 7-day-average of case numbers is plummeting as we speak. I'm not sure a patchwork of NPIs (masks, canceled flights, etc...) here and there will make any difference at all in the number of people cumulatively infected. It hasn't seemed to make a difference to this point - peak infections in bluest areas are just as high as in the red ones.
I think now is the moment to announce the vax-and-relax strategy, so that people have two or three weeks to get ready for when it actually phases in. Deaths will still be high on those dates, but case counts will be back down to manageable levels.
“200,000 additional deaths is politically tolerable when they are almost entirely confined to the very old, very weak and very stupid”
It’s not that I disagree this is a perspective that is politically tolerable or will soon be politically tolerable, but it is a difficult pill to swallow if you don’t prefer that the old, weak, and stupid to die in order for society to function. It’s this kind of thinking that has, I fear, taken root across a large swath of the populace. I’m uncomfortable with it, perhaps because of history, and I worry how that same attitude could be applied in other non-pandemic realms.
Let’s say I think people who drive cars are awful selfish and stupid. Should I begin thinking about policy in terms of how many car driver deaths are acceptable given that I, a smug elite mass transit user, already devalue their lives because they hold preferences different from my own? Perhaps they are too old or weak to use transit (and not merely selfish and stupid)? Do I still discount their lives? By how much?
It is admittedly a bit of an extreme example but I’m trying to think about how this idea should play out. If the cost of living my life normally is the death of the old, weak, or stupid, what does that say about me?
hmm, if there were fewer motorcycle helmet laws, the supply of good young organ donors might go up... And hey, they get more "freedom!" it's a win-win?
I think the X factor here is how much of an actual difference in outcomes we could make with any kind of policy change. You should be uncomfortable with the idea that society's down-trodden get the short end of the stick so the well-to-do can have even better lives.
But if behavior changes of the well-to-do make no difference, and the down-trodden are going to get hosed no mater what then we have a situation that just sucks, always.
Those are two extreme end-points in a continuum - and the thing that has me scratching my head about Omicron is what the cost benefit options for this winter's wave really were. It absolutely ran us over, often in spite of masking and vaccination.
Yes we weigh the costs against fatalities and all that. What I worry about is a principle where, because someone judges car drivers to be less valuable than other humans, we begin to create policy where their deaths don’t matter. So, in my example, we would do less and less to keep drivers safe because they are undesirable people who are old, weak, or stupid.
It's not that anyone thinks, in David Abbott's terms, the 'very old, very weak and very stupid' are 'less valuable', it's that by their intrinsic nature it is hard to protect the very old and very weak (clearly there's plenty you can do, but the trade-off between the inconvenience of NPIs and the number of 'quality-adjusted life years' - as they're called in the UK - may not be favourable), and with regard to the very stupid, well there's two options, we can either compel them to get vaccinated or we can accept that they're taking a risk, and I see no appetite for the former, so that's that decision made.
This has nothing to do with moderate voters and everything to do with easily available vaccinations. The risk of serious harm if vaccinated/boosted is well below other commonly accepted risks.
The overwhelming majority of those who die are unvaccinated. I favor a vaccine mandate to protect that population, but that is politically non-viable. NPIs do far less to protect that group while imposing costs on the vaccinated.
I don't think imposing costs on a responsible portion of the population can be justified at this point.
I’m not against vax and relax, I’m for the Great Barrington Declaration, which I signed in 2020. Pre vaccines, we should have focused on sheltering the aged, not on generalized lockdowns. The lethality of OG covid varied 1000x by age. Focused protection would definitely have kept us freer and happier and might have even saved lives.
My main concern about this is hospital capacity, in terms of individual risk I agree it’s kind of fine (I mean UK data has COVID at about 2x as deadly as the flu), but my impression is hospitals have completely pared down their covid surge capacity, so with lower hospitalization loads you’re still getting “Hospitals overwhelmed” stories, which given the personal levels are “technically” true. So there should be a more serious discussion of permanently increasing healthcare capacity to deal with COVID + Flu on a permanente basis, because doctors being mad and frustrated is a hugely underplayed media dinamic.
The hospital capacity point is the one I'd like to see generalist grapple with the most. I am inclined to agree with the larger generalist critique, but I could see a mix of bending the curve while hospitals are overwhelmed and trying to build capacity there (in addition to the larger suite of vaccination work). I think Noah Millman has also made a good argument on the importance of testing for interacting with people at high risk. https://theweek.com/coronavirus/1008433/covid-hawks-and-doves-can-agree-we-need-more-tests
I wish I could look up the piece now (I’m technically working), but I read a great piece written pre-Covid about what private equity and consolidation did to hospital capacity. We had problems already and now would be a great time for enterprising politicians to take that on.
Yeah, I live in Spain and basically both Private but mostly public Hospitals fired all the Doctors/Nurses on temporary contracts due to budget constraints…which is fine I guess, but I you expect a consistently high level of cases you really need to think about permanent capacity.
At least here in Washington state there is also a shortage of nursing home beds. People who need to be discharged from an acute care hospital often stay in the hospital while they’re waiting for a nursing home bed to open. Which of course means that the hospitals have fewer bed available. It’s also bad for hospitals’ finances because Medicare’s payment method is based on the severity of illness and intensity of care rather than the days in the hospital. Those days where the patient is waiting to get discharged aren’t compensated unless Medicare has some temporary measur in place.
One of the big lessons from the pandemic should be that our nursing home system needs serious overhaul. They rely on poorly paid CNAs who often work at multiple nursing homes because neither place will give them full time hours in order to avoid paying benefits. It shouldn’t be a shock that employees are quitting the field.
Amen. The only thing I would quibble about it’s that the costs of masks is underrated. Overwhelmingly the masks mandate people have occupations in which they don’t have to wear them as much. Or wear them doing physical type jobs. Meanwhile they thing that welders, cooks, servers, policeman, guys like me that inspect our plans, should all just shut up and not complain. Its mask mandate privilege.
I’ve had this argument so many times on twitter. If masks were optional…. The vast majority of people wouldn’t wear them the majority of the time. Revealed preference vs stated preference.
This to me is an enormous social cost that is underlooked with masking. I think it is underlooked is public health officials are more introverted than the general population.
They place less value on social interaction than others and assume others feel the same. This isn't a conspiracy on their part. All groups of people have blind spots like this. I'm sure people in finance assume the average person is more materialistic than reality.
I had signed up for an improv class (these get mocked a lot, but it's one of the few ways I've found to make friends after college and outside of work) but it got suspended due to omnicron, which I found kind of annoying, and I'm sure the "we're back to normal" people would roll their eyes at this complaint, but after two years "minor" inconvenience start to add up to legitimate hinderances to socializing.
We have gym mask mandates again and this is also the kind of thing that's not really a big deal, but I just seethe at them. It's just one more damn thing on top of every other damn thing. And it annoys me both because of the impact, but also because it makes me think less of the people making these choices and trust them less when it comes to other choices they're making.
I haven't been to the gym since getting a Peloton in April, but I can imagine that's super frustrating, especially since compliance can't be very high, right?
Compliance is indeed not especially high! Which is good in some ways, but it also makes it much clearer that this is something that's being forced externally. (Also, I'm twitchy about doing non-compliance in the way that some people seem very comfortable with.)
I'm not sure if someone has already mentioned this, but there's something worth talking about here that makes the social responsibility aspect of limiting your personal activity in today's United States completely absurd.
We have something like 30% of the population completely unvaccinated. And approximately none of those people are doing anything at all to mitigate Covid transmission. The best that you can say is that in certain jurisdictions in the country they are subject to mandatory testing and quarantining policies around certain activities. But socially, they have been back to normal many months by this point.
Given that circumstance, a marginal change in the fraction of fully vaccinated individuals that stay at home or wear a mask or whatever is completely irrelevant to the community spread of Covid, and this is even more true given the R factor for Omicron related variants. The community of unvaccinated individuals is more than enough by itself to support community spread of Omicron. At the same time, the incredible effectiveness of the vaccine at preventing hospitalization means the behavior of fully vaccinated individuals can barely have any effect on the burden on hospitals.
So all of the pro-social voluntary (or involuntary) Covid restrictions vaccinated individuals apply to themselves has, at this point, no benefit whatsoever. The only relevance is to your own personal risk and the risk of your immediate family to contracting covid. The only arena where Covid restrictions are relevant is that if you enforce quarantines at schools or other facilities, you may partially protect vulnerable individuals working there, but only if those individuals are taking exceptional steps in their private life to avoid infection. And note this excludes, by definition, the elderly. We are effectively talking about a tiny fraction of the working public and we should probably find some other policy to help those people that is not so disruptive to everyone else.
I feel like a bad liberal for saying this, but I’ve recently been pretty happy about living in a red state. That’s a problem.
I don’t know how to make this happen, but we have to find a way to get masks off of the poor service workers. They’re miserable, and the ones that I know are sick to death of wearing them while few of the customers do (again, red state).
Agreed. It really is disgusting to see/attend events in which (fully vaxed) server class is uniformly masked, while (fully vaxed) attendees are not. It is amazingly and odiously classist. Remember the whole controversy about AOC's "Tax the rich" dress at the Met? To me the despicable component was seeing the contrast between the uniformly masked servants (whom I would wager all the tea in China had to present proof of vax for that gig) and the unmasked elites in attendance. WTF.
It's not classist, it's just practical. You can wait tables while wearing a mask. It's harder to eat a hamburger while wearing a mask. I mean, it is also true that dentists tend to wear masks while their patients do not, despite the fact that I would be that most dentists are wealthier than there average patient.
Also, it isn't like going to a restaurant is something that only the 1% does. I suspect many of those waiters themselves go to restaurants on occasion.
Go look at the pictures of the Met Gala. What's striking is not just the contrast between the masked workers and the unmasked guests: it's that all the workers are wearing black masks. Not N95's or KN 94's, much less masks of their own choosing. I cannot find a single picture of a server there in anything but a black mask.
The masks are part of their prescribed dress code.
If you're OK with that, then fine, but let's not pretend that it's purely about safety. They're clearly being told to wear a particular kind of mask for the aesthetics of the event. I think that adds to the ickiness.
That Met Gala is hardly a normal event.
That said, it remains true that, since people at the Met Gala were eating, it was a less reasonable to expect them to wear masks than staff. I'd add that I'm pretty sure that there wasn't even a mask mandate in effect in NY in September.
Also, dress codes are kinda standard for wait staff in black-tie events (I'm sure most people would be pissed if a waiter at their wedding showed up in an "I'm with Stupid" t-shirt) so I would expect that masks would also be uniform at such an event.
Basically, I don't get your point.
So it seems like you're acknowledging that it was okay for any given person to not wear masks at all at the event (not just while eating), and that the wait staff were just wearing them as part of a dress code. You don't see why people would object to requiring PPE as meaningless workplace attire for service employees? In a pandemic, can't we handle workers wearing masks or not depending on their preference? That seems a lot less obnoxious than an "I'm with Stupid" tee.
Matching masks was dress code. Requiring masks in the first place was an effort to reduce transmission.
And the fact that it is OK for a given person not to wear a mask is different than saying that we shouldn't do it all. While I would expect everyone being masked is more effective than some people being masked, I would also expect that some people being masked is more effective than no one being masked.
Since that isn’t what he said, you are mistaken.
Never ceases to amaze me how determined progressives are to make everything class warfare. Now the Met Gala stands for 335 million Americans? I live in a upper middle class area in the rich sf Bay Area, and absolutely everyone wears a mask indoors, and probably 85-90% outdoors! Most people I see not wearing them are gardeners, construction workers, and trash collectors. But I’m not inclined to think that says anything about class war, just that situations vary.
Why are people wearing masks outdoors in the Bay Area? To first approximation, you can't catch Covid outdoors. I know people who wear masks outdoors because it is below freezing, but that can't be true in the Bay Area right now.
Virtue signaling would be my guess, although that “first approximation” part bothers me. What about second and third? Huh? How about them?
My particular KN95 masks are black, so there is always the possibility (though it's not one I believe) that the servers were given something similar for the dress code. "Here's the most effective mask around, please wear this type as part of your dress"
Exactly, Neal! Well said.
Well, dentists only started wearing masks to protect themselves from AIDS, not to protect their patients from them. Prior to 2020, if you went to a physician's office your doctor wasn't wearing a mask.
If servers want to wear masks to protect themselves that's fine, they should be encouraged to do so. But in fact they're being made to wear masks when patrons are not, as a way to protect the more elite patrons from the possibly germy servers.
Your argument is the same "well it's no big deal to wear a mask so no one should complain" when in fact lots of people think it's a bigger deal and the cost of that bigger deal is higher than the benefit.
I'm too lazy to look it up for dentists, but it seems that, at least with surgeons (and a lot of dentistry verges on surgery), the primary reason to wear masks is to protect the patient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20surgical%20facemasks,members%20of%20the%20surgical%20staff
While that AIDS crisis may have triggered more PPE use among dentists, the particular trigger was David Acer infecting several of his patients rather than the other way around.
With respect to servers, this idea that patrons are thought of "more elite" than servers is dumb. Going to a restaurant is a fairly common activity for people of all economic levels, even if some people might go to McDonalds while others go to the French Laundry. It's just that businesses tend to be a bit stricter on how their employees act than how their customers act. I mean, there's a reason why the sign behind the sink says "Employees must wash hands," rather than "Everyone must wash hands." The server is getting paid to be there, the customer is not.
I'm a lawyer. When meeting with clients, I tend to wear a suit, while they wear whatever they want and I tend to try to accommodate their schedule rather than vice versa. this isn't because they are "more elite" than me, it's because I'm getting paid, while they are paying me.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things masking servers isn't all that helpful. If so, and if it bothers enough servers, maybe we should stop. But making this a class thing is dumb.
It is a total class issue.
The people being forced to wear masks are those that can't fight back: low income workers and children.
I was at an eating establishment recently, a very popular one. Unmasked people were on top of each other as it was very crowded.
Yet the only people wearing masks were waitresses and cooks.
But it seems like a good thing that employers are protecting their staff, no? In my experience, safety requirements for the workplace are at a higher level than in life outside work, and that's probably a good thing.
If employers gave a crap about protecting their staff, they would mandate vaccinations among the staff and the patrons, not hang a lampshade on the problem. I encourage them to do so.
The thing to do would be to tackle ventilation, which not enough people are doing. I visit companies that are still doing a lot of performative surface cleaning. Those companies are never exploring ventilation improvements.
The problem is that ventilation improvements usually involve substantially invasive modifications of the building, unless you're in a space that is already designed for indoor-outdoor use in good weather. This is especially true with recent buildings, that often have fire codes and/or energy efficiency codes that prevent windows from being openable and make most doors remain closed and block airflow.
They might lose too many workers.
I'm guessing though that that's more likely to happen in Blue areas, not the Red states that the OP mentioned that he's happy to live within
Simple. We recognize two facts:
o Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people; and
o Masks have never been very effective at slowing the spread of the virus. What they are very good at doing is signaling compliance.
Once everyone pulls their heads out of their asses and admits these facts, we can get rid of the masks.
But then, the folks who promulgate mask policies really seem to like swanning around maskless while their social inferiors are clearly identified by their masks. Maybe it will never go away.
Both points are incomplete, see edits below
1) Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy (vaccinated) people; and
2) Masks have (strike never) been very effective at slowing the spread of the virus.
You are a victim of propaganda. The data out of South Africa and the UK make it clear Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people regardless of vaccination status.
Also, prior infection with Omicron provides better protection than the vaccines. So a person who has survived Omicron infection (ie, almost anyone who catches it) will enjoy relative immunity from subsequent infections, free of charge. You can't say that about the vaccines, which today do not provide any protection from Omicron infection.
And I can't begin to address your ideas about the efficacy of masks. I don't know where you are getting your information. In any case, here's more than you ever wanted to know about masks in the age of Covid: https://hectordrummond.com/the-face-mask-faq/
"Vaccines do not provide any protection against infection" is an egregious falsehood, but I suspect you know that and are stirring shit for some reason.
Not an falsehood, an exaggeration. Current vaccines provide very limited protection against Omicron infection. All you have to do is look at the Omicron infection rates in highly vaccinated places like Israel and Denmark.
All you have to do is look at the difference in the case rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Last I checked it was 3x for the unvaccinated.
My brother and several other people I know were knocked on their ass by omnicron. So I’m not sure where you’re getting “harmless” unless you define harm as to only encompass hospitalization and death.
Certainly true that many vaxed/boosted have had tough ten day stretches with Omicron. The statistical evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death from omicron (or delta, for that matter) is overwhelming. Everything in life is a cost-benefit analysis, including speed limits and legality of pools that conceivably could be accessed by toddlers. For those who want to continue Zero COVID fight against less acute but still difficult sub-hospitalization cases, please wear an N-95 and protect yourself. Others can make their own choices.
Yep, that's what I mean by harm.
After all, I was knocked on my ass by the second Pfizer jab. I considered that annoying, not really harmful.
It's true that there are real harms from the vaccine side effects. But they tend to last a day, and can be scheduled in advance, while the harms from illness usually last closer to a week, and don't get scheduled in advance.
Well, because of my elephant-like memory I recall way back before 2020 this sort of thing happened to me and everyone I knew once every year or two. As I recall, we managed without masking in public, lockdowns, vax passports, demonization of the unvaxxed, quarterly GMO boosters, banning from social media of discussion of cold or flu remedies, etc.
I agree. But we also managed without calendars on cell phones, video meetings, ride-hail cabs, or shared scooters. Just because we used to deal with all the problems of something doesn't mean that they weren't real problems.
Saying that we should go back to not expecting people to wear a mask or get vaccinated sounds to me like we should go back to not expecting people to have calendars on their phones or have an easy way to hail rides.
Yes, I think "Harmless" and "Mild" in this context may both be accurately translated as "does not land you in the hospital."
Being in a blue city in a red state (in my case, Austin) seems like the best situation. Most people are conscientious of others and wears masks in crowded locations, but without the burdensome requirements.
I definitely felt that very strongly the first half of last year, when I was living in Austin too. (Now that I'm back in Bryan/College Station, I no longer get those benefits.)
My Brother in Law owns a restaurant. My wife and daughter are servers. Luckily we live in Idaho where they aren't mandatory. But the day they because optional... not a single employee chooses to wear one.
Fellow Boisean here. (Love your comments, by the way!) Among restaurants in general, I haven't yet seen much consistency here. I can think of some places like your brother in law's, and those are awesome. There are some others where they clearly aren't required but still plenty of staff are wearing them. This can get frustrating when it's loud and you can't clearly hear or lipread what they're saying. And among the corporate chains, it's clear they are getting edicts from the top that they still have to wearing them.
Bad Boys btw.
I am a curmudgeon here. I appreciate your appreciation.
Off topic to the main thread, but related to this post, guess which massively overrated chain may finally may be coming here:
https://boisedev.com/news/members/in-n-out-meridian/
I should pledge to go to Bad Boy Burgers on the grand opening day, and stay far away from the ninth circle of traffic hell that intersection already is.
Ha... I already tweeted about it. https://twitter.com/BoiseBetter/status/1488291598228070400?s=20&t=A0RGL1cVmB_B8Doq7G4xCA
+1 on your assessment of Eagle Rd. It was originally designed to be a semi-freeway with interchanges at every section mile road, but ITD chickened out and cowered to all the developers who saw an opportunity to sell stuff with all those eyes traveling down the road. Just piss poor infrastructure planning, that road.
I'll have to get back around to trying them, can't remember the last time I have. We have a plethora of hyper-local burger joints here so there's fierce competition when that strikes my appetite.
And what I appreciate about your contributions is how different they are to the typical Slow Boring reader/commenter, whose backgrounds and sensibilities tend to have plenty of common with Matt's. I apologize if this is too glib, and correct me as appropriate, but "working class/blue collar" are the sensibilities I sense from you, and I think that's a very valuable perspective that needs to be heard--not just among us here but of large swaths of society.
I would say that philosophical blue collar is definitely the vibe I go for. I was enlisted military. My wife is a cashier. My daughter is going to CWI for mechatronics. I do have a Bachelors degree... that I earned online in the Military that has nothing to do with my actual job. My job is skilled technical in the energy sector. I travel all over the country and work with millwrights and welders and pipefitters. On a typical job there are two engineers and 20-30 techs/blue collar workers of which I am one.
When I am in Boise, not a single person I associate with regularly has a college degree. Both my Brother in Laws are HS drop outs. One has a Construction business (successful) and one owns restaurants. Successful. The hardest working person I know is my wife. She is 50 and works circles around the other cashiers/servers.
But in some ways I straddle the fence between two worlds. I am an avid reader. My parents were both computer programmers. Dad got his Masters in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon. Brother is a top engineer at Boeing. Sister is a Tenured College Professor. I read Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. I work internationally. My ex-wife is English. My wife and I make a decent living (six figures).
But at the heart of it, I have this blue collar view of things. If all the bankers and lawyers in the world disappeared... oh, we would have a melt down, but civilization would continue.
If all the welders and electricians in the world disappeared. We would be in the dark ages within a week.
I share your worldview. My father was an Ivy League professor, but every time I walk out my door for a smoke and look at the sidewalks, streets and buildings that make New York, I bless all the men without fancy degrees who built them, and all the women without fancy degrees who raised the men that built them.
I was curious about your moniker and found this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Trees
My interest was piqued because I live in the City of Trembling Leaves.
Boise is a corruption of the French "les bois" (a common phrase to name things here), meaning "the woods", apocryphally said by French explorers when they found a lush area after long travel in the semi-arid environment of the Snake River Valley. Trees are pretty awesome, so in thinking for a username here I went with this as a way to identify with where I live while hopefully not identifying much more.
Well, now le chat out of du sac.
I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now. Personally I have been using N-95 masks as PPE for over four decades as does virtually everyone who works in dusty environments. All day every day where conditions demand it. And doing physically demanding work while they are at it. If it poses no inconvenience to myself, a senior citizen, then a little less whining about it would be in order.
I am happy that you find mask-wearing to be not in the least bit onerous. You should keep wearing an N-95 in order to protect yourself -- which is far more protective to you than someone else wearing a cloth mask. Maybe you think I am ludicrous, but it breaks my heart that my seven-year old daughter never sees another human face during her seven hour school day, not even during outside recess (exception for brief lunch at which silence is enforced). The entire K-12 school is vaccinated: from 5 year old kindergarteners to the head of school. Whom is my vaccinated seven year old daughter protecting by wearing a non-N-95 mask, especially give overwhelming evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death? Couldn't staff so inclined wear N-95s and therefore protect themselves above and beyond the triple dose of vaccines they have received, if they want further protection? Why does my seven year old, who is an only child, have to pay the price of not seeing the faces of peers?
Thank you. The emotional costs have not been stated enough in this regard.
There is no such price. But maybe you could teach her that what she is doing is protecting other people. Just like they do when children in classes have severe allergies to things like milk or dairy products and these are banned from school lunches. Children can and do catch covid. And while they may be asymptomatic they can certainly transmit this to others who are more at risk.
I disagree with you profoundly. My daughter has one childhood; two years of it have been materially impacted by masking or zooming -- sacrificing for those far older than she, sacrificing for those who now can be vaxed and boosted and therefore, according to overwhelming statistics, avoid acute outcomes. Even more so if they wear N-95s like you You arrogantly say "no price" with 100% confidence. How could you possibly know that? You have never met my daughter. Goodbye.
One thing about Covid that has been annoying is having random people (with no/limited experience) tell you what to do in your personal life with no knowledge of your personal situation. "There is no such price" is a strong assertion with no justification, and I disagree.
A dirty secret about COVID politics. Both the right and left coalition have busybodies.
When the Right or Left coalition feels government action is necessary, the busybody subset of the coalition will use that as an opportunity to meddle in people's private affairs.
A portion of the COVID NPI forever crowd is the busybody contingent of liberals who really want to tell you what to do. They are also disproportinatly likely to favor "deplatforming"
Thanks, Man.
The next time Peter G backs up a claim he makes will be the first time, at least based on what I've seen on this site.
Peter G is on a roll today. Your kids must suffer to protect us old codgers!
Well, if you want grandparents sure. If you feel they are disposable that's on you.
It's disingenuous to claim that wearing an N95 mask isn't inconvenient. N95 masks are of necessity uncomfortable, they have to be to maintain a tight seal. The first thing anyone who has to wear them does is take them off as soon as practicable.
People in Asian countries often wear masks when they themselves are feeling a bit under the weather. It isn't the norm in Asia to wear a mask all day in public when they are feeling healthy. And it seems to really just be a thing in East Asia anyway.
I’ve traveled a fair amount of east Asia a fair amount. On the other hand I was in Korea a couple months ago and people were following the outdoor mask mandate but the moment you entered a bar or restaurant the masks came off. Clearly it’s performative.
I've worn N95s plenty in work environments, in construction and manufacturing, engineering site visits, remodeling work at home, etc.
When necessary, they're necessary. But they *suck*, lol, and I would never wish one on somebody without a clear reason.
We have a clear reason.
That seems a stretch.
Moreover, if we had the means to enforce universal N95 mandates, then we’d have the means to enforce a far more effective, briefer, and less irritating vaccine mandate.
In crowded, indoor, poorly ventilated spaces, I think this assessment is accurate.
Mandating N95 Masks is far more of an infringement than mandating vaccinations.
The only justification for an N95 Mask update is if we were in the middle of a COVID vaccination mandate period and were waiting to finish the vaccinations.
Since we're not mandating vaccines we shouldn't mandate masks
I'm glad that you have been able to properly use your PPE during your long career. It has undoubtedly protected you. But there is a huge difference between wearing required PPE and walking around in a N95 to alleviate the anxiety of others. Worried about COVID? Stay home or wear a N95, but don't ask me to wear one.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Peter, weren't you the other day talking about how Americans wouldn't stand for eating less beef for any reason and it would be political suicide to take that as a goal? No one responded "well then people in India must be made of sterner stuff, they never eat beef." Because that wouldn't be responsive: people are more or less okay with a certain practice depending on their cultural expectations. Resilience has nothing to do with it.
"I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now."
I remember reading an article [1] from long before the pandemic talking about masking culture in Asian countries. One of the points it made was that many people wore masks **specifically to prevent person-to-person interaction**. To quote [1]
"Juvenile psychologist Jun Fujikake has made similar observations. “When we deal with others, we have to judge whether to do things like smile or show anger,” he explains. “By wearing a mask, you can prevent having to do that. The trend of wearing a mask to prevent directly dealing with other may have roots in the current youth culture in which many of them are more accustomed to communicating indirectly through email and social media.”"
Such people aren't "made of sterner stuff"; they just had a different cost-benefit analysis than many of us do.
I find it amusing (and frustrating) that it used to be widely acknowledged that masks degrade or outright stop human interactions --- indeed, that was often their purpose! --- but now people will twist themselves into pretzels to deny such an obvious truth. Go ahead: tell me with a straight face that masks do not in the slightest impede human interactions.
The article goes on to note a bunch of other non-disease reasons to wear masks. Again, it's a different cost benefit analysis not toughness.
[1] Possibly this one: https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/why-do-japanese-people-wear-surgical-masks-its-not-always-for-health-reasons
EDIT: The point is echoed by many in the comment section of [1]. To quote the highest rated comment:
... No, in a land where so many are cripplingly shy, this device [a mask] offers a shield against the scary outside world. For the socially inept, it's like a cloak of invisibility, helping you to hide and live inside your solipsistic cocoon.
A girl worked in my office l for twelve months, and we never once saw her face, she was never hear to speak above a whispered squeak, and she never once made eye contact with a living soul. A healthy society would fear for her mental health. Here, she was praised for being kawaaiiiiiiiii.
Hey whippersnapper. I had to walk uphill to school both ways in snow when it was 120 degrees, carrying my horse while babysitting my seven siblings with no clothes. And by god we were thankful for the opportunity.
When I was young sometimes we would have temps of -120 degrees...or lower!
Yeah, and the very first thing you did when you could scrape together a couple bucks was buy a car with snow tires and air conditioning --- and you were even more thankful then..
Yes. But my first car was a hand crank. None of this fancy starter motor yet you young kids have today. We didn’t have ABS braking. We would just pull the lever. We were so poor, there was only one seat that we would take turns sitting in. The others would stuff themselves into the trunk. Now sonny boy, you complain if u don’t have leather.
Have you actually been to Asia? I visited Japan, China and Hong Kong pre-COVID. At any given time <1% of people were wearing masks. They were socially acceptable, but also quite rare in practice.
I have indeed been to Asia (not that lived experience matters for this purpose), and it is absolutely over 1% in many pre-covid contexts --- especially public transport. Seriously, just look at any stock footage of the Tokyo subway with a reasonable sample size.
For example:
- I count 5 masks in a photo with ~50 visible faces (certainly under 100): https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/06/21/national/population-woes-crowd-japan/
- 6 masks in similar context: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tokyo-japan-april-17-2017-green-1214076736
I challenge you to show me a photo from Tokyo mass transit in the last decade with at least 50 clearly visible faces and no masks.
I have a brother who has a very woo-susceptible girlfriend of the far left variety, and very regrettably they refuse to get vaccinated. And as an odd side effect of that, they are planning to move from the Bay Area, a region which otherwise has long satisfied their worldview, to the South, due to whether restrictions on unvaccinated people are being placed.
There is a burrito place near me that does everything by the book. You tell them what you want and they glove up and move down the line adding ingredients. Then they ring you up and take their gloves off. Then they got back to the order station and glove up and repeat the process.
How is that different? The customers never wear gloves - they just grab their burrito with their grubby hands and chow down.
It reminds me of all the guys saying schools and the government don't have a right to tell you what to wear. And women saying, "I was sent home from high school for not wearing a bra."
I get the sense that you would've been in the crowd that correctly said how insane and utterly inappropriate it would be to send home a woman for not wearing a bra in school though. So it's kind of bizarre to use that as an example of how schools and government telling people what to wear is totally okay and normal.
The burrito also seems like a particularly bad example. The whole point of the gloves is to protect from a particularly acute risk (food born contaminants being transferred from the hands of the people literally handling your food into the food itself, thereby making customers sick) that is posed by the service workers in the absence of gloves. The customer doesn't wear gloves, but the risk posed by that is borne solely by the person eating the burrito rather than being spread to others. In contrast, the masks protect everyone from a risk that everyone poses, so requiring them to be worn by some people who pose no additional risk than other people who do not have to wear the mask is arbitrary and creates a burden borne by a selective few (who also just happen to typically be lower earning members of society than the people who don't have to wear the mask).
I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree about these policies, but I just think you might want to come up with better examples or arguments than these ones. They're pretty obviously flawed.
This isn't really relevant to the discussion, but your comment just reminded me of the time the girls' soccer team at my high school was suspended because their school-issued soccer uniforms violated the school's dress code.
Oops! LOL
Yep. I've felt exactly the same way. I feel like a red state free rider. I'm in Texas, my whole family that's eligible is vaxxed (and the adults are boosted) *and* they've had it before.
Our two-year-old's preschool, though, has not shut down for COVID once, even when the principal got COVID. He (my two-year-old) does not wear a mask.
Honestly, I don't know what our family would do if it did regularly close down. Both of us work, and I work from home and have regular deadlines. We have a mortgage. I see on Twitter about schools in blue states closing down and that would just not be possible for us without my working until midnight every night.
What red state are you in? I’ve seen plenty of unmasked service people here—I assumed any service workers who are wearing masks want to wear them, and I should certainly think they should be allowed, though there’s no point wearing anything but a certified N-95/KN95/KN94 for personal protection.
Outstanding article. With over 250 comments already, and us Westerners regularly getting the short stick of these articles being published too early while we're still sleeping, I apologize if someone has already made this point or something similar to it, but here goes:
There's been a weird, disturbing, and bad strain of sentiment among some of the left that could be termed as a "politics of asceticism", an opposite of the politics of abundance Matt described here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/abundance-scarcity. The core of the strain is that the only solution out of major problems is to sustain long, indefinite sacrifice toward pursuing that sole solution.
This is seen all the time in global warming discourse: so much emphasis on solely reducing GHG emissions to the point that it would lead to a drastic reduction in the quality of life, as opposed to building as much clean energy as possible to create a cascading effect to address AGW even more furtively (again, as Matt said here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance). And you see it in the housing discourse where so many are convinced that building more housing of any kind doesn't work, and to the extent that you are going to be abundant, it has to be solely toward what's deemed as affordable housing, and barring that, you can only deal with redistributing the existing scarce stock. (There's a zillion articles from Matt I could cite so I won't bother here.)
And so it goes for covid. We've invented excellent vaccines that have significantly and consistently blunted the virulence of SARS-CoV-2. But that's not sufficient for the ascetic covid hawks out there wanting a sustained and vigilant abstinence from some very basic human qualities, like being around other people and seeing them smile. It is a dead end as far as politics and policy goes.
Covid as fun-seeking-missile was very definitely a thing, and it hasn't gone completely away. People on a REMOTE BEACH during a PANDEMIC, they might even be HAVING A GOOD TIME!
Thankfully, at least we're not Australia.
as User01 mentions, I don't think this is unique to any one side of the political spectrum. I think there's just always been an association of a certain kind of asceticism and "purity" types of moralism, and this has existed across the political spectrum in many different societies, and probably always will in some form or other.
I am increasingly certain that whatever the infectious disease and public health people tell themselves in their conscious minds, in their reptile hindbrains they’re just enjoying being *important* and want to spin that out as long as possible.
Even a well-versed layperson can see that there are no NPIs short of “China” which will have any impact on this going forward, and that therapeutics and vaccines have reduced the threat level to near-zero for all but the most extremely unhealthy or oldest of individuals.
Yet, we’re being told that all of this is now permanent.
The reaction to that idea should have been rather obvious.
Hopefully the next pandemic isn’t dramatically worse because these people overplayed their hand and will not be widely listened to again in living memory.
Addendum: I considered it preposterous, asinine, and laughable 12 or 18 months ago when I first saw it suggested that there was a subset of the general population that found a perverse pleasure in the pandemic and didn't really want this to end.
This now seems pretty clearly true, although it's hard to tell how much of it is 500 shouty people on Twitter.
Unfortunately I think it's > 500, though I have no idea how much. Coming back to NYC after a year and a half in a red area has been...interesting. At least in Manhattan (Ross Douthat suggested over the weekend that it's different in the further reaches of the other boroughs), not relaxed seems to be the default mode. I work for the city and am concerned that we will never be able to take the f***ing mask off at work, and I have similar fears about my building (I have to put the damn thing on to walk through the lobby and out the door, as well as do an insomniac load of laundry at 4.30 or 5 in the morning). It's like taking your shoes off at the airport, only constantly, every single day.
Like Randall above, I'm kind of missing that red area get-on-with-it vibe. This situation seriously detracts from the general benefits of being in the city as opposed to the boondocks. I couldn't wait to get back here, and now I am feeling, for the first time in my life, close to being what seems like actually clinically depressed, with nothing firm to be able to look forward to.
I'm moving away from my blue enclave for this reason. I don't want to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask if I have to go to the office, if I'm even allowed to go to the office at all. I'm worried that in the Bay Area, I'll never be able to see the faces of coworkers again in person and connect with them socially if I want to continue working for non-profits. Sending good thoughts your way.
I live in SF too and am thinking of bailing. I never see co-workers, most of my friends moved away.
It is hard to justify paying our housing costs with how little social amentities are available. If I'm going to have a suburban social life might as well have suburban cost of living.
Thank you, and same to you! I'm also looking for a way out of my city job, and quite possibly the city itself.
This is an extremely disorienting time.
Your last sentence struck me. A lot of people are feeling that way. Talk to others. Know you are not alone. If you have to take off the mask to keep yourself from an anxiety attack or just to feel the sun on your face, take off the mask. This is an important piece of the benefit-cost analysis now.
Exactly, lots of people who can do their jobs remotely, and appreciate the additional working flexibility that the pandemic forced employers to allow, and who don't want to lose that, have at least a subconscious conflict about whether things should go "back to normal".
If things were bad and we made them better, why should we go back to the bad way?
BEcause a majority of the population wants to go back to 2019. You can see it in lobbying for schools being open, opposition to masking requirements, etc.
The minority who want less social interaction are just that a minority.
I 100 percent agree with Matt, but the pandemic has made my day-to-day life much better for the reasons you mention.
I somewhat agree with you. While I think the people who say "Politicians never want to end the pandemic" are morons because a permanent pandemic is awful politics. I do think there is a good portion of the general public that loves the "superiority" they feel when following every single public health guideline to an absolute T
It really is awful politics. I remember in the leadup to the election a lot of conservative commentators would speculate "just wait until Biden wins and then the whole pandemic panic will conveniently disappear".
Things would be much better for democrats if they really were that cynical, rather than this neurotic.
Definitely some of that.
I'm surprised the politicians aren't doing more to stomp on it, given the narrowness of the demographic peddling it and how thoroughly they're locked into the Democratic coalition.
The permanent pandemic has certainly been good politics for DeSantis!
I don't understand this instinct to first exaggerate people's views ("all of this is now permanent") and then assume it's due to malevolent intentions ("they’re just enjoying being *important*"). The CDC has a laundry list of research indicating the benefit of mask wearing, for example.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html
When people say masking and other NPIs must continue because there are still immunocompromised individuals who cannot take the COVID vaccines, they are for all practical purposes saying the NPIs should be permanent because we have no timeframe by which immunocompromised-safe vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments are likely to be available to those individuals and, based on our experience with other diseases, it's entirely plausible that we will *never* have immunocompromised-safe vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments available for COVID for those individuals.
"...exaggerate people's views ('all of this is now permanent')"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2021/12/20/fauci-face-mask-planes/?sh=c263b8b4dd5c
"'Are we going to get to the point where we won't have to wear masks on airplanes?”' asked ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who was filling in as host on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“'I don’t think so,” replied Fauci. 'I think when you're dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people — you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.'"
But presumably that is understood (yes I'm giving Fauci the benefit of the doubt) in the context of the then current case loads. Of course he should have said "Sure, when we have enough vaccinated and recovered people to reduce the chances of serious illness to result from close interactions of people."
How useful are masks when people are eating in a restaurant or drinking in bars? Given these are high risk activities that necessarily do not allow for mask wearing, what is the point of masks? How many infections do they currently avert?
Others have addressed this thoroughly, but I’ll reinforce: there are ways to say “this must continue forever” without explicitly saying “this must continue forever”.
You can see this is about continuing this indefinetly by:
1. Ill defined endmarks.
2. Explict end marks that are constantly re-defined
3. And endmarks that are essentially unacheivable given other policies.
I genuinely believe a significant portion of public health experts want to continue with current NPIs forever.
Maliciously? That seems more than a little bit of a stretch.
Moving the goal posts on herd immunity is real enough though, as was actually admitting to lying about it, which I still find shocking.
I don’t really think it malicious, it’s just human nature.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I think I generally appreciate the sentiment of this post, but "no NPIs short of “China” which will have any impact on this going forward" and "reduced the threat level to near-zero" just seem blatantly false. If we could have used this pandemic to learn which interventions are moderately helpful for little cost, and could figure out how to implement them whenever we have a winter surge of respiratory illnesses, we could save a few thousand lives a year and many millions of sick days. But the fact that some people are maximalists who want to do everything always, and other people have become determined to learn nothing from the pandemic, makes me pessimistic.
That was meant with regards to omicron in particular.
I agree that we might be able to pump the brakes on flu season each year with a month-long mask mandate, but I have no desire to do so and suspect very few others do too.
Why don't you have a desire to do a little bit for a few weeks each year when it's most effective?
Because in this particular application I now believe, with cause, the slippery slope to be no fallacy.
I’m no longer willing to give up a goddamned inch on this, short of a new flu strain with a CFR of 5% and R0 of at least 5.
I would be fine with, and myself intend to, wearing a mask when I’m ill and cannot avoid going out, as I did in China.
I will be damned if the seasonal peak of cold/flu transmission is sufficient reason for a mask mandate, however limited.
Mandate the annual flu vaccine, at least in schools, before even talking about that.
Agreed. It's pretty clear both from bioplausibility and observational data that a high degree of compliance with layered NPI strategies (distancing, masking, isolation & quarantine, indoor ventilation & filtration) has a significant effect on the spread of respiratory viruses. The '20-21 cold & flu season in the U.S.A. was absolutely crushed by broad adoption of NPI measures.
But, as you say, we do not have a base of prospective, randomized evidence that identifies which components of that layered NPI package are most effective (+/- the Bangladesh masking study). Nor do we have a great set of evidence on what methods would be most effective to encourage compliance with NPIs (mandates vs education vs advertising, etc).
That said, I'm not sure evidence would terribly helpful - it hasn't moved the needle much in the vaccine wars either. As you've seen in David R.'s replies to you, I think the experience with COVID-19 has poisoned the well when it comes to many of these NPI measures. Which is too bad, because there's potential here to relieve a huge amount of needless suffering.
If we were to find that an improved technological response to winter respiratory illness season (ventilation and vaccination) were worthwhile, then sure.
There’s never going to come a day when I regard a universal mask mandate for one-quarter of each year as an acceptable means of saving 300,000 life-years or less. Let alone any kind of enforced social distancing.
The median age for a death of flu in the United States is almost 70, and a typical season sees 20-40k deaths.
Anyone who regards mitigating that as a convincing benefit set against the cost is frankly incomprehensible to me.
I would not favor mask mandates in most situations or circumstances, except maybe mass transit (buses, subways, trains, +/- planes). I do think a strong informal social effort to promote mask-wearing in communal indoor settings during the peak of respiratory virus season would likely provide substantial health benefit, and I suspect when you get closer to 70 you may feel a little differently about the marginal value of an additional year of life compared to someone's psychological distress over seeing a lot of masks.
Bottom line: both the COVID-19 neurotics and the COVID-19 contrarians are going to have to learn to live in a society where the distribution of risk tolerance has more visible consequences. I too wish we lived in a society where 'vaxxed + relaxed' was the norm, with a handful of exceptions for empirically validated, high yield interventions (over-30 vaccine mandates, selective masking in specific venues / times of year) but as with many areas of American public policy we are likely to have to muddle through with an unsatisfying hodgepodge of non-optimized solutions that overshoot and undershoot in different localities.
I find it intriguing that the only cost you can think of associated with mask-wearing is "someone's psychological distress over seeing a lot of masks".
It does tend to make me want to dismiss you out of hand, because it's just not even slightly even-handed.
I mean you come across as completely tilted by masks for some reason, when basic common sense seems to indicate that they would have always been a good idea in crowded indoor conditions, even pre-pandemic.
I think psychological dislike of masks is legitimate, and it is by far the largest (and easiest to prove) downside of widespread mask adoption. There's also physical discomfort with certain types of masks.
But for the kind of context-dependent masking I'm proposing, I struggle to think of any other real costs. I think permanent, universal masking (which I'm not in favor of) has some theoretical - although no empirical - concern for social and emotional developmental impacts on children.
The thing about vaccine mandates is that they're much easier and less inconvenient to implement for things like school enrollment or plane ticket purchase than they are for general presence of adults in crowded public spaces. I think vaccine mandate for some level of school attendance seems like it might actually be the least invasive way to get universal adult vaccination (in the long run).
I thought Biden was on the right track with vaccine mandates as a condition of employment, as most people have to work, and among those that don't, they obviously tend to be older and are more likely to vaccinate due to a sense of heightened risk with their age. A damn shame that the courts had to kneecap it.
As for the practicality of verification, I agree that it would be difficult in some venues, like small restaurants or retail with multiple entrances. But in venues where security is already needed due to some other form of verification needed, like tickets or age, that's where I see more potential.
Ding Ding Ding
Every time I hear someone say we're back to normal, I am 100% certain they do not have young children.
Someone in my three year-old's class room tested positive for covid. As a result, both she and my one year-old are at home for a ten day quarantine. And this is the second time this month. I remember 2019 and if someone got the flu on class, this did not happen.
I have two kids, one in school, one in daycare. This school year, between school vacations, unplanned “vaccine awareness days”, quarantines, and teachers union strikes, my school-aged child hasn’t had a five day week in school since early October.
Of course I believe I have the cost benefit analysis on my side in siding with a true “return to normal” post omicron. But really it’s the emotional weight. Two years into this, to have so many days balancing work and parenting - even with a good, relatively independent 6 year old, meetings and thinking are constantly interrupted.
And although I feel we’ve done our best in helping our kids stay normal through all of this, we went to a museum one recent “no school” day, and my son was clearly a bit anxious in areas that were more crowded.
He’s never been in school without a mask and no longer has many (any?) memories of being in crowded indoor places without a mask. It’s going to take time to unwind the sense things are “off” when being around lots of people indoors.
These stories make me really sad; these poor kids. Mine just turned 11, transition has been seamless. They currently have mandatory masks on the bus, but not at school. I’m told that none of the kids are wearing them. Right or wrong, I’m glad the masks are gone.
We haven't had the issue with school being closed this year yet thankfully, but we played outdoor soccer this weekend and I asked the kids to wear a mask because that's the rule when there was a recent exposure at school (the rule _actually_ is, I think, that the kid is supposed to stay home but that's _TOO_ abnormal). Had it not been for that exposure I wouldn't have even asked for a mask for the kids. (Side note: the masks are actually kind of nice in winter - keeps my face warm)
But anyway, none of the other kids were wearing masks and on the walk back to the car my son was anxious about that. I _think_ I successfully calmed his anxiety by explaining how open-air spaces are much safer, but I can see that returning to no-mask for them is going to take a while, even once it's the "normal" thing to do again.
I’m planning on helping her make a crown or something out of all the masks so she can wear them on her head to ease the transition. Fortunately she’s young, she’ll forget all about it eventually.
Another trait that I often see among the Very Online, heavily introverted covid hawk set is how many of them do not have children.
You are totally right about that.
This is a downstream problem of FDA's hostility to screening tests. If everyone were tested either daily and or at least on suspicion of exposure and turned away or sent home only on a positive test, this would not happen. With testing, schools and day care would not have needed to close even in 2020. Romer and Tabarrok said it way back then and still no one pays attention.
Maybe I'm overly concerned about this, but how much waste (landfill) and congestion (traffic for delivery) would that much testing generate? Not to mention the input costs of materials and energy manufacturing the tests.
We're talking 330 million times 365 days in a year. That's 125 billion tests. If, optimistically, each test is costing society $10 a pop, we're talking 1.25 trillion dollars. That would go a long way just on other health initiatives.
I'm OK with that being part of the cost benefit analysis. You do seem to be assuming a lot of testing and maybe a pretty high marginal cost for tests. One tests on Bayesian priors. Testing on probable exposure or if every unvaccinated person coming onto the premises of a venue, would not be THAT many tests when community case numbers is low and the percentage of negative tests is high.
I understood it as daily preventative tests. Of course not everyone would do that even if it would be mandated, so the actual number of tests used would be far fewer. But still the way I was understanding it was that the goal was to use that many tests.
But even if it's just all school kids every day of the school year, we should factor in those costs and get a ballpark of what they are.
Like everything else we could test too much, too. But it think we are at present doing far too little intentional testing, testing that will determine whether to take a costly action or avoid a clear benefit.
I agree the FDA's screening test posture has been counterproductive for pretty much the whole pandemic. However, on the whole return to normal issue, I wasn't getting my kid flu tested if she was exposed to influenza at daycare in 2019.
I guess the side I'm coming down is basically get vaccinated and stay current with boosters. If you get sick then stay home, but it doesn't really matter what you're sick with.
Different guidelines would make sense if you're, for example, working at a nursing home or something.
I do hope we keep getting easy availability to rapid at-home test kits, but that these test kits start having multiple lines on them to identify flu, covid, and possibly a couple other things. And I hope that sexually active young people are more used to the idea of regular screening tests now, and become more likely to get regular STD tests.
100%!
I'd love to see the lasting result of the pandemic be that we collectively take infectious diseases more seriously and we're more open to testing, vaccines, and mitigation measures (some masking, for example).
My point is that the school should not send asymptomatic kids home w/o a positive test and a negative test should be enough to return in whatever number of days.
Yeah, people with kids are terribly impacted primarily since the liberals have a lock on the "education industry".
Where do you live? Because this happened recently in my three year old’s class too, but there was no mandatory quarantine and life went on like normal. I live in a red state. This may prove Matt’s point that it’s the rules that are disrupting life more than the virus.
My kid's on their 3rd daycare quarantine since Dec.
Yikes. Good luck!
I'm in Pennsylvania. I'm not completely up to speed on all the intra-agency details, but my understanding is that the state Dept of Human Services is just following the CDC's guidance for unvaccinated individuals. It wouldn't surprise me a red state department superseded the CDC rules.
Here here!
There are some people who discovered that they like wearing masks and they especially like other people wearing masks, and they want "normal" to be "everyone wears a mask in public".
Not a mandate, but a normality - that not wearing a mask is weird and strange and is like not wearing pants.
Tbf I think that during periodic surges masks on subways and trains should be normal (dunno why people are so mad about planes, I mean how often do you fly? But planes are less of an issue), but that said I’m a mostly relaxed and Vaxxed, work at home, then meet friends/ go out to dinner every weekend.
I wish the class nature of this was being talked about.
(Not this poster)
But it is a bit much for upper income people on zoom who are not wearing masks for 8 hour shifts to constantly push that low income workers wear masks.
It’s a huge class issue!
At my very large company, the higher someone’s social-economic status, the less likely they wear masks.
Janitorial, restaurant, security staff: all masked
Lower-level accounting jobs: mostly masked
Thin, healthy, tall execs: no masks ever
Maybe this is cultural but most restaurants in Madrid enforce masks when you walk around. It feels kind of dumb when you think about it, but this is specially the case in fancier restaurants
Sitting still on a plane for 3-4 hours with a mask on is lame as hell, partially because airplane rides are already not the most comfortable thing in the world. Additionally, the air in an aircraft, by design, is changed out about every 90 seconds. That's how its pressurization system works. So, aircraft are actually quite safe, masks or not.
THIS. It's not that I think masks everywhere should become normalized, but there are certain densely-packed transport situations where I DO want masking to become standard.
I understand this sentiment and don’t find it to be alarmist or crazy. But for a society that has always struggled with fraternity like the United States, the symbol of masks might be something that could add sterility and distance to our social fabric and I think we should work to remove them completely in time.
Start with banning windshields, if you want people to see each other. Masks are relatively innocuous compared to windshields in terms of the way they encourage dehumanization and hate.
By “remove them completely over time” I don’t meant to say that people who wish to wear a mask should be barred from doing so.
"Desire" and "mandate" are two different things. Just let people choose their risk levels.
If you want to wear a mask by all means do so. Leave me alone though with your mandates for my face.
The flu/COVID have a vaccine. At this stage concern about either is overwhelming unusually high risk aversion or unwillingness to get the jab. Neither should be the basis for public policy.
Colds are a price I'm willing to pay for casual social interaction.
Why not clothes, while we're at it? Why not mandate nudity? Scandinavians have long known that you build fraternity by being buck-ass naked with each other. How far do we take this?
I think “over time, we should revert to the way we conducted ourselves 2 years ago” is far cry from canceling clothes. But real answer Justin, is that I fly a desk all day, get just enough workouts in to maintain my college pant size, and won’t be doing myself any favors by sporting my birthday suit everywhere.
But what's so great about "2 years ago" that it should set the standard for society going forward? There are actually things we've improved on, since then - like the prevalence of mask wearing during flu season. Remember how flu season more or less completely disappeared? When was the last time you had a cold? Or hay fever?
Those things are better now than they were in 2019. Why should we go back to the bad old days just for sake of "normalcy"? Why wouldn't we try to preserve the gains?
I'm fine if people WANT to wear them. It's the mandates that are an issue.
It really comes down to risk aversion and introversion. The people who want to make masking permanently on the bus, trains, airports, planes, offices etc disproportionately introverted. They don't enjoy casual conversation and don't consider it a cost to reduce it.
They also have higher than normal risk aversion and are much more comfortable telling people what to do to mitigate risks.
Good for them on both fronts but reasonable for the rest of us to say we don't want our mouths covered everywhere we go but restaurants, outdoors and home.
It's quite pessimistic to think that this will be cost effective. There will be even "densely packed transport situations" that are as bad as a hospital operating theatre?
You don't need to think a situation is as risky as a hospital operating theater to warrant mask use. Public transit is a particularly low-cost place to wear masks, because many people are specifically trying to avoid eye contact and social interaction anyway.
Fair enough, but It still feels pretty dystopian to think that we'll never get to a point where the marginal cost of masking exceeds the marginal benefit from the reduction in spread.
I don't see why it's any more dystopian to say that crowded subway cars are always a place for masks than it is to say that automobiles are always a place for seatbelts, or even that you should always wash your hands after holding onto a subway pole.
Obviously it's different when you're talking about places where people actively want to be social, but the subway was never that.
why wouldn't a crowded subway car be an equal or greater risk for respiratory spread than a hospital operating room? TONS of people packed in there.
It would depend on the level of cases in the community. If the community spread numbers are low even a packed subway would not be THAT risky. But it's ultimately a calculation. I'd hope that we could eventually get to a no-mask point, but biological parameters that go into a cost benefit analysis will give the answer.
This is essentially my feeling. We need to recognize that COVID is going to be with us for a long time, and that we can't live in emergency conditions forever. At the same time, we are going to have periods with higher case loads and more dangerous variants and we should be ready to be less normal during those period.
We should aim to remove mask mandates and open up indoor public gatherings, but we should also be ready to put those restrictions back in place when we get another big wave (which is frankly what seems to have happened in Blue States). Ideally, the Government should try to work out fairly objective criteria for doing so, as I suspect people will be more willing to put up with restrictions if they know that it wont be a battle to remove them and people will be more willing to relax restrictions if they know it is based upon an objective criteria rather than because of political pressure.
FWIW, I'm not sure we are quite at the point where we should be relaxing restrictions. Omicron seems to be waning and it seems not to have been that bad a variant, but we are still at or near record highs for cases, deaths and hospitalizations.
Normal means constant change in behavior.
Exactly - normal means wearing jackets in winter and shorts in summer and masks when there is an acute surge of respiratory illness.
I fly every week. And on any given flight that’s true of something like 10% of us.
I would love statistics on how many extroverts are still not socializing in person and how many introverts are still avoiding it. Surely there are some extroverts under the boot of covid zero universities, but I suspect a very high correlation.
I find it strange that the pandemic has seemed to redefine introvert as people who enjoy lockdowns and not interacting with strangers. I used to be a regular at a few meetups that were populated by tons of introverts. Introverts meeting up to play board games with strangers was not uncommon prepandemic. These people, like me, slightly shy, relying on organized meetups for an amount of socialization, have been devastated socially by the pandemic.
This is true but shyness =/= introversion. A lot of shy people are extroverts who draw energy and enjoyment from being around people but are uncomfortable in unstructured social environments.
Your larger point is correct and under-discussed. There are a lot of shy people out there who rely on offices, organized social clubs for human connections. They've been crushed. This is a real cost. And the COVID zero crowd ignores it.
"There are some people who ... want "normal" to be "everyone wears a mask in public"... [and] not wearing a mask is ... like not wearing pants."
I think you are making up straw-liberals in your head to get mad at. If there are 15 people in all of North America who have this whacky view, I'll be amazed.
If you think about it, everyone is always wearing a mask in public.
That's like, deep, man. It's, like, the real masks we wore were the ones inside our own hearts the whole time....
I think this is pretty accurate -- besides some people explicitly saying it, it's also the implicit message of every statement that we have to continue masking until the immunocompromised, children under 5, etc. are protected via vaccines or comparably effective medical interventions because, SPOILER ALERT, there is no foreseeable timeframe for protecting them and it's entirely possible that it will *never* be possible to protect them. (For example, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends that the yellow fever vaccine never be given to children under six months and discourages it for children at age six to nine months: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2020/family-travel/vaccine-recommendations-for-infants-and-children )
I think I know more autistic people who have that as a preference than that personally.
So you know more than 15 autistic people who want to make mask-wearing as obligatory as pants-wearing.
I think your 15+ autistic friends are not a useful reference-population for thinking about politics, and are giving you a skewed view of what the majority of people think about masks.
The questions raised by MY's post involve mass politics, not the obsessions of the neuro-divergent.
This isn't a strawman. Some of these people are in this thread.
Well, conversely there seem to be a bunch of people who look back fondly on the times when they just contracted diseases from people - even people who claimed to care about their welfare.
A new norm where we treated "communicated a deeply unpleasant sickness to another person" as a genuine interpersonal harm to be ashamed of when you did it, would be a good, socially-beneficial norm.
We have to be careful with this. One thing the gay community has been working on for decades is getting people to take the proper level of care and testing around HIV and other sexually transmissible infections, without stigmatizing people for getting infected. Stigmatizing the infected is one of the most counterproductive things in terms of getting people to test and provide useful informal contact tracing. It should not be embarrassing to text your hookup from last weekend to say, "hey, my gonorrhea test this week just came back positive so you should get tested and pause hooking up" and it should not be embarrassing to tell your friends you went to dinner with last night, "hey, my influenza test just came back positive so you should get tested and perhaps isolate for a day or two".
'A new norm where we treated "communicated a deeply unpleasant sickness to another person" as a genuine interpersonal harm to be ashamed of when you did it, would be a good, socially-beneficial norm.'
Sounds more like a dystopian nightmare. Passing on germs is not something people usually have control of, and such a norm would certainly rule out any kind of gathering of strangers, mass transit, meeting of more than one or two friends at a time, public schooling etc etc.
But it is something people have control over. That's the whole point of public health - disease isn't an immutable condition of the human experience. That's why we've skipped a couple of flu seasons in a row, now.
Please explain to me how you could have public schooling in this world where you have committed a mortal sin by transmitting a germ to another person.
If you have a cold, wear a mask. If you have a flu or COVID, stay home from school.
Done.
We skipped flu seasons by dramatically reducing social interaction. Way more people work from home. Way less people travel. Way less sponaentous social interaction in general.
Those are enormous costs that you don't even seem to care about. Especially since a flu shot dramatically reduces the risk of infection without any of the social costs.
That's debatable.
It's far more likely to be used as a cause to shame those who aren't able to take off work when they're sick, by those who work from their own offices at home, than anything else.
Without getting into arguments of prevalence or right/wrong, why in hell should those of us who disagree want to go along with this?
I think this has already happened, though not for everyone. Two years from now, do you think anyone will be surprised to see a mask in a crowded public area? It will be very similar to Hong Kong pre-Covid, where public mask-wearing was normal by people who were feeling sick or were particularly germ-conscious.
Or concerned about particulate air pollution, or suffer from hay fever.
Hats might be a better example. Before the war, only weirdos went out in public without a hat. (George Orwell wrote that middle class socialists, among other cranky things, didn’t like to wear hats.)
Of course, masks are a little more unpleasant than hats, and less likely to get baked into our culture, but it’s an example of how an article of clothing, even an inessential one (what were those hats for, exactly?) can become necessary in polite society.
My understanding is in some east Asian countries, it is already normal to wear a mask *when you are sick*. When I lived in Sydney, which has a lot of immigrants from east Asia, it was normal to see some of them wearing masks. I had a white, Australian born friend who expressed frustration that more people didn't adopt what he regarded as a sensible and polite practice.
I appreciate this is not the same as wearing a mask all the time but it's not so distant.
Wearing a mask the 2% of the time you are sick is a lot different than wearing it 100% of the time. They are more than a little different.
And the right answer is probably to wear a mask the 2% of the time when you're sick *and* the 2% of the time when there's a local wave of sickness, but not much more than that.
Actually, It was very common in asian countries (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan) to see a significant %age of the population ALWAYS mask up in very densely crowded places like the subway.
I started noticing this trend around 2003 and am told that the initial bird flu and SARS epidemics in that part of the country (which we in the US pretty much never experienced) sealed those habits.
But then the subways in these places make the NYC subways during rush hour (pre-pandemic) seem empty ....
Yeah, I saw this headline here in Portland last summer. I never read it because I'm not in favor. But you do see it. https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/08/opinion-mask-culture-should-become-part-of-oregon-culture.html
Thanks, Jeff. But that article is not about what Richard Gadsden is discussing.
The article advocates for greater use of masks *when people are symptomatic*, as is the custom in some Asian countries.
RG thinks that some people want to make masks universally mandatory like trousers, ie everywhere in public by everyone, whether symptomatic or not.
So, your article does not support his point.
Yes, as someone who has been hawkish on Covid measures (as in: generally please do more of them), it is interesting to see that there are clearly groups of people who have a cultural preference for certain Covid approaches almost irrespective of the presence of Covid.
It’s interesting because I have different reactions to different parts of the portfolio
Masks: no logical argument against but culturally rather repellent.
Stay home when sick: damn right, now and always
Limit own socialisation: hey, you do you
Limit kids’ socialisation/ school time - terrible
I live in a country where there is zero chance that any part of that package will remain in place for a second longer than necessary, but I can imagine that if you like these things and live in a sub-community where you have clout, you might want to try and permanently embed them.
A "normal" that includes a few people with exaggerated concern for my health is OK with me, so long as I'm not supposed to show exaggerated concern for theirs. I don't think we're at the point where I'm showing EXAGGERATED concern by wearing a mask becasue my cost of mask wearing is low (except for having to sing masked in church; that sucks).
My biggest concern about the divide within the left on this issue is that there seems to be a growing number of people who want to minimize risk and have no concerns about the extent to which doing so seriously burdens other domains of life. I attended policy school at UC Berkeley and the political scientist who really started the graduate program there was Aaron Wildavsky. He was gone by the time I arrived, but his reputation was significant, and it he seemed like he had become something of a crank at the end of his career, really disparaging the regulatory state as a tool to redistribute utility/wealth away from the working class and to the professional middle class by sapping the dynamism of the economy to mitigate small risks. This seemed to me a bit overly libertarian when I was a graduate student in the 90s and I thought he was underestimating the real harms of an unregulated market, but these days I find myself worrying that we just keep getting less and less risk tolerant as time moves forward, and that the costs of that creep are being dismissed -- it seems true with the focus on safetyism in ideas and speech (harm mitigation is more valued than the benefits of robust exchange) as well as this response to COVID (wanting kids to be in school in person without masks is seen as being a teacher killer). I think it's weird when people want proof that wearing masks all day is bad for kids mental health and education -- I think it pretty self-evident -- we shouldn't have to prove that masks are suboptimal, the burden should be on the mask advocates to show a meaningful reduction in spread and yet that data really isn't there. I am a pretty personally risk averse person, but I feel despair when people are attacking someone as sane and level headed as David Leonhardt.
Great comment—it hadn't occurred to me that the current moment was presaged somewhat by "helicopter parenting" among other signs of us "getting less and less risk tolerant as time moves forward." Also funny that anti-vaxxing (both pre- and post-Covid) is in a weird way another sign of getting less risk tolerant: anti-vaxxers aren't against mitigating risk, they just think the vaccine poses extreme risk, whereas in the past people seem to have adopted an "it's probably fine" attitude.
This piece is murkily argued.
Most will immediately agree that they don’t want mask requirements to persist forever. I include myself in that group.
Antivirals are in very short supply, but that supply will greatly improve in a matter of months. Those drugs will make a big difference for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated—and while we should do all we can to persuade the latter to get their shots, as a practical matter, some of them will never agree to do so, and for them, antivirals will be the key to cutting death rates and limiting hospital load (irrational though it may be to eagerly take a new drug but claim there is too much risk being vaccinated). The point here is that there is a finite horizon to when antivirals will be in good supply, and thus a target date for when NPIs like masks can be relaxed and risk of severe disease still kept low for all.
Matt suggests setting dates for when masks will go in schools and on flights. That approach seems to ignore a principal lesson of the pandemic: that facts change unexpectedly, whether when vaccines turn out to be less effective against symptomatic illness and transmission than previously seen, or when a new variant emerges that is even more transmissible and more vaccine-evasive, and thus threatens to overwhelm hospitals. How can it possibly make sense to set dates for a change in posture far in advance, when uncertainty is a principal lesson of the pandemic? Policies must adapt to evidence and variants as they emerge. That is not a recipe for forever restrictions! It is a recipe for rational response to evidence. It is a false equivalence to suggest that needing to wait and see and adapt is tantamount to permanent loss of freedom.
The trouble is that if you don’t take a firm stance in favor of normality at some very well-defined point in the future, it may never happen. You can always find some reason to delay a little longer, till things get a little better.
It’s the “there’s no good time to have children” of public health.
"Well defined point in the future" doesn't mean a fixed date. It could mean when deaths fall below X or when hospitalizations fall below Y per week.
Not to belabor the point, and I'm skeptical and don't want to contribute to the doom porn, but there is no guarantee that those metrics would ever be reached.
Yeah, Anthony Fauci said we can “pull back on the masks” when cases get below 20,000 per day.
In a country where 100,000,000 people are unvaccinated, with a disease as transmissible as measles, does anybody believe that will happen in our lifetimes?
Earlier in the pandemic, before vaccinations and when we knew less, it made sense to make policy based on total number of cases. However, I feel like now, especially with Omicron, I think we should make our policy more based on number of severe cases/deaths/hospitalizations
We are currently at or near at all-time highs for hospitalizations and deaths.
To that point, perhaps the metric should be something along the lines of measuring hospitalizations among the vaccinated for NPI maintenance, while quietly using the overall hospitalization rate as the yardstick for maintaining assistance to hospitals. (Just spitballing)
We were below 20,000 cases per day for much of June and July, if I recall correctly. It's possible that the increase in transmissibility of delta and omicron mean that their endemic levels will be higher than that of classic and alpha, so I don't *predict* we'll be at this level by April or May, but I wouldn't be surprised if we are.
(The number I've been aiming for in my own behavior is that I avoid indoor spaces and mask when I can't if the local case count is above 20 per 100,000 per day, which I think translates to 70,000 daily cases nationally - though of course local areas can be above or below this threshold independently of the national numbers, and local numbers are what's relevant outside of airports.)
It will never happen. Setting impossible benchmarks to avoid doing something you don't want is quite common.
It is quite common to hear people say "I'll start eating healthy but first I need to . . . laundry list of things that will take years."
If you have a large number of unvaccinated people and a highly transmissible disease, herd immunity will kick in pretty quickly
The more transmissible a disease is, the higher level of immunity you need for herd immunity. For some diseases, herd immunity is impossible (say, if R0>10 and prior infection only gives 90% reduction in infection risk). I haven't thought about how *long* it takes to get to herd immunity, for diseases where it is possible - it's not obvious to me whether more transmissible diseases would get there faster or slower, or if there's some optimal transmissibility rate for fastest or slowest approach to herd immunity.
I think people will take off their masks when they want to, no matter what Fauci says. As comfort levels rise (fingers crossed), it will just happen.
But if you don't reach them, you're not and will never be at "normal." It's actually deeply abnormal for thousands of people to be dying of the same cause every day; that's a bad thing, and we should be trying to stop it for as long as it's the case.
"It's actually deeply abnormal for thousands of people to be dying of the same cause every day"
No it's not. Deaths from infectious disease have been part of the human condition since time immemorial. Our threshold for what is considered a "normal" background level of death from infectious disease -- ie, the level at which people allow it to disrupt everyday life -- has been dramatically reduced since the advent of modern antibiotics, vaccines and related treatments.
Should that threshold be recalibrated a little in acknowledgement of the reality of covid, and what it reveals about the limits of our ability to master nature? It seems like that's an unspoken issue that underlies a lot of the disagreement here.
As usual, you’ve taken what I’ve voiced occasionally and put it into far more expressive, clearer language.
I think this particular strain of death-cult neo-Luddism is the most dangerous development during this pandemic, bar absolutely none. Even the anti-vaxxers actually think dying is bad, mkay - there's just going to be no reasoning with, or redeeming, the people who think it would be absolutely no big deal if we gave up the gains in hygiene and public health that have kept the graveyards from filling up with children since 1920.
This is a very fundamental disagreement. I am not trying to stop it anymore.
They have, pardon the pun, had their shot. To first order, I don't care, I don't feel obligated to care more about their lives than they do, and I will not lift a finger or pay a cent (except tax dollars to produce vaccines) to work around their problem.
This is deeply sociopathic, is the thing.
Heart disease?
We literally made it illegal to use certain kinds of cooking oil because of their effects on heart disease, and that's hardly the only effort we've made, societally, to address deaths due to heart disease. Remember how you literally can't smoke in any public place whatsoever?
If you are not reaching your metrics, then you should consider whether A) you set your metrics too low; or if you did not B) perhaps it makes sense to keep restrictions in place indefinitely.
I mean, during the AIDS crisis, people didn't come out and say "Well, we are never going to get infections down to an adequate level, so I guess we should stop recommending condom use."
We can recommend all kinds of things! What people are objecting to is *mandating* various behaviors.
But likewise, when it was partly unknown how HIV was transmitted, people didn't shut down the entire world for years at a time until they could verify that the sexually abstinent wouldn't be infected.
Of course, but the disagreement is over what "trying to stop it" should entail.
There's also no guarantee that a particular date will ever be reached. The world could be a simulation that is shut down before then.
I would be fine with metric based targets, but probably not the ones that the public health people would pick.
>>The trouble is that if you don’t take a firm stance in favor of normality at some very well-defined point in the future, it may never happen. <<
I think there's an inertial tug toward returning to normality. If we go 6 months with no horrible new variant and caseloads/hospitalizations/deaths dropping to near background noise levels, people will gravitate toward normality on their own, whatever public health folks are saying.
It depends on what you mean by "well-defined." I think that there is a lot to be said for "no mask mandates when cases are below X and hospitalizations are below Y." However, lifting restrictions on a date certain is just asking for trouble because you don't know if the next waive is going to just be cresting on that date, at which point you either have to look like a liar or make a policy blunder.
You can still recommend masks without mandating them
I mean, you can. But since people tend to disregard recommendations, you can also mandate them when they are called for.
“unvaccinated—and while we should do all we can to persuade the latter to get their shots, as a practical matter, some of them will never agree to do so, and for them, antivirals will be the key to cutting death rates”
After 18 months of treating this situation with the seriousness it deserved, and then getting promptly vaccinated, I am no longer interested in making *any* sacrifices, no matter how trivial, to vainly attempt to save the lives of those who won’t even take the most common-sense measure they can to protect themselves.
I will not wait for therapeutics to become available in quantity.
If they die, they die; they’ve sacrificed the right to my concern and my effort. Nor do they want either.
And trust me; I’m far from alone in this.
Yep. DGAF. I got my 'rona a few weeks ago--in very large part because I've gotten three different shots, it was a cold. I'm sure I'll get it again.
Wearing a mask from the time I walk into the supermarket until I leave is a low enough cost to me to make to reduce the chance of death of even a "die hard" anti-vaxer. At today's risk levels; tomorrow is a different matter; we'll see.
My only remaining concern here is the kids < 5 who can't get shots (yet). If that vaccine comes out early March, then there's a slight argument for setting May as a "return to normal" date.
I understand that "unvaccinated 4 year old" is about at the same risk as "vaccinated 50 year old" but I can also sympathize with those parents who want to protect their kids and will get them vaccinated at the first available opportunity, and it has the benefit of a very clear date.
But I agree on not being that interested in waiting for more therapeutics. There are a few people who can't get vaccinated at all and I hope that they can get the therapeutics, but I don't know what to do for them.
I have a kid under 5. Fortunately, being able to read data at a basic level, I understand that she's at more risk from getting towed around by my bike last summer than COVID. I'm disinclined to pander to those who don't have that ability.
I cannot tell you how many people have *dared* to attempt to shame me for living a reasonably normal life with a child since the adults in our household were fully vaccinated. Virtually all in instances where they themselves were doing the same exact activity as my family. Virtually all without children.
I have developed zero patience towards virtue-signaling, and very impolitely told every single one of them to impale themselves on the stick up their ass or variations thereupon.
I always wonder how people like that justify allowing their kids to ride in cars. cars are far more dangerous to kids and many of those trips are not essential. COVID’s case fatality rate in kids is about the same as the flu.
I do understand parents who are worried about their kids’ lives being disrupted if they test positive. Or parents who are worried that their friends and neighbors will judge them harshly if their kids get it.
"Novel-ness" seems like such a simple concept, and "to very young children, every virus is novel" such a simple extension.
Truly, I remain baffled at how ineffectively these concepts have been communicated to the public. I don't know whether it's the public's fault that they're dense, or public health authorities' fault that they're bad communicators, or what. But there's just a vast, gaping disconnect and I don't know why.
It's partly that if Biden wants to pick a specific easily identifiable milestone for relaxing (and pushing back against) NPIs, that seems like a good one? It provides justification for changing without people saying "why not change it a month ago"?
I am not that kind of doctor, but I don't think it's obvious that a covid vaccine will (or should) ever be approved for <5. Obviously I hope that the big pharmaceutical brains come up with something that passes the effective-versus-safe criterion, but they might not.
Instead of setting firm dates when masks mandates will end in schools, trains and flights, they should set some simple criteria based on thresholds of Covid-related metrics to end these policies. It seems ill-advised to set a firm date when Omicron is just past its peak, death rates are still higher than the Delta wave, and more importantly when the future of the virus is impossible to predict. The criteria would be based on the daily death rate, number of hospitalizations, or number of severe/critical cases--something that is straightforward to communicate and for the public to understand when it will end. If we dip below this measure, then our masks can come off. Likewise, if there's a new development that causes things to get worse again (a new more virulent variant for instance) and we cross this threshold again, masking policies should come back to effect. That way people have a clear benchmark for when these policies will end, but also reasonable expectations that if things get worse again, some restrictions may come back.
The alternative is not to set dates, but conditions. But those conditions have to be realistic and achievable in a realistic timeframe - otherwise you end up with the situation in Afghanistan where we set conditions for withdrawal that were unachievable and so we stayed and stayed and stayed until we finally left in the worst way possible.
I think the _conditions_ of cutting back NPIs need to be pre-stated - I agree that the _date_ can't be pre-stated because to do so would mean we're letting the conditions be "whatever is happening on 4/4/23" or whatever date we hit on the calendar with a dart.
But the conditions should be pre-stated and should align with whatever goal we're trying to reach, and I think it's the failure to do this that makes people like MY write posts like this.
I looked at the Mass COVID tracker the other day and ... it was actually pretty alarming. Here in blue, vaccinated MA, we had a lot of COVID death post Christmas vacation.
If someone said "we need to do these interventions because look at these spikes on the graph"...I'd buy it - particularly if the corollary is "when the graph goes back to normal, we'll stop doing this and no one's gotta feel guilty about it."
“‘we need to do these interventions because look at these spikes on the graph’...I'd buy it”
I wouldn’t, because absolutely no one can articulate a mechanism by which any of these “interventions” is going to save so much as a single life.
Absent the complete collapse of a region’s healthcare system, which we really never came close to during omicron, all any of these NPIs do is shift disease burden to and fro.
I agree. At some point people (Including Yglesias) were arguing for setting and sticking to objective criteria (e.g. case load, hospitalizations, or deaths) for easing restrictions. This makes a lot of sense. The problem is that, even though Omicron wound up being less bad than it could have been, most of the country remains at or near historic highs on all of these metrics. The vaccines are great, and are probably a big part of the reason why Omicron wasn't worse, but its still just a tool for brining down those metrics.
Matt Yglesias always says this about economic policy - make your enhanced unemployment insurance phase out when unemployment is below a certain level, not on a certain date regardless of the unemployment level! Similarly, make your covid policies phase out when covid is at a certain level, not on a certain date regardless of the disease situation!
This seems reasonable if we were mandating vaccines. The objection I and other people critical of NPIs have is we aren't mandating vaccines.
What we are mandating is infringement on one portion of the population to protect another portion of the population that is completely unwilling to do anything to protect themselves.
And since the unvaccinated aren't willing these measures will have to continue until the end of time because COVID will be endemic.
I think you can regard the apparent contradiction as Matt's way of saying that whatever benchmark he's applying has already been met.
But that seems weird, because we're at a worse point on any benchmark right now than we were at the height of delta, when I don't think Matt was saying we were done.
Although now that I think about it, Matt lives in DC, and DC is one of the farthest points along in the decline. I think last I checked, DC was still above my personal 20 cases per 100,000 per day threshold, but it looks like it could be below that threshold within a week. I'm expecting the rest of us to get there about three weeks later, and then I'm ready to be done (modulo future variants). But not yet.
Did Matt say "dates"? I thought he meant, like, acceptable levels of case counts or whatever.
From the article: "Then the administration can set a date much earlier than the beginning of the fall school year and make that the day that the mask mandate for airplanes, Amtrak, and federal buildings ends. They can coordinate with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to do the same for Congress."
Ah, my bad!
Do not disagree! My biggest annoyance, especially with the CDC, is their complete lack of explanation for certain situations.
It seems to me that they are still operating in the mindset of Fauci who flubbed (for all the right reasons) in the early days of the pandemic in stating that masks are not needed.
Noah smith (I think, or was it MattY) had an article as to why organizations like the CDC were more effective in earlier communications. (TL'DR; Information was scarce to the general public)
I think it's time to retire the "they lied about masks back in early 2020" thing. As you say "for all the right reasons" and sure they took a believability hit because of that tough, and possibly defensible, call. But so much has happened since then, can't we move on from that?
It's like criticizing Eisenhower in 1946 for botching the battle of Kasserine Pass.
Do not disagree either.
I spend as much time on right of center forums and I can tell you that this comes up A LOT, like really A LOT!
I dont think people really understand how bad that moment was for a certain section of the population already disinclined to trust "experts"
I recall, even then, immediately understanding why he said it and winching and commenting to my partner that this is going to back fire...
My real issue is that the public health establishment does not seem to have learned their lessons
Covid is going to result in BS guidance like "6 feet distance" (came from a 1960's MIT lab study) becoming the new "remove your shoes at the airport"
The CDC has continued doing new things to get equally angry about.
I don't think it's appropriate to say they *lied* about masks - they earnestly believed that if you don't have evidence then it can't hurt you!
“the Secretary of Education can make it clear to the NEA and AFT that unless they enthusiastically agree to a return to normal schooling for next year, the White House is going to go nuclear on them.”
^THIS is the “sister souljah” moment I’m looking for.
also -- I think it's a bit unfair to pick on a tweet from AOC dating back to a time (Nov. 2020) when, in fact, she was *right* that it was important to maximize the non-pharmaceutical interventions, because **there was no vaccine yet**.
If you want to blame people for keeping that mind-set 15 months later when it's out-moded, then you should use a different piece of evidence.
I think Matt picked that tweet because that particularly intervention was a bit non-sensical, or at least it contained many more tradeoffs than the tweet implied. It wasn't selected and called out for being too covid-hawkish at the time.
It's also been a relatively common way to advocate for mandating paid sick leave for all workers, even pre-COVID.
She wasn't advocating a NPI, she wanted to give out money.
My issue at the time was “are you really willing to pay me what it would cost for me to be willing to stay home” and I think the answer is “no.”
I wonder why this (totally correct) message from center-left wonks makes that crowd *so* mad. Like, the internet is full of things that make people mad but telling COVID hawks that this has to end eventually is a particularly acute form of poking the bear.
This has become a virtue tribal thing with some upper income middle class white liberals.
I suppose the only thing that one might add to the above is that things really are back to normal in almost all respects in places like Texas and Florida, the main exceptions being areas exposed to the federal writ -- federal buildings, airports, and such. (This doesn't make their policies "right" or "wrong," just a description of them.) In such places, the federal rules seem ridiculous, and only amplify the contempt for "Washington," just as the absurd local rules that require one to wear a mask for 18 seconds between entering the door of a restaurant and reaching the table only amplify the narrative that the "experts" are woefully out of touch.
What do you mean? I live in Texas, and a substantial fraction of the population is masked everywhere I see them. We're not allowed to say anything that could be felt to be demeaning to students who choose not to mask, and we're not even allowed to ask anonymously to get statistics on whether our students are vaccinated, and still a significant fraction of students are wearing masks in class (even a substantial majority right now, in my classes).
Austin and Highland Park aren’t Texas.
Are Bryan and College Station not Texas either? I don't see how you get there without saying that a majority of Texans don't live in Texas.
I live in Austin, actually, Old West Austin. Virtually nobody wears a mask outside, and people (in my experience) don't do the goofy thing where you wear a mask as you stroll through the restaurant or bar, only to take it off for three hours of eating and drinking. This is all a far cry from New York and Boston and even (curiously enough) New Orleans. I have been to all three places a bunch of times this year. So even Austin is very open compared to the coastal cities, and once one steps outside Austin it seems to disappear. You don't see a lot of masks in Wilco...
Right - no one wears masks outside. But even here in Bryan, probably a quarter of the customers in businesses are wearing masks. In New York and Boston you have the rule requiring the mask for the walk to the table, so you get that behavior there, but I don't think "back to normal" is an accurate description of even what we've got in Texas towns. (The person at the counter in the gas station across the street, who refused to wear a mask for most of the duration of the mask order, is now wearing one during Omicron!)
Today is a strange day to switch to vax and relax. The NYTimes says an average of 2,254 Americans are dying of covid every day. New therapeutics that will sharply reduce the odds of severe outcomes once infected will be broadly available in a couple months. The idea “we’re going to have restrictions for a few months to save 200,000 lives” still applies.
Still, a lot of people, including smart center left people like Matt, are switching to vax and relax. I suspect this is because of all the breakthrough infections. I recently had one, together with my wife, a third of her company, and a few of our neighbors. It wasn’t a big deal. So many respectable people have gotten the nerf version of covid and been just fine that it has been impossible to keep up the drum beat of fear which worked earlier. What this shows is that the politics of restrictions are more about the subjective fears of moderate voters than mortality statistics. 200,000 additional deaths is politically tolerable when they are almost entirely confined to the very old, very weak and very stupid.
agree that knowing more people who have had breakthrough cases probably has an impact.
I also think the general stats often downplay how much of the death is just unvaccinated people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~All+ages
There's NO death surge amongst the vaccinated! Why is this not the headline in more Omicron articles? Sigh.
That chart is too early into Omicron (data ends Dec 4th) to pick up a surge. More recent data shows there has been an increase in deaths of the vaccinated, although starting from a very low level. Deaths by vax status is in the weekly rates section, mid-page.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily
I wonder if there's any reason vaccinated deaths peak a week before unvaccinated (1/1 vs. 1/8) or if it's just noise.
Vaccinated people were more likely to be international travelers or connected to international travelers? It took a week for Omicron to make it into the outer boroughs? But that's just a crazy guess, it probably is just mostly noise.
preach it.
The 7-day-average of case numbers is plummeting as we speak. I'm not sure a patchwork of NPIs (masks, canceled flights, etc...) here and there will make any difference at all in the number of people cumulatively infected. It hasn't seemed to make a difference to this point - peak infections in bluest areas are just as high as in the red ones.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
I think now is the moment to announce the vax-and-relax strategy, so that people have two or three weeks to get ready for when it actually phases in. Deaths will still be high on those dates, but case counts will be back down to manageable levels.
I have been operating under vax and relax since last April. I am very much not alone in that regard.
“200,000 additional deaths is politically tolerable when they are almost entirely confined to the very old, very weak and very stupid”
It’s not that I disagree this is a perspective that is politically tolerable or will soon be politically tolerable, but it is a difficult pill to swallow if you don’t prefer that the old, weak, and stupid to die in order for society to function. It’s this kind of thinking that has, I fear, taken root across a large swath of the populace. I’m uncomfortable with it, perhaps because of history, and I worry how that same attitude could be applied in other non-pandemic realms.
Let’s say I think people who drive cars are awful selfish and stupid. Should I begin thinking about policy in terms of how many car driver deaths are acceptable given that I, a smug elite mass transit user, already devalue their lives because they hold preferences different from my own? Perhaps they are too old or weak to use transit (and not merely selfish and stupid)? Do I still discount their lives? By how much?
It is admittedly a bit of an extreme example but I’m trying to think about how this idea should play out. If the cost of living my life normally is the death of the old, weak, or stupid, what does that say about me?
Old people have always died and will always die. I don’t want to live if I’m too weak to function physically or intellectually.
hmm, if there were fewer motorcycle helmet laws, the supply of good young organ donors might go up... And hey, they get more "freedom!" it's a win-win?
I think the X factor here is how much of an actual difference in outcomes we could make with any kind of policy change. You should be uncomfortable with the idea that society's down-trodden get the short end of the stick so the well-to-do can have even better lives.
But if behavior changes of the well-to-do make no difference, and the down-trodden are going to get hosed no mater what then we have a situation that just sucks, always.
Those are two extreme end-points in a continuum - and the thing that has me scratching my head about Omicron is what the cost benefit options for this winter's wave really were. It absolutely ran us over, often in spite of masking and vaccination.
Yes we weigh the costs against fatalities and all that. What I worry about is a principle where, because someone judges car drivers to be less valuable than other humans, we begin to create policy where their deaths don’t matter. So, in my example, we would do less and less to keep drivers safe because they are undesirable people who are old, weak, or stupid.
It's not that anyone thinks, in David Abbott's terms, the 'very old, very weak and very stupid' are 'less valuable', it's that by their intrinsic nature it is hard to protect the very old and very weak (clearly there's plenty you can do, but the trade-off between the inconvenience of NPIs and the number of 'quality-adjusted life years' - as they're called in the UK - may not be favourable), and with regard to the very stupid, well there's two options, we can either compel them to get vaccinated or we can accept that they're taking a risk, and I see no appetite for the former, so that's that decision made.
This has nothing to do with moderate voters and everything to do with easily available vaccinations. The risk of serious harm if vaccinated/boosted is well below other commonly accepted risks.
The overwhelming majority of those who die are unvaccinated. I favor a vaccine mandate to protect that population, but that is politically non-viable. NPIs do far less to protect that group while imposing costs on the vaccinated.
I don't think imposing costs on a responsible portion of the population can be justified at this point.
I’m not against vax and relax, I’m for the Great Barrington Declaration, which I signed in 2020. Pre vaccines, we should have focused on sheltering the aged, not on generalized lockdowns. The lethality of OG covid varied 1000x by age. Focused protection would definitely have kept us freer and happier and might have even saved lives.
My main concern about this is hospital capacity, in terms of individual risk I agree it’s kind of fine (I mean UK data has COVID at about 2x as deadly as the flu), but my impression is hospitals have completely pared down their covid surge capacity, so with lower hospitalization loads you’re still getting “Hospitals overwhelmed” stories, which given the personal levels are “technically” true. So there should be a more serious discussion of permanently increasing healthcare capacity to deal with COVID + Flu on a permanente basis, because doctors being mad and frustrated is a hugely underplayed media dinamic.
The hospital capacity point is the one I'd like to see generalist grapple with the most. I am inclined to agree with the larger generalist critique, but I could see a mix of bending the curve while hospitals are overwhelmed and trying to build capacity there (in addition to the larger suite of vaccination work). I think Noah Millman has also made a good argument on the importance of testing for interacting with people at high risk. https://theweek.com/coronavirus/1008433/covid-hawks-and-doves-can-agree-we-need-more-tests
I wish I could look up the piece now (I’m technically working), but I read a great piece written pre-Covid about what private equity and consolidation did to hospital capacity. We had problems already and now would be a great time for enterprising politicians to take that on.
Yeah, I live in Spain and basically both Private but mostly public Hospitals fired all the Doctors/Nurses on temporary contracts due to budget constraints…which is fine I guess, but I you expect a consistently high level of cases you really need to think about permanent capacity.
Sounds like hospitals should be forced/funded to raise their surge capacity and keep it there.
At least here in Washington state there is also a shortage of nursing home beds. People who need to be discharged from an acute care hospital often stay in the hospital while they’re waiting for a nursing home bed to open. Which of course means that the hospitals have fewer bed available. It’s also bad for hospitals’ finances because Medicare’s payment method is based on the severity of illness and intensity of care rather than the days in the hospital. Those days where the patient is waiting to get discharged aren’t compensated unless Medicare has some temporary measur in place.
One of the big lessons from the pandemic should be that our nursing home system needs serious overhaul. They rely on poorly paid CNAs who often work at multiple nursing homes because neither place will give them full time hours in order to avoid paying benefits. It shouldn’t be a shock that employees are quitting the field.
Yey... they have an edit button finally.
Amen. The only thing I would quibble about it’s that the costs of masks is underrated. Overwhelmingly the masks mandate people have occupations in which they don’t have to wear them as much. Or wear them doing physical type jobs. Meanwhile they thing that welders, cooks, servers, policeman, guys like me that inspect our plans, should all just shut up and not complain. Its mask mandate privilege.
I’ve had this argument so many times on twitter. If masks were optional…. The vast majority of people wouldn’t wear them the majority of the time. Revealed preference vs stated preference.
Humans communicate through facial expressions. Anything that blocks facial expressions is going to be a tough sell.
This to me is an enormous social cost that is underlooked with masking. I think it is underlooked is public health officials are more introverted than the general population.
They place less value on social interaction than others and assume others feel the same. This isn't a conspiracy on their part. All groups of people have blind spots like this. I'm sure people in finance assume the average person is more materialistic than reality.
But it is a big problem for public policy
I had signed up for an improv class (these get mocked a lot, but it's one of the few ways I've found to make friends after college and outside of work) but it got suspended due to omnicron, which I found kind of annoying, and I'm sure the "we're back to normal" people would roll their eyes at this complaint, but after two years "minor" inconvenience start to add up to legitimate hinderances to socializing.
We have gym mask mandates again and this is also the kind of thing that's not really a big deal, but I just seethe at them. It's just one more damn thing on top of every other damn thing. And it annoys me both because of the impact, but also because it makes me think less of the people making these choices and trust them less when it comes to other choices they're making.
I haven't been to the gym since getting a Peloton in April, but I can imagine that's super frustrating, especially since compliance can't be very high, right?
Compliance is indeed not especially high! Which is good in some ways, but it also makes it much clearer that this is something that's being forced externally. (Also, I'm twitchy about doing non-compliance in the way that some people seem very comfortable with.)
That sucks, sorry to hear it
I have taken improv classes for fun, and I definitely met a lot of interesting people! I hope you get to take the class soon.
One of the few fun in-person things I did during the window between arriving back in NYC and the whole Omicron situation was to see an improv show.
I'm not sure if someone has already mentioned this, but there's something worth talking about here that makes the social responsibility aspect of limiting your personal activity in today's United States completely absurd.
We have something like 30% of the population completely unvaccinated. And approximately none of those people are doing anything at all to mitigate Covid transmission. The best that you can say is that in certain jurisdictions in the country they are subject to mandatory testing and quarantining policies around certain activities. But socially, they have been back to normal many months by this point.
Given that circumstance, a marginal change in the fraction of fully vaccinated individuals that stay at home or wear a mask or whatever is completely irrelevant to the community spread of Covid, and this is even more true given the R factor for Omicron related variants. The community of unvaccinated individuals is more than enough by itself to support community spread of Omicron. At the same time, the incredible effectiveness of the vaccine at preventing hospitalization means the behavior of fully vaccinated individuals can barely have any effect on the burden on hospitals.
So all of the pro-social voluntary (or involuntary) Covid restrictions vaccinated individuals apply to themselves has, at this point, no benefit whatsoever. The only relevance is to your own personal risk and the risk of your immediate family to contracting covid. The only arena where Covid restrictions are relevant is that if you enforce quarantines at schools or other facilities, you may partially protect vulnerable individuals working there, but only if those individuals are taking exceptional steps in their private life to avoid infection. And note this excludes, by definition, the elderly. We are effectively talking about a tiny fraction of the working public and we should probably find some other policy to help those people that is not so disruptive to everyone else.