The goal was to come up with a clearcut metric to indicate when it would be safe to drop mask mandates.
The criteria is that case counts would be “low enough that the highest-risk adults can attend to something like daily living and have less than a 1% chance of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 in a 4-month period .”
Many assumptions, like immune-compromised people would wear well-fitting N95 masks in public, people would have access to Evusheld, and that a typical immune-compromised person would make regular trips to the grocery store, pharmacy, church, and other events (but no indoor dining).
Punchline:
“for a person doing all of the activities above (or similar), we’d need to keep SARS-CoV-2 under 50 cases per 100,000 people weekly, if one-way N95 masking in those public settings were to be safe enough that the 4-month risk of infection would be under 1% for an immune-compromised person in whom vaccines offer no protection.”
That’s slightly below where we are right now (goal of around 25,000 identified cases per day versus current rate of 30,550)
Ohio’s reporting has moved from daily to weekly, so I’m not sure if the daily numbers are accurate anymore, but it looks like my area is below that 50 cases per 100,000 people per week.
haven’t been following this thread at all lately. it’s been roughly 2 years since i pulled my kids out of school at the start of nyc’s first wave. things have finally started to normalize somewhat.
first family vacation on public transportation (Amtrak) over President’s Day weekend
first business trip for in-person meetings a few weeks ago
kids no longer wearing masks in school starting two weeks ago
first popcorn at public movie screening (The Batman) last week
daughter having a friend over for sleepover this weekend
really hoping we can somehow fade another subvariant surge
Maybe it’s a recognition that things with the virus have moved quickly enough that making longer-range estimates is a loser’s game? I don’t know. I guess it’s arbitrary, but at some point a public health agency has to make decisions with discrete boundaries. Those boundaries will be subjective, but unless you have a reason to say “that criteria is unambiguously worse than my preferred criteria”, I don’t think the subjectivity is a big deal, particularly if the chosen criteria doesn’t influence the conclusion much. (I don’t know how different things would look if he had chosen a 3/6/12 month benchmark.)
[I’m sure that there are people arguing that the Department of Transportation needs to rigorously examine whether a 55 mph speed limit is objectively better than a 54 or 56 mph limit, and they would kind of have a point because the 55mph limit *is* kind of arbitrary, but that argument would also be ridiculous.]
The reason I liked this was because it was the first effort that I had seen to actually lay out a coherent argument for a specific decision-making criteria. Right now, the CDC’s guidance just lays out county-level Low/Medium/High indicators, but there’s no real indication for how they came up with the criteria underlying those categories.
I like that part, but it just seems to me like four months is kind of like 54 mph or 56 mph. Like six months or a year would make a lot more sense to me.
I guess my main concern is just that it feels like they worked backwards. It feels like, “Hey, what criteria would give us a chance to stop masking soon?” and then they land on four months.
But obviously there’s no way to prove that. It also feels an awful lot like, “Well, gee, the floor with Omicron is a lot higher than it was before, so we better find a way to define this floor as acceptable so that things can get back to normal.”
I’m pretty amazed by how few people (IRL not here) seem to be willing/able to acknowledge that our current “low” level of cases is actually pretty high relative to past lulls between waves.
Sorry… It’s already starting. Cases are ticking back up in my suburban Philadelphia county, which in the context of what’s happening in Europe seems like a very bad indicator.
So my girlfriend and I were having a discussion, she thinks there’s a decent chance the WSOP is cancelled/postponed again due to the incoming BA.2 surge.
Let’s see where the Unstuck community comes down on this:
What are the chances the WSOP is postponed or cancelled in 2022?
I personally think destroying human interaction is a much bigger detriment than preventing airborne illnesses, which have and will exist for the entirety of civilization. Like not even close. The ability to think of this as something with “no downsides” is borderline dystopian to me and likely what’s driving much of the disconnect between this forum and the real world.
Not only do I not think that mask wearing “destroys human interaction,” for some with things like social anxiety it actually makes human interaction a lot easier to bear. I have had no problem communicating with anybody while either I or they or both were wearing a mask. You speak slightly louder, and Ta-Da, communication achieved.
Dystopian is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too pessimistic for what is going on. A number of asian countries have been wearing masks during flu seasons for decades. Are they dystopian and incapable of human interaction.
I guess this is aimed at both you and @anon38180840, but why would the immediate response be to delay or cancel, even assuming we get a surge in cases? Is the feeling that large gatherings absolutely can’t be held even with stringent protocols like required masking, testing, and vaccinations? That seems super extreme to me.
I’m deaf in one ear and while I never realized it before Covid I rely on watching people’s mouths when they speak to help me hear. I can’t lip read but I’ve noticed that with masking it’s harder for me to understand or know if someone is speaking to me a public place that has background noise.