Society requires us to wear masks, as a relatively reasonable human I will continue to wear masks in public rather than wave around my vaccine card screaming I don’t need no stinking mask.
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Ya that’s definitely what I was talking about doing. So to be clear, post vaccination the masks do basically nothing but one should wear them because “society requires us”, which I assume has something to do with encouraging other people to wear masks?
My appointment is set for 1:15 Friday. I’ll be accidentally leaving my ID at home just in case.
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Yeah I think the medical benefits of wearing a mask after you are fully vaccinated are vanishingly small. It’s not zero, some people who are vaccinated won’t be immune. The societal benefits of wearing masks greatly outweighs the medical benefits imo.
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Loads of people in the Far East routinely wear masks outdoors. I doubt it’s a terrible idea.
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No problem wearing a mask routinely if its actually doing something. After a year of quarantine, if the mask does nothing I don’t really see the need to go out with it to like, do my small part to give a visual reminder to anti-vaxx morons that they should probably wear one.
Yeah no, definitely not for that reason. Cities in the Far East are often overcrowded beyond belief so it makes a lot of sense to mask up.
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Because the vaccine is proven to offer substantial protection in a masked environment, but we do not know exactly how well it protects without masks in riskier environments.
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The biggest reason to continue masking up is because there’s no quick way to tell if people are truly vaccinated. If it becomes normalized too soon for vaccinated people to unmask, then our mask culture will slip as a whole.
Perhaps come early 2022 it will no longer be necessary to mask up in places like the grocery store.
As South Africa battles a highly infectious new mutation of Covid-19, the country’s leading expert on the pandemic has urged wealthier nations not to hoard vaccine supplies, describing the behaviour as “unconscionable” and warning that “no-one is safe until everyone is safe”.
"Fundamentally, there’s a mistaken belief by some countries that they can vaccinate their populations and they’ll be safe.
“It simply is not true. In this world that we live in, with this coronavirus, no-one is safe until everyone is safe,” said Prof Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the government’s coronavirus advisory panel.
"To me it would be unconscionable that a country like the US or UK to start vaccinating low risk young people, when we here in Africa haven’t even started vaccinating healthcare workers and the elderly.
“At the rate at which things are going, that is what’s going to happen,” he warned.
Narrator: It’s already happening in one of those countries
Eh, I don’t know, I think we’re going to return to normalcy (or something very close to it) a lot sooner than some of you think.
Whether or not we should, I don’t think there will be much appetite for distancing or even masks once we get to the point that anyone who wants the vaccine can get it. That’s the critical point imo, and Biden said he thinks that will be late Spring. After that my guess is we’re opening fully with sports and all, businesses won’t require masks, etc. Some individuals will choose to mask up at like the grocery store but most won’t.
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Norway to close borders to nearly all non-residents
Norway’s borders are to be closed to all but essential visitors, prime minister Erna Solberg has announced.
She said that while exceptions will apply to a few groups, such as health workers: “In practise, the border will be closed to anyone not living in Norway.”
The measures will be reviewed in two weeks, she said.
Norway announced a lockdown of the region around its capital Oslo on Saturday after an outbreak of a more contagious variant of Covid-19 first identified in the UK.
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It’s possible.
But there is going to be significant pressure from at-risk populations. The specter of COVID will be hanging over us well into the summer and fall, and “we here at Whole Foods are keeping you safe by requiring masks and distancing” will probably play better than “no masks COVID is behind us partayyyy” as a marketing message when we’re still seeing x0,000 cases per day and many thousands of people still hospitalized all the time.
Travel will also be severely disrupted for the rest of the year, without question.
It could be a measure of an individual’s probability of dodging the disease, no matter what. I agree you can’t conclude that solely from the effectiveness trials. What the trials show is that, in the vaccinated group, 9x% of the events that would have been infection-creating in the control group did not generate infections. What they don’t tell you is why the 10-x% of events were able to circumvent the vaccine and still cause infections. The good answer would be that 8% of people just don’t develop immunity to the virus from vaccination due to genetic quirks or improper administration or whatever, and the remaining 92% of people are perfectly immune. In that case, you would be 92% safe doing anything up to getting injected with live COVID. On the downside, you could equally well explain the results by saying that 100% of the vaccinated people got a weak immunity that works against the mildest 92% of infection events that were encountered by the experimental group and does nothing at all for anything worse. In that case, nobody would have protection against getting sneezed on by an infectious person, but we’d all be fine jogging past an infected person outdoors.
I would have guessed that something like the first explanation was more likely based on my half-remembered AP bio classes, but that’s not a very reliable source…
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I can see myself wearing a mask in crowded situations during flu season from here on in. Headed into the flu season prior to COVID arriving I was already getting crazy about hand sanitizing because the previous three years I got SICK despite being vaccinated. One of those years I got pneumonia and was close to being admitted to the hospital. I’m going to be pretty extra careful about avoiding respiratory viruses pretty much forever imo.
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I don’t really think we’ve seen any sort of significant pressure in favor of these populations and I don’t expect that will change for the better once a vaccine is out
But aren’t the vaccines only good for 9x% effectiveness against symptomatic cases?
The pie chart in the below article (Salt Lake Tribune randomly has decent covid coverage) indicates the frontline efficacy numbers we have been reading are simply for symptomatic cases (which is a genius framing if true). It suggests efficacy for asymptomatic cases is lower, like 60%.
I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it; instead, we should be looking at the conditional probability of symptomatic OR asymptomatic cases when discussing asymptomatic efficacy.
ie 85/90 = 94.5% for symptomatic efficacy, (129-5-14)/129 = 85% for asymptomatic efficacy.
But I think 85-90% is probably a decent proxy for how effective the vaccine is at preventing transmission.
Yeah, one good thing that could eventually result from this debacle is a much greater awareness of public health and the transmission of viruses.
I have no idea how we would react to something that had similar spread and 10x deadlier. If if the morbidity demographics were different, younger.
Of course I thought once the US hit 50,000 dead everyone take covid much more seriously.
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It is at least apples to apples: though, symptomatic cases in the control vs. symptomatic cases in the vaccinated.