I think the covid deaths and infections will go down, but they are flattening and they aren’t that low. They are about where they were from June through November of last year. They really haven’t gone down much in the last month after going down a lot in the previous month. Compare the US to the UK and you see both had very similar spikes (very close to the same peak per capita), but the UK went down to practically nothing in between spikes and the US baseline is about 20x as high per capita. Canada and the US have pretty similar deaths per capita right now and we have about 10x as many people fully vaxxed per capita. Our cases per capita have gone down, but they’re still 5x as high as the worst peak in Australia.
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You can’t count.
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This only works if we have politicians that are leaders but we actually have politicians that are cowards and specialists at deflecting responsibility and assigning blame. To steal from an article I read a couple of days ago, our politicians are like firefighters that go to a burning building and stand on the sidewalk bickering about who was supposed to bring the hose. Thats not the CDCs fault, but they should know better.
Mike DeWine, GOAT.
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Pardon me while I go find Cuse to end this debate with an epic multi-multi quote reply.
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My take on this thread over the last few days:
CDC announces changes to mask recommendations.
Some discussion ensues about this change.
Johnny: This is too soon. Going OFB instead of waiting a little longer is putting a lot of people in danger.
Some other people: Ive been isolating since this thing started, Im fully vaxxed, and I welcome being able to get back to some normality. I dont think its reasonable to delay that because of anti vaxxers who likely wont ever get the shot anyway.
Johnny: Its not just anti vaxxers who arent vaccinated yet. There is a large number of vaccinations happening daily. That signals a high demand from people who have not yet had the means or opportunity to get their shots and get safe. Going full OFB means the cases will drop more slowly, which means those at the back of the line are in more danger. We have an obligation to wait a while longer for them to get to safety.
Churchill: As this graph clearly demonstrates, new variants are rendering all our resistance futile and I for one welcome our new covid overlords.
I mean, there were a lot of other words, but I kinda think this is the crux of it.
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I’ll be honest, I’ve been scrolling past a lot of this because I’m just looking for news and don’t do well with forum drama, but if this is an accurate summary of this discussion then I am very surprised that anyone disagrees with what JT is saying here. The few posts I saw from him above this seemed entirely reasonable so I don’t understand why there even is drama here.
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If the CDC believes that a mask mandate is necessary but won’t be kept in place by local governments, it should simply impose a federal mask mandate in public places. The near-universal assumption that the only channel the public health bureaucracy has to influence public behavior is manipulation and wheedling is both wrong and profoundly harmful. If the CDC is making a political decision not to pursue a federal mask mandate, then it also needs to defer to local political decisions to do the same thing. Distorting the bureaucratic function of providing science-based health advice to manipulate local governments or box them into taking political steps that the CDC itself has declined to take is antidemocratic and absolutely terrible for the CDC’s institutional credibility.
I don’t think Walensky is going to win any prizes for clear policy communication, but I do think she gets it.
Blaming the CDC for local governments not listening to the CDC seems like quite a stretch.
I think the issues stem from conflation of responsibility.
Organizational (CDC/Govt)______Societal_________Individual.
I skimmed a lot, but generally it seems like all the back and forth is people coming at the discussion from different points on that continuum, feeling misrepresented/misunderstood/personally attacked, and responding as such.
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Yeah, there’s actually a reasonable discussion to be had here. Unfortunately a lot of the petty abrasiveness took over early.
No one is explicitly saying this, but there seems to be the suggestion that the CDC should fudge the science to make local governments take the virus more seriously.
It sure seems like if they did that the exact same people would be in here howling about how the CDC lied and no one should trust them ever. There’s probably some wiggle room around how the messaging is framed, but I really doubt there’s some magical press release they could come up with that would make the good people of Ohio do anything other than rush toward prematurely going OFS/OFB. Mostly it just seems like the CDC is being scapegoated for broader failures among local governments and the general public.
That isn’t remotely what the chart you posted earlier said.
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It’s not the CDC’s job to lie to people for the greater good, and to the extent one thinks it is, their lying was already beyond plausibility. Nor is it their fault that we are a country full of sociopaths based on the idea that people should abandon the society that raised and nurtured them in the pursuit of teh capitalism. As a wise man once said, it is what it is.
Not updating previous guidance that vaccinated people need to wear a mask, and continuing to implausibly defend that stance when questioned, is a lie.
Like if they truthfully stated that vaccinated people don’t really need to wear a mask but policies should stay in place to not give cover to unvaccinated anti-maskers, then the result would be exactly the same. The people who want to loosen mask policy would focus on just the first part of the statement and ignore the second.
What’s wrong with:
While vaccinated people are safe from catching and transmitting the disease, because of the fact that is impossible to tell whether someone has been vaccinated, we recommend that mask mandates remain in effect until case rates get to X and/or vaccination rates get to Y?
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Auto parts store was 33% employees masked. I was the only customer and masked.
Talking about “lies” is a distraction, I think, because what scientific experts really contribute is judgment. Is it the best judgment of the CDC’s relevant experts that it’s safe for fully vaccinated individuals to go to the grocery store without wearing a mask? Yes it is. (Not sure if the anti-CDC folks disagree here–my understanding was that they took this to be true, but don’t approve of the fact or way this was communicated.) Should the CDC share its best scientific judgment with the public and policy makers, or should they construct their communications with a different goal in mind?