Cool. If you know how the physiology of respiration works, you know this doesn’t happen.
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lol I’m asthmatic myself, so I don’t need educating about breathing difficulties.
Having a condition does not mean you are an expert. If you cannot wear a mask because of your asthma, you need to be in a hospital for an acute asthma exacerbation and sick enough for me to consider intubating you or giving IM epi.
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No, because for the past year or so (since I stopped running) it’s been mild or non existent, not severe. When it was even moderate there’s no way I’d have worn a mask - I’d have felt like I was suffocating.
When I had a severe attack out of the blue aged ~20 - you must be kidding me.
No one is saying asthmatics need to keep their masks on during an attack.
One thing that definitely makes asthma worse is air pollution, which surgical masks help with.
I am going to preface this by saying that I think we should have had more precautions, stricter precautions and for longer but I do honestly wonder if we would have been better off overall just letting Covid ravage us as fast as possible.
And by that I mean are we really better off having this lingering mess for 10 years vs. whatever else would have happened? At least from a political perspective Covid has been a massive loser for the left imo. There was a narrative this was Trump’s problem but I am not sure you can really make that case now. Soon more will have died under Biden AFTER vaccines. And it’s been a massive loser at a point where we can’t afford losses. The longer it goes on the more people say “fuck masks on planes” or whatever. If we still are trying to push heavy Covid restrictions in 2022/2024 lots of people are just going to say “I’m tired of this shit”. Not to mention the Dems have been absolutely terrible on messaging with Covid. Like a lot of good was done in the Covid bills and 0 people give a single fuck about that.
Lots of people are going to die from climate change because the world is sick of the sane people doing the Covid restrictions. Lot of people sacrificed a lot during Covid and for what? We really think we will get a supermajority of people in the world to care about something much more abstract?
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It’s not binary - you’re not suffering an attack or fine, always. Some people wheeze their way through the day.
Air pollution is a much lesser factor for many people than pollen. You can’t sleep with a mask on anyway. That shit is getting into your lungs whatever.
I think he means he saw a sign in the subway.
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The problem is COVID burning through might just not be an option. Herd immunity seems questionable at best, so all we’d have done is kill even more people and still be facing the same issues today.
I also would argue Democrats have been, while better at COVID than Republicans, pretty bad at COVID response. Agreed their messaging stinks, but their policy while in charge also has kind of sucked and underestimated the challenge they were dealing with, so Im not surprised it isnt a winning issue.
lol
There are frequent announcements on the “subway” reminding passengers that masks are compulsory except for those who are exempt.
Can’t understand why this is so difficult.
Precautions until vaccines are available to everyone save lives for sure. After that, maybe we should just let er rip, at least until we’re threatening to overwhelm hospitals. Eradication is essentially an impossibility at this point. People who aren’t vaccinated and won’t ever get vaccinated are basically certain to get covid at some point or another.
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This is, more or less, current policy and where I thought we’d end up if you had asked me six months ago. Might still be where we end up, but I have real fears about what it does to the healthcare system. If this is as good as it gets we are going to see a real decline in life expectancy and quality of life just from deferred care, and it is going to get worse over time.
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This is a bad outcome, but its sustainable. If you double mortality rates across the board, you would end up with mortality rates from about 50 years ago. Its obviously a disgrace that political leaders are going to allow something like the erasure of decades of mortality improvement, but we would still be able to have a society even with all those excess deaths. Contrasted to climate change, it would actually be a “good” outcome.
What, specifically, are you envisioning here? How much higher will mortality rates go and what happens?
Pretty sure a wise man (me ldo) said COVID would be over when it got to the place where it was just about as bad as the flu.
Influenza mercs a ton of people every year, eats the vulnerable, and can essentially be completely neutralized with universal mask and distancing mandates.
We never have and never will do it for the flu, and we won’t do it for COVID once it kills a bit less (vax + not being novel to folks after they survive it once or twice). Throw in another promising treatment or two and bring down the mortality rate a bit more and we are pretty close.
We are all going to eat maskless in a restaurant again, even JT. Some do already, some will soon, some will take a bit longer. We have been in the every man woman and child for themselves mode for a year plus now, of course we all are getting there at different times.
Yeah agreed. And I’m definitely not advocating for YOLO. It’s just that it seems like we are sometimes thinking of Covid like its an existential threat and I am not sure that it is. I was wondering if you saw something about that I haven’t seen, you are more on top of the downside risks than I am.
Probably talking his book some, but I can tell you Pfizer management views this as, if not a base case, a reasonably high probability of where we are headed. Highly confident we will be able to revax, but they view complete immune evasion from current vax as closer to a when than an if.
And it’s on employees of these establishments to enforce people wearing a mask properly. Masks are mandated in Manitoba, but every time I go to the store or whatever if they’re over 50 there seems to be a 50% chance it’s under their nose.
For grocery stores, malls, movie theatres, restaurants and the like it’s often a teenager having to tell a grown ass person to wear their mask properly.
Yeah, some percentage of the vaccinated will get it, but we’d expect about an order of magnitude fewer than if everyone were unvaccinated, and of the people who got it, they’d have milder cases and stay out of the hospital on average. For a more dangerous strain that escapes this vaccine, we design a new mRNA sequence. The good news is that this virus fundamentally just doesn’t mutate that quickly. If we do get a Rho strain that is that bad, maybe we lockdown and mask again until we start rolling out an updated vaccine with a new sequence. Maybe we do that every couple-few years?
It seems to me like an eventual compromise here is mask mandates in places where social distancing isn’t possible and/or you are forced to be exposed to a random nperson for a significant amount of time. As in, I don’t htink mask mandates should come off of mass transit for a long time. Especially not planes, trains, or ride share/taxi.