The people that need to know this- won’t listen, and the people that don’t need to know- don’t need to know because they already know it.
It's not about the morons that refuse to wear mask. It about people that believes in truth checking that the things they know are correct. If we wore masks and never tested if that did anything we would be as stupid as any anti-vaxxer.
Yea but there was already ample evidence. This isn't enlightening anyone with anything new. (not that revalidation is bad, but revalidation isn't changing anything)
Even if the research had come out that masks did absolutely nothing to protect against Covid, I would have absolutely no regrets for masking up. We did what we thought was the right thing based on the evidence available and it harmed no one. The worst that would’ve happened if we were wrong (outside of a false sense of security) is that we looked silly for awhile. The people that were vehemently against wearing masks were tool-sheds who were manipulated into their position by an Administration who assumed it would affect Democratic-leaning cities/states more and who are so blinded by their anti-science views that they didn’t even understand the threat posed by Covid. Mask wearers did the right thing and the evidence backs us up. Anti-mask idiots hopefully learned an evolutionary lesson, but I doubt it has really ever sunk in.
I remember reading a while back that MAGA counties had significantly higher death and serious disease rates. Probably still do. I'm not sure about the apartment Republican strategy of actually working to kill their core voters, but I guess we'll see how it works out for them.
I've read that TrumpCo wasn't as concerned with it out of the belief that more populous Democratic counties/states would be more heavily impacted by Covid. If anything, they tried to take advantage of Covid to use it as a natural bio-weapon and this is probably their worst, yet least talked about crime that they'll likely never face charges over. The strategy apparently blew up in their faces though, but by the time anyone realized, it was already too late to do anything about it. The damage had already been done.
The real problem for the Right Wing is that masks are at their most effective stopping the wearer's germs from getting OUT, even though they're also pretty effective at stopping others ' germs from getting IN. They can't stand the idea of sacrificing even a tiny bit of comfort for anyone else to benefit. Even if it also helps themselves.
So fucked up masks became politicized: I had hoped that the pandemic would help normalize them so people would just mask up whenever they feel sick. It could've mitigated the spread of all sorts of airborne disease.
Instead, they've been demonized by insane fascists. What a stupid world we live in...
Sometimes I just wear a mask to piss them off lol.
God I remember when this happened.
Right at the beginning of the pandemic, masks were being recommended by the CDC and everyone just sort of did it. COVID was novel and we were still trying to wrap our heads around it and being over cautious.
Weeks earlier, Trump was lamenting his polling numbers and complained that he didn't have a "Katrina" that would rally his favorables.
Trump could have done something simple and just worn the damn mask. He could have told people that until they had better data, let's be cautious and following the CDC guidelines.
But when he was asked point blank, he said he wouldn't wear one.
Before that, conservatives and liberals were wearing masks. It wasn't a "tribal" signal. But the second he said it, it was. You could tell immediately after that who conservatives were.
The funny thing is had Trump handled COVID better, he probably would have won re-election. Or at least it would have been closer.
But nope. That's not the kind of person he was.
He could have made a MAGA mask and told his cultists that it was more effective and blessed with holy water or something, and then go on to make piles of cash. At the time, that's what I was expecting to happen, but sadly I was wrong.
There was so much happening around this time. There was a story that didn't get a lot of runtime about some company that he or someone who was connected to him set up where the federal government purchased masks bought a bunch of boxes from them but never got delivered.
The internal audit found that they basically the funds were misappropriated. The whole management of funds were so.....shady to say the least.
Blue Flame (take your pick of articles). These were a group of politically connected people who were using official avenues to divert (steal) desperately needed PPE away from hospitals and municipalities to resell for profit, often to the same destinations they diverted it from.
Trump's administration, especially Jared Kushner were all up in it, right around the time that asshole also thought it would be an effective political tool to withhold supplies from blue states as a punishment, as though viruses would all cave and go "oh, okay, I'll stay in New York and not board EVERY FUCKING FLIGHT in existence to every other location just because I can" regardless of political affiliation.
It was also around that time that the bodies were piling up in NYC requiring the use of refrigerated trailers because not even all the morgues could hold them, and healthcare workers were having to buy their own PPE (if they even could) or be forced to re-use the same mask for weeks on end.
These were the folks that thought it would be great to profit off of massive human suffering, and make coin off of stealing by the literal truckload from their local and state governments and neighbors and heroic healthcare workers to do it.
May every single person involved in Blue Flame fucking rot in hell, rotating eternally on a spit that goes up their ass and out their mouth with a bit of hot, stank, fume-emitting turd stuck to the end of it that they have to huff unto the end of time, with passersby laughing at them periodically just to remind them that no one else made them do it, it was their own bright idea, and when it comes to being a sentient human being, all of them are a total fail.
I'm Asian. So I could wear a mask and not get the stink eye even before covid.
Things that should become obviously acceptable often doesn't seem to do so due to some sort of cultural acceptance.
Like in regions most susceptible to malaria, they hate mosquito nets. Yet if I lived there, I'd mosquito net everything even without malaria!
The fact that the idea of an air filter is controversial is frankly amazing.
They apparently only work in every situation except when put over your face.
Many think that it takes only 1 virus to catch the disease when, in reality, your body will easily deal with a small amount of unknown pathogens and does so many times a day.
Masks work because they reduce the overall viral load, so your immune system isn't overwhelmed.
What also doesn't help is how unintuitively percentages scale. A mask that is 90% effective doubles the viral load if compared to a mask with 95% effectiveness, even tho the difference is "only" 5%.
There's something to be said for masks that aren't 100% effective that isn't often said: letting in a little virus when out in public, but not enough viral load to cause an infection, very likely has a positive effect on your immunity to the virus.
Most people think it is an all or nothing thing, including some doctors.
My immune system is apparently very good against noroviruses or whatever was giving my family the "all exits no waiting" treatment. A doctor argued that I must not have come in contact with the virus since I had no symptoms aside from feeling icky for a couple of hours. I was bothered that they had such a bad grasp on how viral infections work and I don't consider myself an expert by any stretch. Even after I told them I had been having to clean up my toddler and infant messes, do diapers, bathe them etc. I had come in contact with saliva vomit poo pee breath etc- of course I came in contact with it.
I had the virus, I just didn't have the disease/nasty symptoms. Maybe I had built immunity, maybe I had been able to build immunity quickly, maybe insufficient viral critical mass for rapid onset- who knows?
Yeah, I'm the same way, I always get about 10% as sick as the rest of my family when something is going around. I just assume my immune system is well trained. But I am also always cautious when new stuff is around, as an immune system can't be trained to stuff it hasn't seen yet. But I don't go for a zero tolerance approach. I go for a minimize exposure approach. Avoid contact with mucous membranes and other external weak points, and keep distance. But don't completely avoid everything. Still do stuff, just more carefully.
That's the same as what we knew about masks a century ago?
I thought doctors and nurses were wearing this just for fun.
All “Hygiene Theatre” .., according to Qult45.
Seriously… if masks don’t work, then I’m sure you’ll have no problem with your surgeon coughing into your open chest without one on, right?
I thought it's so that doctors don't lick the scalpels.
Assuming a mask blocks 50% of particles or droplets in either direction (preventing yours from escaping if you're sick, preventing outside particles from getting to you), when 2 people wear masks that reduces the chances of transmission in a given retail encounter by 75%.
Reducing those odds by that much, when (from an epidemiological POV) the biggest math factor is to drive the r number down below 1, it's a huge deal. If you do that consistently, the virus becomes rarer and rarer and has fewer opportunities to mutate and more importantly, you're feeding fewer and fewer human beings to it.
It's such a tired topic. Most pathogenes of this kind travel by attaching themselves to little droplets, aerosols and larger spit particles. Thinking that even cloth masks aren't at least reducing those to a certain degree by catching said particles just feels dishonest, and medically related masks have been in use in hospitals and other locations for ages. Do people think they are worn out of fashion? And now we've got even more studies and data that confirms all of this even more, but covidiots will just continue with their idiocy. 🙈🙉
I hope I won't have to witness an even deadlier disease turning into a pandemic, but at the rate things are going it is probably not very unlikely.
We know that they help prevent spreading disease to other People and that a large subsect of Americans hates that it helps others.
The problem isn't that "most people" won't believe it. The problem is that there is very little conversion of people who didn't already believe it. The ones who most need to understand this will flat out refuse to believe any kind of science on the matter, because being right is what is most important to them. Admitting they were wrong just isn't going to happen.
Yeah but a guy on YouTube said they don’t work and he said “trust me” so what now?
"you can still smell farts"
sigh
At the same time, you have the people claiming they immediately turn blue and pass out within seconds of putting a mask on.
Millions of people in this country apparently have problems keeping two thoughts in their head at the same time.
To these people, COVID is simultaneously not as bad as the flu, a Chinese hoax, something to be fought with ivermectin, a liberal hoax, something so infectious it can get through even the best fitted filtration mask, fought by going to the gym, fought by getting more sunlight, overblown in death count, etc etc.
Masks are the same. They're simultaneously stifling and damaging to your health because they disallow O2 ingress or whatever and you can't use them because you have some private health condition, and they're completely ineffective at keeping out COVID somehow.
My diagnosis is that they're brain wormed from the maga mind virus, and probably got some damage from COVID too.
This means nothing. I'd be willing to bet that anyone unwilling to wear a mask is also unwilling to listen to science/medical experts.
Most people do believe this. I doubt that the unbelievers will be convinced though.
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