Jfc. Science/medicine doesn’t change their minds. They are constantly reassessing new information and challenging assumptions and prior findings and then reacting appropriately.
If I hear one more “they kept changing their instructions/directives” so they are just making it up nonsense.
The White House brought back masking for the unvaxxed, and Fox News is pissed… and digging up the Cochrane Review.
Meanwhile, experts have been calling into question the efficacy of face masks. A recent study published by the prestigious Cochrane Library, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, dug into the findings of 78 randomized controlled trials to determine whether “physical interventions” — including face masks and hand-washing — lessened the spread of respiratory viruses.
The conclusion about masks undercuts the scientific basis for masking, according to the study’s lead author.
“There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop,” Tom Jefferson, the study’s lead author, said in an interview. When asked specifically about fitted N95 masks in health care settings, Jefferson said: “It makes no difference – none of it.”
So weird that I didn’t get Covid for the first 3 years of the pandemic and then when I started to get loose and fast with masking a bit in public I immediately got Covid. Must be a coincidence.
Interesting research that will require animal and then human studies to draw conclusions, but it seems quite feasible this is the mechanism causing brain fog.
I think my decision has been made for me and the mask will be coming off in two weeks (fiancee was just boosted and want to let it kick in). My poker results in cash games have been shit for a long time, and I went back and looked and sure enough my winrate took a nose dive when I went back to masking around the time Omicron started. About a 75-80% drop off.
I’m pretty sure it’s just that action players aren’t going to give much action to the dork in the mask, so the vast majority of my pots are either against action players with premium hands or other pros. I can make a profit that way, but not a living.
I’m also getting bullied worse and worse about it at the table, which is drawing more attention to it, which is further amplifying the lack of action. I had a guy on the rail yelling at me in a cash game in King’s Lounge at the WSOP the other day. Bullying works!
My fiancee was also rejected for a job over her mask. It’s just costing us money on multiple fronts and we’ve put up with the costs for a while and prioritized health, but at some point we would like to own a home and build a life, so I guess it’s time to roll those dice and see if we’re the lucky ones who can dodge the consequences.
Great job society, you win. Time to see what all the hype is about and start catching covid.
Deep down I believe I’m probably giving up an EV of about 10 years of life expectancy and 20+ years of quality life from a health standpoint (I expect to have long covid within 5-10 years), but the life we’re currently living with daily harassment and diminished opportunities is not worth much either.
Hopefully my fears about long COVID are wrong, there are a lot of intelligent people who think it’s totally fine now, but at this point waiting around to see definitively is just not tenable.
It would be pretty classic me to be the most careful person in the world for 3.5 years and be freshly boosted and just get smacked upside the head with a bad case and long covid like 2 weeks after unmasking, but hopefully that’s not how it goes.
It’ll definitely be an adjustment if you’ve still been diligently masking in public all this time. It’s going to feel weird and reckless for quite a while, months. But you’ll get used to the way things were, and yes, you’ll get sick again occasionally which is super fun. And you’ll get COVID sooner or later (probably sooner) and kick yourself but then get over it and life will keep on keeping on. I don’t think you’ll lose two decades of high-quality life in your older age, or a decade off your life expectancy, but what do I know. At least by then we’ll all have forgotten about this rocky few years (dimentia ftw!) and will probably be dying of supercancer from 5G or something.
But yeah, it felt weird as heck to get “back to normal”, but at least Karen will be able to see you smile, damnit.
Did I miss something about your current health and medical conditions? Otherwise these do not seem to be logical beliefs at all.
Asthma, overweight (nearly rid of this one), slightly high cholesterol (will retest after weight loss). But I’m very pessimistic about the impacts of covid over the long-term, especially with repeat infections - that’s why I’ve been masking still.
I think you probably can’t mask forever, but just prepare yourself, you’re going to basically instantly get Covid (my experience).
If you are vaxxed, boosted, and quickly go on paxlovid when you get infected, I really think you are vastly overestimating your risks here. It is not 2020, we have highly effective vaccines and highly effective antivirals.
I think there’s still a lot of downside risk for long-term issues after COVID, it’s too early to say for sure but there’s growing evidence that it could wreak havoc on our brains, heart, blood vessels, and lungs even in mild cases. Those studies will need to be repeated and they’ll need to be done with vaccinated participants, but by then it doesn’t matter - we’ll all have had a few cases of COVID each.
Hopefully the studies don’t hold up, but I’m not optimistic.
There isn’t a strong evidence base for this at all, and the 10 year estimate is super pessimistic.
I really, really hope you’re right. I don’t feel like I have a choice anymore so I’m doing my best to forget about my fears and lose my last 25-30 pounds as quickly as possible, hopefully you and others ITT are right, and hopefully I don’t catch it before I lose my weight to get out of that risk category… But at the end of the day money makes the world go round and I don’t have enough of it to be the dork in the mask nobody wants to give action to at the poker table anymore.
If it’s come to the point you’ve already made a decision you probably want to stop following COVID news entirely and remind yourself by far the most likely outcome is your going to get COVID and then be like wtf was all the fuss about.
The nocebo effect is real, if you’ve already decided to stop masking any additional worry you cause yourself is increasing the chance you experience worse outcomes.
A Japanese study shows that good ventilation can bring the R0 of COVID below 1. Literally could stomp out COVID if we just improved ventilation across society. Study was in medical settings, 540ppm is for inpatient settings, 620ppm is for outpatient settings.
As a reference, outdoor levels are 400-450ppm.
https://twitter.com/covidmeetupscom/status/1668576159045484546
A Japanese study shows that bringing CO2 levels below 540-620 ppm brings down transmission levels such that COVID stops spreading exponentially (R0 < 1).
A simple CO2 monitor is one of the most powerful ways to raise awareness regarding poor indoor air.
How hard is it to provide that kind of ventilation?
I assume it varies significantly based on how many people per square foot are in a room. Humans exhale about 45,000ppm CO2. My somewhat educated guess is 6 air changes per hour would get many public settings close to that, and would be pretty easy to achieve. I base the 6 ACH on a prior study that 6 ACH reduced transmission by 82%, and I base it being achievable based on my own calculations at home with HEPA purifiers.
Like you’re probably never going to get a small concert venue packed with people to the target numbers, but societally that’s fine - if a ton of settings keep the R0 < 1, then overall spread would be pretty low still even if you have super spreaders in concerts and sporting events and so forth. And those who wish could always mask up in those settings. Keep in mind that stomping it out elsewhere also reduces the number of people that walk into a crowded indoor venue carrying COVID in the first place.
Society clearly doesn’t care about getting rid of covid, but minimizing the burden is going to prove to be economically beneficial and could probably be done cost-efficiently by implementing stricter ventilation requirements in public settings and trying to get stuff like office spaces, retail spaces, etc to the required numbers.
In my head, I’m thinking of restaurants as kind of the dividing line. Some of them could definitely hit the number at least some of the year (picture places that have huge windows or sliding floor to ceiling glass dividers between indoor/outdoor) and many others could never. Anything more crowded/indoor than a restaurant is probably never gonna make it, anything less crowded/indoor than restaurants probably could.
If I were POTUS I’d commission a study to see what the cost would be to implement an ACH requirement and HEPA requirement on public settings, as well as the savings from preventing the transmission of covid, cold, flu, etc. I’d then propose a tax credit for implementing and maintaining it, subject to quarterly inspection or something along those lines. Compliant public places would get a certificate they could place at each entrance to show that they’re in the program.
Requiring this in all public schools and federal offices would be a step 1 no brainer. Requiring it in K-12 private schools, doctors offices, hospitals, and pharmacies seems obvious too.
Obviously in a utopia my plan wouldn’t involve a tax credit for the wealthy. But in the real world, the best way to get it done is to get Republicans on board via tax cuts.
And think of you could something as contagious as Covid <1 what that would do for other respiratory infections
Yep, we could basically wipe out the flu and common colds.
wasn’t there a big chunk of covid stimulus that was supposed to be funding for doing this in schools etc? Did any of that ever happen?