"The Pandemic is Over"

It doesn’t matter how many studies suggest that masks are useless, someone somewhere will produce that one study that suggests your 10% reduction. But it’s all based on what I consider the myth of contagion.

 

I think you pretty much nail it right here. It was a peace of mind for you. That is fine.

I got blasted for early on calling out the mask policies. And I have always been okay if people wanted to wear one. But there was not compelling evidence before this pandemic that masks did anything for a disease like this. In fact there was some evidence showing that masks were not necessary. I am not saying masks made things worse. Though I think the mask messaging very likely did make things worse during Delta with the combination of messaging that these shots would stop people from spreading covid. There were a lot of people who had gotten shots and went out in public and to friends and family gatherings thinking they had allergies and/or a cold when in fact they were covid positive. Since Omicron many had moved on from masks outside the heavy restriction communities.

When public health started to try and censor past information on masks. At the same time here we are 2.5 years into this and zero RTCs on mask wearing in a likely spread situation. At the same time plenty of observational data to show there is no benefit from a public standpoint.

Here is an article from 2016 from a dental perspective that was censored by the Oral Health Group (what I was getting at with censoring past information). Mind you masks in a surgery setting are basically worn to protect the wearer. The peace of mind thought and optics has become part of the rational over time as well.

Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review - John Hardie, PhD, Oral Health Group (2016) - Evidence Not Fear

The one area where I do believe forcing masks was damaging was and is with kids. No kids should have ever been forced to wear a mask. Kids need to see facial recognition for their development. And with no evidence that masks did anything. That is one group that was detrimentally harmed by forced wearing policies. For me it was no big deal. If a business wanted require me to wear one I would just go somewhere else if possible. Very few things required me to patronize a business (there were a few). We never asked patients to wear a mask at our practice. A few let us know they disagreed but with a respectful conversation about the situation they understood why we did not require patients to wear a mask or not to wear a mask.

It is unfortunate but the mask became a political weapon. But I would really like to know why the cdc and nih did not spend some of the billions of dollars at their disposal to run RCTs on masks in spread situations (not taking a mask into a laboratory with a black light and shooting particles through it/but looking at real world situations where we know the virus spreads most commonly) to prove they work. I actually think there is a chance they did and the results were not what they wanted. Not saying the results showed they were worse but that it did not prove there was a benefit. It is fairly obvious at this point there is no benefit either way with mask wearing outside an N95/KN95 which were worn by those with serious immune compromised systems before the pandemic as well to protect them (remember we were told we are protecting others).

Appreciate the response!

 

The only people who deserve to be blasted are the people hanging onto absurd (in the extreme) mask policies.

 

And Hockey showed how ineffective the shots were…

Go Bolts!

 

The opinion of Dr. Leana Wen
Biden is right. The pandemic is over.

He’s right. By multiple definitions, the pandemic is over. That doesn’t mean that the coronavirus is no longer causing harm; it simply signals the end of an emergency state as covid has evolved into an endemic disease.

A pandemic is something that upends our daily lives and profoundly alters the way that we work, go to school, worship and socialize. That was certainly the case in March 2020. I was among the public health experts who urged people to “stay home, save lives.” We called for Americans to avoid “play dates, sleepovers, bars, restaurants, parties or houses of worship.” Employers sent workers home en masse. Schools pivoted to remote instruction.

Things changed with the arrival of vaccines. Many individuals, once vaccinated, began resuming their pre-pandemic activities. Others, like my family, waited until younger kids could receive the shots. By now, the vast majority of Americans have been vaccinated or recovered from covid-19 or both. The preventive antibody Evusheld and treatments such as Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies provide further protection against severe illness.

As a result, most Americans have turned the page and abandoned mitigation measures. By August, according to a Morning Consult poll, just 14 percent of adults viewed covid as a severe health risk. This tracks with their other findings that only 28 percent still mask in all settings, while 75 percent were comfortable with indoor dining.​

 

That lady is a whacked out covid freak. Look up some of her cnn or msnbc clips, scary chit.

 

Although completely off-topic for this thread, the issue isn't whether an embryo/fetus is living, virtually everyone agrees that it is, the issue is when it should be considered a human being independent of its mother.

 

The In-laws came back from an Alaska cruise and caught a mild case of COVID. My father in law is immune compromised making any lung ailment potentially deadly. Both of them are vaccinated and had their boosters. Nasty stuff.

 

Really? This is another one of her columns.
I’m a doctor. Here’s why my kids won’t wear masks this school year.

 

All abortion arguments are after-fact rationalizations.

 

She was crazy early on but has come a long way to follow the data on Covid. And certainly she has some views on life I would completely disagree with outside of Covid. But she helps define what is wrong with Public Health Officials when they wanted to cancel her for actually following the data on Covid now…

 

Dr Paul Offit says at the very end of this video, around 1:03:00 that if you define pandemic as it changes the way you live work or play most people are behaving as if we are past that point.

 

My personal view is that mask wearing is probably of very marginal benefit now with the much more quickly incubating and faster spreading variants. They may have been modestly effective against original strains.

It is interesting to me that often the people that are more likely to wear them these days, apart from Asians, are young/college aged and of seemingly much lower risk.

 

I think this highlights your point. Stanford no less in 2021…

“In April of this year, I witnessed something on the Stanford campus that will be seared into my memory forever: a student on a bicycle, wearing flip-flops, AirPods in ear, going the wrong way through a roundabout in an active construction zone, with no helmet. But like any good follower of science, the student was wearing a disposable blue face mask -- for safety, I guess.”

Review Analysis: Stanford students are more likely to wear masks on bicycles than helmets

 

He is following the science. It's easier to catch because everybody else is going the wrong way. Remember? You have to learn to think like a millennial/gen Z'er.

 

It's almost as if everything she said was based upon the situational knowledge available at the time.

 

I sprayed my lawn for unicorns last spring. It was my best guess, at the time, as to bald spots on the lawn.

 

One image to define the OP.