Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Great job. Here’s a gold sticker.

In your opinion, who is the problem?

 

I have no great desire to name a "them" for you (because there always has to be a "them" opposing "us"), but . . .

The single greatest harm done to this country was the declaration three months ago for people to "STOP WEARING MASKS!" (ostensibly because our poor healthcare workers needed them, and they don't protect you anyway!). Never mind that you can make one in 10 minutes. And it wasn't even an off-handed "they may not help you all that much" statement. It was a "STOP DOING IT" recommendation.

We've known forever that masks help others more than the wearer. So why did the CDC not even mention it here:



Followed by the Surgeon General:



And then WHO gets into the act.

Face masks: WHO stands by recommendation to not wear them if you are not sick or not caring for someone who is sick - CNN

That started the snowball of back-and-forth messaging and gave mask-avoiders the excuse they needed to keep eschewing them ("Yeah, we need one THIS week. Whattabout NEXT week?").

Making masks mandatory for all businesses and crowded indoor settings (buses, subways) in March would have accomplished more than shutting these businesses down (and parks! and tennis courts!) and keeping people home indoors 24/7 (where they became infected by family members working essential jobs without masks). It would have made masks the norm from Day 1 instead of starting this stupid cultural divide.

 

Three months ago, nobody knew hardly anything at all about this virus, and even now, we’re all still have a lot to learn. As we’re seeing now in Arizona and Florida, for instance, the virus isn’t going away in the heat.

Now, was the flip-flopping on masks helpful? No., of course not. But you know what would have been worse? Telling people that everything is awesome as long as you wear a mask, and then having an even more deadly outcome that could set back the country for a generation.

The stupid culture divide is being caused by the stupid culture warriors who think that every little thing is a goddam conspiracy theory designed to take away the guns that they cling to.

 

Who says that would have been the message? They could offer the SAME preventive recommendations they did anyway without fucking up the mask recommendations. And you know what? The "we didn't know anything about the virus!" is a bullshit excuse anyway. ALL OTHER recommendations from then (wash hands, etc.) are still perfectly applicable. Only the masks were fucked up. Mask wearing AT WORST would have done no harm. So there was no reason to give the message they did. Whatever happened to "err on the side of caution?"

 

Alrighty so it’s the Scientists’ fault. Good. They get the blame.


How do we move forward? Maybe we could identify some sort of high-level politician - something like a CEO of the Federal Government ... I don’t know - to explain to people why we should be wearing masks?


Or is this a “nope they had their chance to ask us to wear masks and got it wrong no no take-backs now” kind of thing?

 

We will never know with any certainty what kind of differences in our reaction to the virus would have shown in results months down the road. I would think we'd be in better shape if Trump had said, "we're going to suck it up for a month. We're going to live with whatever inconveniences this generates and we're going to our best to get a grip on this." At least I'd feel better that we tried . . . something!

 

Those same preventive recommendations included staying the fuck home.

And yet, now we’re going away from that, because freedum or something.

 

ONLY to prevent healthcare systems from crashing. It was never meant to be anything more than a temporary load-lightener for hospitals to spread out the infections. Somehow we've forgotten that and think that it was meant to stop the virus. Never was.

 

You really can't think past yourself and maybe your wife, can you?

 

And how are some of those hospitals doing now?

 

Look, people not wearing masks are either ...

A. Fucking idiots
B. Trump cultists who believe this pandemic is a hoax
C. Science-deniers
D. All of the above

 

No we haven't forgotten. But reopening was supposed to happen when we weren't going to immediately go right back to where we were before the shutdown. When we saw declines in new cases over a significant stretch of time. More available testing. Contact tracing. Places like Florida decided declines over a few days was enough and threw caution to the wind. They can blame things like more testing means more cases all they want, but the rise in hospitalizations says more. Yeah we're not seeing a spike in deaths but deaths typically lag spikes in cases. California shut down between March 16 and March 20. The worst single day for deaths wasn't until mid April. So two weeks for symptoms means people infected before lock down saw symptoms at the end of March/early April. Three weeks until deaths of those cases, and lo and behold...