There seems to be a large disconnect between the hospital situation and the fact that there’s been no discussion of any type of restrictions on indoor capacity of restaurants, bars, theaters etc…. to slow/curb the spread of covid. What do people expect? All these articles have such an incredulous tone yet people are traveling at levels near or exceeding pre-pandemic levels, restaurants and bars are full, schools are open, people are gathering over the holidays, weddings and funerals are proceeding without capacity limitations and so forth. Pretty much all the restrictions that were in place prior to 2021 are gone, the often whiplash inducing messaging of the CDC is adding to the chaos, as well as testing scarcity yet people are surprised at the rapid spread of COVID and the resulting pressures on the health system.
Just listened to a story on NPR about the hospital situation in California. Many people are going to the ER for COVID tests because they can’t get them anywhere else. Primary care doctors are running out of PCRs and many people don’t have insurance let alone primary care doctors. My daughter had a PCR through CVS to return to campus and it took 120 hours to come back.
I agree with the poster above with regards to the CDC and the leadership (or lack thereof) that they are providing. Rough waters are the true tests of leadership. Everyone can be a good captain in calm water.
She sums it up nicely…
‘When Li, a law professor at the University of New Hampshire, summarized her confusion in a tweet last week - “Stay indoors. But also return in person. Wear a mask. Not that one. The expensive one, that you can’t find. Take rapid tests. Which you also can’t find. But if you find them, don’t buy them. Rapid tests don’t work” - she racked up nearly 300,000 likes.’
https://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Which-mask-What-test-Covid-s-latest-surge-16766542.php
Similar fun advising corporate employees. Please remain home if you test covid positive for 5 days. Unless you are working in NJ or one of the other states with a 10 day requirement. Or you are in San Francisco supporting hospital workers, then no isolation, please report to work if positive but asymptomatic. Some jurisdictions would prefer you test prior to return, but there are no tests to be bought, so don’t worry about that. Of course, this all assumes you havent received a medical or religious exemption from vax; then different rules apply relying on testing which can’t be done anyway.
This. People around us and in many places assume everything is over and are acting like it. We just returned from a medical procedure for H (not at a hospital) that required an overnight stay at a local hotel for us due to distance. No employee at that hotel was masked or even pretending to be. Only about 3-4 customers I saw were, and that was at breakfast where everyone took theirs off to eat anyhow.
I wore mine the whole time in public including in the elevator alongside a younger man wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirt. I put it on as he entered my previously unoccupied car telling him, “nothing against you, but my H is having a medical procedure and I want to stay safe.” He remained silent (kudos to him for that at least - he didn’t offer to wait for the next car, nor did I). After that I took the stairs instead. At breakfast I stayed away from everyone I could - noting there were some folks in there coughing, but of course, I don’t know what from, and I didn’t stick around to people watch.
Now I’m back home. H and I will try to isolate soon so we can be sure to be negative before traveling south for Feb. He already tested negative for the medical procedure, so we have a good start. I do have to get my hair cut and have been debating sooner vs later. Right now the virus abounds, but later if I were to catch it I’d have no time to get over it before wanting to travel.
At least we’re vaxxed with boosters giving us best odds.
That was me and after I posted it, I forgot about probably the most egregious of all their errors/blunders so will add that now you reminded me: there was news of a more virulent strain that started circulating in Europe that was named Delta and just then the CDC said people in the US could stop wearing their masks if they were vaccinated. I thought “What? That strain is coming over here, if it’s not here already. Now is not the time to stop wearing your masks. And once you tell people it’s ok to take them off, it’s really hard to tell them to put them back on. At least wait for Delta to pass before you tell people it’s ok to stop wearing their mask (if vaccinated).” SMH.
There are many derogatory terms used by some when referring to others who ‘do their own research’.
Frankly, if you aren’t, at this point, at least looking deeper than the headlines…and are blindly following the command of the day…and claim to be following the science…you’ve got your head in the sand
The message is, and continues to be, overly influenced by politics. Whether one likes (believes the science behind) the message and is adamant that all follow its’ wisdom (or they want to kill granny, teachers, HCP) is too often dependent upon whether one likes the particular messenger.
Can you wear your mask during your haircut? I have worn mine for cut & color since the salon reopened in June 2020. My stylist also wears her mask, and asks all clients to do the same.
For most “doing their own research” just turns out to be an exercised in confirmation bias. Most people don’t have the tools to understand the validity of what they’re reading. They create an illusion that they are doing research when in actuality, they parrot things they already want to hear. That’s not to cast aspersion on anyone. It’s a simple acknowledgement that the need for affirmation is strong, and very few have been trained to read scientific literature, let alone have a background in statistics.
I had my hair done today. Both of us are vaccinated and boosted. Hairdresser wore mask, I doubled mask with surgical mask with twisted loops then wore a copper compression mask over that. I was her only client today as her other appointments cancelled due to contracting COVID or being exposed to someone with COVID. I always make the first early morning appointment.
The was my point. You like the message(r) of the day…great…no need to look further (even if the message is out and out dumb - hey ‘we’ve won’ throw away those masks).
If you don’t like the message(r)…Hey…look at the article I found proving this message(r) WRONG.
The conflicting, contradictory, clearly non-science motivated guidance - from the beginning of this mess - continues and doesn’t seem to be abating.
I don’t think one needs to understand intercellular signaling molecules to ponder the wisdom of throwing away masks as another variant is hop-skipping thru town.
I don’t think one needs to have a PhD in psychology to see what is in front of their nose - especially the damage to kids - that many of these policies have wrought.
One doesn’t need to be a virologist by trade to question the push for a 4th booster…of the stuff that was made for a variant that has pretty much disappeared.
And one certainly has to question the harmony line to ‘for the love of god stop buying masks’ which is ‘for the love of god stop buying rapid tests. because some people need them more than you and they don’t really work anyway.’
I think we are being asked to suspend common sense - and I, for one, am not at that point of submission.
Things change as new information comes to light. The main thing they did wrong, through both administrations is failing to acknowledge this. If you have any “clearly non-science motivated guidance” that wasn’t just armchair coached in retrospect, I’d love to see it.
One needs to be able to weigh the known virulence and transmissibility of a variant gauged against the negative impact of the mitigating factors to combat it. It made absolute sense to go unmasked for a very brief period of time, I don’t think anyone wants to be like this forever.
A third dose appears to substantially reduce morbidity and mortality. A fourth should be no different. There are a lot a variant specific options in the pipeline, but nothing available yet. Thus, your options are wait, or move forward with what we have.
This is where I really bristle. As demonstrated above, there aren’t “common sense” answers to evolving science. The facts on the ground are constantly changing. That assumption is built into the scientific method. Too many people believe that physicians and lab scientists who know this stuff like the back of their hand after devoting decades studying it are idiots because they don’t have “common sense.” Certainly the messaging has been bad, but the reality is that the vast majority of the public do not understand the nuance and the science.
I’ve been wearing an N-95 mask since the beginning of the pandemic. Our DIL picked them up overseas and at first the hospitals wouldn’t take them because we’d opened the package. Once they would they got all, but two. I’ve been working from home, seeing clients as little as possible, substituting photos for site visits a lot of the time. We walk outside regularly, mostly maskless unless we are near people. The only thing I do differently now is I don’t spray the groceries and when our numbers are low my cleaning woman comes and works with a mask on. I paid her to stay away for a month before Christmas, and may extend that another couple of weeks.
I’ve pretty much given up on following the science. My husband is a biologist (but for cancer) I trust him to make sense of papers. He’s naturally much more cautious than I am, but he’s been working in the lab since the summer of 2020. (Sometimes at half capacity always with masks on - though he often has to remind people about the mask requirement - at a Med School!)
“Doing their own research” would be fine if one were seeking out qualified medical professionals and comparing what they have to say. Not getting medical advice from non-medical people like Joe Rogan.
I don’t think they lack common sense or are idiots. I sincerely hope they’re competent, or hopefully stellar, at what they do. However, to me the issue is that studying how viruses and pandemics work in theory is different than dealing with one in real life. This was evident early on when Fauci said he wasn’t concerned about COVID spreading here from China. SARS and MERS had not and those were the last 2 respiratory virus that had hinted at the potential to become a pandemic, or at least somewhat widespread. There were other articles that discussed how most countries’ pandemic prep focused on influenza. Again, because the Spanish Flu and swine flu were the last 2 “big” ones (and swine flu kinda fixed itself). People, scientists and doctors included, often have difficulty extrapolating beyond their actual experiences and modeling only takes you so far. In addition the sheer volume of studies and data that’s been accumulated and continues to accumulate has to be a challenge to review and distill into policies in real time and a variant like omicron compresses those timeframes almost too much to allow for competent real-time policy making. The CDC is at the point now where they’re playing constant catch up and that’s hurt their credibility and people’s willingness to follow their guidance.
This. We have enough data now to check our modeling predictions (the ones used to develop policy real time) for the first wave of this pandemic. I have yet to see how the modeling faired (predictions vs reality). It’s of course complicated stuff but if anyone has any references I would love to read them.
I won’t line by line analyze the rest, but this statement encapsulates the sentiment. He said that with HEAVY equivocation about what could change.
We want to know the future, and press science when that prediction is inaccurate. The scientific method assumes that predictions will be wrong, and adjusts on the fly, to the best degree possible, when new information arises.
It’s not science and scientists being stuck in some theoretical world. It’s that the world evolves, quickly. Most can’t handle the uncertainly and question the competence of science and medicine when there simply is no answer.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to go to my stylist’s house since she started doing hair there during the pandemic. She and I will be the only one in the room, so I only have to worry about her having it. She only has to worry about me. She’s been open before about her contacts - I’ll be checking that again. As of the last time she was the caretaker of an older lady (not in house, but daily) and she watches her young (not old enough to be vaxxed) granddaughter who had Covid earlier in the pandemic - caught it at preschool (so she said).
I know she’s vaxxed and boostered.
The top example that comes to mind is the letter signed by 1000+ HCPs stating that the protests of the summer of 2020 were so important to peoples mental health that they needed to be supported and allowed. This during the same time the same voices were telling us to stay inside at all costs. Beaches were closed, hiking trails were closed, playgrounds were closed…because all of those would lead to the death of granny. But…somehow the ‘science’ showed that large gatherings of people in the outdoors while wearing masks were not risky…apparently as long as those gathering were for a very defined purpose…
.‘"However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders."’
So the science says the bug knows WHY you are protesting and hence it is safe - or not.
During that specific time we had a local incident where an elderly couple set up two chairs and had lunch together on the beach. Local law enforcement forced them to leave. The above mentioned thematic protest in the area took place just a few yards from where the couple had sat only a few days ago.
That.does.not.compute.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
What science knew at the time, and knows even better today is that outdoor transmission is exceedingly rare, probably well under 1% according to MIT. If you don’t know that, then you can drop personal political overlays onto those decisions and criticize them. It’s a great example of doing ones “own research.” These weren’t the “same voices.” They were lots of local opinions.