We just got back from the Apple store at the mall. There were signs all over the place saying that masks were required due to state mandate…which was lifted on the 19th. Businesses were told they could keep masks if they so chose.
I would guess 75% or so of folks we saw had on masks. They were required in the Apple store.
I have to say…there weren’t very many people at the mall. I know it’s Memorial Day but still…very sparce.
I just left a suburban Home Depot in my midwestern hometown, a very large city. Being a holiday and gome remodeling and gardening season, it was was packed. 6 or 7 registers open, people waiting 3 or 4 deep at each register, and crowded aisles.
33% of the population in the county are vaxxed. 0% were wearing a mask. I am not kidding. There were 4 or 5 employees in a mask, but no shoppers. I am stunned. I knew it would be bad, I just didn’t have any idea. My parents have been trying to tell me the last year that I didn’t get how bad it was because I’d been gone too long. I told my Dad when we left that the sad thing is that some of those people we were shopping with will be dead in the fall.
A trip to Home Depot in the part of the town where I would have expected to see some unmasked faces. Nope. Other than one dude who had the mask hanging under his nose, compliance was 100%. Stopped at a local winery to grab a bite to eat and to taste some wines. Winery required masks to enter, and the staff all had masks on.
I was watching a pro hockey game on tv last night. Masks are still required as it is a group, inside, of more than 500. I think people were spinning the masks as if they were pompom for goals.
Baseball, outside, no longer requires masks.
Sad.
I would gladly take the other side of that bet. With no higher than about a 0.1% COVID fatality rate for people under 70, you would literally need about 1000 infected shoppers with median age around 65-70 to assume even one would be dead. The rates of death for the under 50 crowd are an order of magnitude lower (no higher than about 0.01%).
All this reminds me of the fear of having a child snatched off the street at random and killed in modern America. I remember some statistician/economist who calculated that if you actually wanted to ensure that your kid was snatched and killed, you would have to leave them abandoned outside for 750,000 years.
It is so easy to lose sight of the odds and the numbers.
Your math assumes there are no other possible exposures between now and November. My math assumes those folks will be maskless at dozens and dozens of social outings over the next 5 months.
No it doesn’t. Think about it. Most people only get COVID once (in fact the overwhelming majority). Median time to death, when it occurs, is measured in weeks. You would need a random bin of 1000 infected persons with median age 65-70 to see even one death with confidence on a, say, four month horizon. If median age was 45-50, you’d need 10,000. They would all have to be unvaccinated too (basically).
Infection would have to occur either at Home Depot today or sometime over the summer for there to be deaths in the fall. Did you see more than 1000 unvaccinated people at Home Depot today with median age, say, in their sixties? That’s what you would need statistically.
Another way to think about it is this, assume with certainty that everyone you saw was unvaccinated and in fact contracts COVID over the summer. You’d still unlikely see even a single death among those people whom you saw (obviously others could be infected, and that would increase the risk that there would be some deaths associated with this maskless Home Depot group).
COVID is not negligible risk, but it’s not terribly frightening either on the numbers, at least for the vast majority of people.
For those under 65, the risk of long term after-effects of COVID-19 (26-30%) may be what they really should be concerned about.
I agree—long term covid symptoms are a major problem for many who had covid, even among some who were asymptomatic or only had “mild” cases.
Our state still requires masking indoors and most are complying.
you mentioned compliance: do you still have mask laws your way? or is that HD requiring them?
in the midwest here. City/County Mask law revoked this week. i saw 100% compliance while we had the law. Now - it’s about 50/50 - and our vax rate is around 50%. (here, the wealthier zip codes have higher % vax; the low SES zip codes with the highest CV death rates have a much lower % vax. That’s sad to me. ).
This is not a surprise.
During vaccine scarcity, high SES people typically got vaccine appointments more easily. But even now, with vaccines readily available, low SES people may have more difficulty due to scheduling and transportation limitations.
It’s actually still 100% compliance with the law. If the law doesn’t require a mask and you aren’t wearing one, you are complying.
My husband and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary tonight by going to Muse Paintbar, where they guide you through creating a painting (kind of scary to see two engineers trying to paint, ha). I was surprised that they required masks, but I was fine with it. It’s a chain, so I imagine they decided to make it a corporate policy.
Happy 35th—it’s our 35th today too!
At this point, my husband and I are only wearing masks to make other vaccinated people more comfortable. The unvaccinated don’t care if I mask.
Not all unvaccinated people are voluntarily unvaccinated. Due to the length of the vaccination process (5-6 weeks*), some people in some areas may have gotten started less than 5-6 weeks ago when easy availability came to their areas. However, the number of such adults should decline in the next few weeks, after which it may be reasonable to assume that almost all adults who are unvaccinated are voluntarily so (except the very few with medical contraindications).
*J&J time frame is only 2 weeks, but manufacturing problems mean that there is no availability.
I am still not sure I get your math. Certainly getting Covid is not a random event, as the risk goes up significantly based on behaviors and setting. In this county, 1.7% of infected people have died, and that rate would be much higher for 60+ crowd. I do appreciate your general point though and realize the risk of death from Covid for that group of shoppers is probably somewhere in between what the two of us think.
I think what you are struggling with is the true fatality rate of COVID, a stat known as IFR (infection to fatality rate). That is, what percent of people who are infected with COVID actually die from it. A statistic like this can never be perfectly calculated, primarily because the true rate of infection can never be known with precision. It will also vary, as you note, by age, and also by region.
But it can be estimated, and estimates now based upon experience in many countries are all well under 1%, most under 0.5%, across all age groups. For an example, look at this figure from a recent meta study examining data from 45 countries:
Study here: COVID Infection Fatality Rates by Sex and Age | American Council on Science and Health (acsh.org)
You can easily see the under age 50 group is generally no higher than about 0.1% (males 40-49 somewhat excepted)
It is not hard to find many similar studies; for instance, look at the estimated IFR binned by age groups for Italy’s experience very early on, when treatment was poor due to lack of knowledge of treatment strategies early on (middle panel):
Study here: Estimating COVID-19 mortality in Italy early in the COVID-19 pandemic | Nature Communications
I’ll leave it at that, but there are dozens and dozens of estimates now on how deadly COVID is, and you really do not even get to 1% rates until the 65+ age groups, and I think most people would be shocked to know that the vast majority (90%+) of even 80+ year-olds who are infected with COVID do not die from it.
I think the difference is those rates are estimating the untested/unknown cases. But, if you do the math using the known cases, I get the following. My health district has a 2.2% death rate using # of known deaths/# of known cases. Almost all of these (all but 2) deaths occurred after July 1 - so (unlike NYC/NJ) most of the known life saving techniques were in place. 7.5% of our population was known to be infected in the last 6 months. Only 1/3 in my area are fully vaccinated. Around 39% have had 1 shot.
So, Home Depot is ~100,000 SF and has a max capacity of ~25 people/1000 SF, or 2500 people. I’d say a “packed store” is likely to have 1500 people. If 60% are not vaccinated (and I’d guess higher in Home Depot since middle aged men tend to be the most stubborn in my district and more common in Home Depot), that would be 900 unvaccinated people. Assume 5% get infected in the next 6 months, or 45 people would be infected. 2.2% of 45 is roughly 1 person would die. But that number is taking a snapshot of the people in the store at 1 moment in time. If you are there for 30-45 minutes, there would technically be more than 1500 different people in the store. So, while shopping in a packed Home Depot in my area, I could see 1-2 people dying from Covid by Christmas.
