Very well said. A lot of views and beliefs on these topics are about governing human behavior, and so many times there is no actual "fact" or "reality", they are all subjective viewpoints.
exactly
The 'science' has degenerated to a bunch of politicized opinion pieces, people selling a story.
Masks no Masks Lockdown vs no Lockdown and on and on
To quote Hillary
'What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?'
The answer is it probably makes no difference.
The position seems irrational to me but I am fine with it because I don't care, he is entitled to be irrational and I will appease the madness because it costs nothing, if however appeasing the irrational fears of the population comes at a price then a different position is logical and rational.
I don't give a shit whether you wear or anyone else wears a mask or not or whether you have a pocket full of posies too and if it makes you feel more secure I will wear a mask, because the real damage from corona is not happening in ICUs it is happening in peoples own heads. People need to overcome their irrational fear that someone else, a dangerous stranger will infect them and kill them (leaving aside the chances are that if you are going to be infected it is much more likely to be someone you know well who will infect you and it is unlikely to do you serious harm anyway unless you are unlucky or especially vulnerable.)
There is clearly a perception gap between the objective reality and the perceived risks of SARS-CoV-2, recently a survey said that Americans thought that 9% of the population had already died from coronavirus! before anyone says that is is because USA is stoopid, people in the UK thought 7% of the UK population had died, Same question in Germany 3%... Sweden 6% and France 5%. so WTF is going on?
for the survey see
hxxps://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf
The incessant fear fear feed from the media has clearly worked in creating a collective delusion, a hysteria.
Masks are low cost, low effect, however hopefully do help in the process of people screwing their fucking heads back on which has to happen sooner or later or you will die but not from wu-flu
Lockdown, wholesale economic destruction, the destruction of peoples lives and livelihoods, the damage to metal health, the complete destruction of the medical service provision, the isolation and divisiveness, the final destruction of impartial science the creation of a central dependency culture all have immense costs.
If masks reduce transmission by say 50% and that is not a given, then the following approximate math applies (caveat I am going to play a bit fast and loose with the numbers and terms to make the point, see HRC quote above) Say the prevalence of active transmissible infection in asymptomatic individuals in a given population is 1 in 1000, unlikely to be that high even in hot spots, but worse case, and asymptomatic individuals can infect with an attack rate of 20% which again is towards the worse case.
Risk of a contact with some random wearing a mask infecting you
= (Mask effectiveness 0.5) x (prevalence active infectious coronavirus in asymptomatic population in 1000) x (infection attack rate for casual contact 1 in 5)
=0.5x(0.001)x(<0.2)
= 0.0001 or 1 in 10000 approx
Risk of a contact with some random not wearing a mask.....
=1x(0.001)x(<0.2)
= 0.0002 or 1 in 5000 approx
Relative risk ratio of 2, but an absolute risk difference of 0.0001 or one in ten thousand
yes in theory someone without a mask is perhaps twice as likely to infect you, but the 2 times a small chance is still a vanishingly small chance in absolute terms.
Say a masked person lets call them Alasdair, does not come into close contact with thousands of people a day so the absolute risk is actually zero to all intents and purposes.
So the mask position espoused is based on a fearful concern about an additional 1 in ten thousand chance chance of infection. On the basis of a miss-estimate of the risk, is it rational to mandate it? that tells me more about that mindset than anything else.
The real risk, small though it is, comes from symptomatic people, symptomatic individuals should isolate themselves out of enlightened self interest, mask or no mask, they may actually not have Covid rather than some other ILI, but someone who does actually have covid and isolates will slow transmission and could actually prevent you being infected.
I can see why masks are being promoted, it is setting the seeds for 'selfless' behavior on a dubious scientific basis. It also means governments and people who are totally powerless in the face of a small amount of RNA can look like they are doing something.
This nonsense, is the exact same argument will be trotted out for widespread deployment of vaccines of dubious effectiveness by people who do not understand what lack of sterilizing immunity is.
There is an agenda here, bow down serfs to the technocrats, the government the bought and paid for scientists and its associated profiteers who will save you from something, in reality, you probably don't need saving from.
Focus on protecting the vulnerable and try not to break anything was, and still is, the only sensible strategy.
Coronavirus will run through no matter what happens and then disappear to become an endemic disease with occasional localized flare ups, no matter what is done once a significant proportion of the highly connected individuals have caught it and either died or recovered. If you understand the limitations of theoretical epideimiology you will already know this. This inflexion point which has already happened in some areas and will happen soon in the Americas, the disease will fade into the background. People can return to their scheduled programming of climate change fear, China fear, Russia fear, fear or whatever other irrational fear is popular, I fear Furbies and clowns.
Corona has a lot of similarities to the 9/11 aftermath, the risk from terrorism was always vanishingly small yet it was used as a pretext by evil men and women to destroy countries, to wind up a machine which attacked its own people based on lies, all in the name of safety (and making immense profits for the insiders), and yet almost 20 years on how many of these emergency temporary measures have been repealed?
yep them terrorists hate you for your freedoms, the very same freedoms the government stole from you and continues to steal from you.
