It is my pleasure to say, "I told you so.":
The most effective public health guidelines are those that are simple, clear and applied consistently, said Gretchen Chapman, a professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
Thank you, Dr. Chapman!
She said it would help for leaders to set criteria so that people might know, for example, that reaching a certain threshold of infection would trigger measures such as masking.
That's a good idea. As I presciently wrote yesterday, policy-makers must needs set realistically-attainable goals! And it would help if the policy-makers told us what those goals were!
“When the weather turns cold, people say, ‘Ugh, now I have to bundle up with a scarf and coat every time I have to go out.’ We may complain that the cold weather is back, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it,” Dr. Chapman said. “Nobody is going to be happy that you have to wear a mask again, but if we could say, ‘These are the conditions again, it’s time,’ then there would not be a surprise when we get to the mask zone.”
I'm liking this chick, Dr. Gretchen Chapman! Such good, common sense advise, I wish she were the head of CDC.
But my sense is that it's too late for common sense. The Disgraced suggested we inject bleach, take that bullshit hydroxychloroquine. We have been through lockdowns, the Disgraced’s calls to "LIBERATE!" leading to premature re-openings and partial re-openings, and I wrote at the time that "there is no reentry ramp onto Lockdown Street". We’ve gone from masks mebbe, the Disgraced setting the example with NEVER!, to No! we didn't mean no masks, we meant no N95 masks, they're needed by hospital workers, to masks definitely for everybody else except the Disgraced, to no need for the vaxxed to mask!, to sorry about that, the vaxxed should mask up again, you might transmit the virus to an unvaxxed. I started masking up again before Dr. Walensky made it formal guidance because I'm a responsible guy with an above-Deliverance IQ.
...
The C.D.C. [yesterday] recommended that people wear masks indoors in counties with substantial or high infection rates, or more than 50 new cases per 100,000 people in a seven-day period. By that measure, all residents of Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana should wear masks indoors. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. counties qualify, many of them concentrated in the South.
You see, Dr. Walensky? You set yourself up again for failure. WE WANT CHAP-MAN! WE WANT CHAP-MAN!
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The patchwork of regulations has created a confusing landscape where masks are strictly enforced on airplanes, required and mostly worn on public transportation systems like the New York City subway, and left off completely inside supermarkets, movie theaters and gyms in much of the South.
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“You asked us to stay home,” Rita Heard Days, the [St. Louis County Council] chairwoman, told the director of the county’s public health department before voting to lift the mask mandate. “You asked us to put on masks. You asked us to stay six feet apart,” she said. “We have followed your orders, and yet we are still in a predicament. So something is not working.”
The virus has changed, Dr. Faisal Khan, the public health director, told her.
True that, Dr. Khan, but so has the guidance.
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The surging virus, fueled by the more contagious Delta variant, has led the C.D.C. to respond with guidance that harked back to a year ago...
But after months of shutdowns and with three vaccines available to protect Americans, those trying to get people to wear face coverings again in the middle of a long, hot summer are encountering defiance and hostility.
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Even in Washington State, where tough virus restrictions last year enjoyed substantial public backing, there appeared to be scant support for stepped-up masking now.
“Everybody has access to vaccines in our country at the moment, and so I think that if people are not taking advantage of that, it’s poor personal decision-making,” said State Senator Mark Mullet, a Democrat.
Yeah, that's the other thing. I'm pretty callous about unvaxxed people getting sick, even dying.
Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, urged all residents to follow the federal guidelines and announced that mask requirements in schools would remain. He suggested that the state could require vaccinations for eligible students if rates do not increase.
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“It’s an inconvenience and it’s annoying,” said Tina Kim, 40, who sat on the outdoor patio of a Mexican restaurant in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday night. “But I don’t think there is a reliable way of filtering who is vaccinated when you walk into a store. It’s just easier for everyone to put it back on.”
Ms. Kim is right. We should "Just Do It," but these people will not:
Hours before the C.D.C.’s announcement on Tuesday, the school board in Broward County, Fla., postponed a meeting on back-to-school protection rules after a small crowd of mask-less adults and children showed up to the lobby of the school district headquarters and got into a tense exchange with masked members of the local teachers’ union.
The recommendation that Dr. Walensky made yesterday that I thought was not only unrealistic but, I suspect, detrimental to learning was universal school masking. Every grade school kid is by nature ADD. Now you want those kids to wear those annoying masks when they’re in school. T'AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN, DR WALENSKY, T’AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.
7/27/21, 12:36 p.m.
Reversing a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to recommend on Tuesday that people vaccinated for the coronavirus resume wearing masks indoors in certain areas of the country.
The change follows reports of rising...infections [of] the Delta variant...in people who were fully immunized, and case surges in regions with low vaccination rates. The vaccines remain effective against the worst outcomes of infection...involving the Delta variant.
In Reversal, C.D.C. to Recommend Some Vaccinated People Wear Masks Indoors
The new guidance would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
This hurts CDC's and Dr. Walensky's credibility. I started wearing a N95 again a couple of days ago after seeing the rise of cases nationwide and in particular in the Asshole of America, and especially after reading about what the scientists refer to confusingly as "breakthrough" infections, a term that I delete every fucking time I see it. Experts: To normal people "breakthroughs," especially in science, are good things. Couldn't you have come with a new term, "breakout," "outbreak," break in,"?Reversing a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to recommend on Tuesday that people vaccinated for the coronavirus resume wearing masks indoors in certain areas of the country.
The change follows reports of rising...infections [of] the Delta variant...in people who were fully immunized, and case surges in regions with low vaccination rates. The vaccines remain effective against the worst outcomes of infection...involving the Delta variant.
[I thought I had read something similar to this previously. I thought it was that Delta, although much more contagious, is not as likely to lead to "the worst outcomes," Oh God, New York Times, why do you use a stupid fucking twee euphemism, it's DEATH, QUASIS, DEATH!]
But the new guidance, the details of which are expected later Tuesday, would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
But the new guidance, the details of which are expected later Tuesday, would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
As recently as last week, an agency spokesman said that the C.D.C. had no plans to change its guidance, unless there were a significant change in the science.
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The C.D.C.’s initial guidance in May said people fully protected from the coronavirus could go mask-free indoors in most scenarios, but recommended that unvaccinated people still wear masks. Those recommendations drew sharp criticism from some experts, who said it was premature given the vast swaths of unvaccinated people in the country.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C.’s director, at the time pointed to two scientific findings as significant factors. Few vaccinated people become infected with the virus, and transmission seems rarer still...
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But those data, and the C.D.C.’s decision, were based on infections of previous versions of the virus before the Delta variant began sweeping through the country. Reports of clusters of infections among fully immunized people have suggested that the variant may be able to break through the vaccine barrier more often than previous iterations of the virus.
Oh my God, Dr. Walensky, you had the example of India before you in May, did you not? Why oh why did you take the fatal leap over the evidence right before your eyes on Delta to studies on previous variants? GOD!
