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New Covid wave has begun and masks should be worn again, scientists warn
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
646 points (92.1% liked)
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I'm in Australia and half my kids class was sick last week. Me and the kid both tested positive today. It is pretty rough.
Nobody here cares at all any more. This is my first but most people are on their 2nd or more go around. Its not even discussed, there are zero masks, and people are sending their kids to school sick.
All our care and caution just in the bin because people just don't give a shit
Yeah and dickheads without a clue or a sense of morality will continue to take other peoples lives to save themselves a minor inconvenience. Murica!
There are 7 million dead people who I'm sure would argue that point if they could. Do you think a respiratory disease spreads through some other means? Or do you just not understand anything about the situation?
"yall should accept covid killing people cause I want the freedom to unmask" is quite the shit take
Americans are a fucking shitstain on our society man. Douchebag
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It might have to do with the fact that by far most of the population has some degree of immunity now due to infection or vaccination, making the disease much less lethal than it was, and now completely comparable to other flu viruses. I don't want everyone to freak out every time some mild disease is in season. Yes, it sucks to get a cold, and it sucks to get the flu, but if nobody ever catches them we will have very low levels of immunity in the population, making it far worse when people do eventually catch them.
After covid I was bedridden a couple weeks because of common colds. Thats never happened before. The amount of people hospitalised due to other diseases than covid also spiked (we have statistics for this). The reason was that very few people had gotten sick for two years, so nobody had any immunity agains anything they weren't vaccinated against (which is most cold- or flu viruses).
So your standpoint is that you want people to walk around making each other sick regardless of the consequences? And your reason for this is that you spent two weeks in bed? That's whacky man
I never said that. I said that if nobody ever gets sick, the consequences are much larger when disease does spread. Just check the statistics for any country post-covid lockdowns, and you will se a spike in non-covid related respiratory disease. Plenty of doctors and researchers have pointed out that the reason was very little respiratory disease during lockdowns/quarantining periods leading to low immunity in the population. I want to minimise the consequences long-term, and I'm saying that I prefer to get mildly sick once or twice a year over getting extremely sick every other year.
It seems like you didn't even read the whole paragraph. As I said, what I experienced wasn't unique, but something we could also see in statistics over hospitalisations. I'm lucky enough to only have been in bed, but for people with preexisting conditions, the same infections could have been much worse. Again: If most people get mildly sick every now and then (as we always have) we prevent outbreaks from wreaking havoc and hospitalising a bunch of people when the do happen.
No, most people don't have some degree of immunity. They found out very early during the pandemic that Covid damages the immune system and that you can basically assume you won't gain immunity. Stop pretending it's the flu.
Fun fact: if you got sick during the first wave, getting it again will not result in any immunity.
I'm not pretending coronavirus is literally a type of flu virus. It just happens to be a novel flu virus that we don't have as much exposure and immunity to yet. There are plenty of historical examples of what happens when a population is hit by a virus that it has little or no immunity against, even though that virus is relatively harmless to those with immunity.
That is not an argument against vaccines, and it is not an argument against all the precautions that were taken when Covid-19 first hit. Those were both necessary for the population to build as much immunity as possible, with as few as possible deaths and as little as possible sickness.
It is an argument for the fact that Covid-19 must be treated differently now and in the future vs. how it was initially treated. It is now a virus that most of the population as some degree of immunity against (due to both infections and vaccines). If you doubt that that's the case, just look at the reproduction numbers for Covid-19 outbreaks, which are still ongoing. In the initial waves, just a handfull of infections were capable of spreading to entire countries, killing thousands, within just weeks. If a handfull of people get Covid-19 now, that is no longer the case, even though we aren't quarantining people. This is a direct result of herd immunity. Just like we have flu season, where different flu viruses spread in local epidemics, Covid-19 will continue to spread in local, seasonal epidemics in the foreseeable future (likely "forever"), but it is no longer the same threat as it was when nobody had any immunity to it.
That is not how the immune system works. There is lots of info about it and it is very complicated, but stuff that has been around for literally ages, that coincided with humans evolutionary path, have been basically added to a permanent watch list and so our immune system goes haywire at the slightest hint of one of those invaders presence. Covid is still considered a novel virus, regardless of it being a few years since it's existence, and our immune systems haven't had time to find a good defense against it. This is a simplification, but think of covid or other viruses like a key, but a rapidly changing (mutating) key and the immune system as a really elaborate lock, that also changes (but incredibly slowly, comparatively) and yeah that's all I've got. Source: I'm in undergrad studying to be a microbiologist.
Yes, Covid-19 is still considered novel, but saying that we are dependent on evolutionary-scale changes to develop immunity is just wrong. The immune system learns to recognise infections relatively quickly, which is literally why vaccines work. It's also why people typically only get infected by seasonal epidemics once in a season, because we quickly build a short-lasting "immunity" to the virus that is in season. Source: Masters degree in chemistry/biotechnology.
because wearing masks did shit. that's why.
vaccines did.
Citation needed.
it's not about science. it's about public perception. masks didn't stop covid. vaccines did.
people will not wear masks again. they would probably get another vaccine though.
ending covid = getting rid of mask mandates, in the publics viewpoint.
Ok, in this context you are right in spiritt. Masks are stoping tje spread, but in the grand scheme of things it is mostly about slowing it down.
However I don't think saying the masks do nothing is right at all. Masks are still useful.
Except he's not right in any sense with that logic. "masks didn't work because people feel like they didn't work" is not a valid argument.
He is right in sense that vaccines "stopped" covid, while masks were mostly just slowing it down but not enough to "stop" it. That's what I meant by being right in spirit. Otherwise I agree he is wrong.
No, vaccines slowed covid even more than masks, but covid is still around. "Stop the spread" is a more catchy slogan than "Slow the spread" would have been.
Yeah, it "stopped" covid only by slowing it down significantly. Also, more people have better immunity so many who wouuld have strong symptoms won't have them and hospitals would not be overflowing.
Covid is not really stopped, that's why I used the quotation marks. But the worst things about it pretty much stopped thanks to it.
It's funny, I didn't get COVID while I was wearing a mask, but caught it after we were vaccinated and I stopped wearing them.
I'm not just going to downvote you here, because I think this is an information problem.
Here's a cool video about mask efficacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GndKYJ4uBI
And a study on the topic: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm
The tl:dr is that masks are ac5ually extremely effective at reducing infection by respiratory diseases if both the infected and uninfected parties wear them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=3GndKYJ4uBI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.