That's fine. The vaccines protect you from symptomatic disease, which he reportedly does not have. If they tested all 160K people on the phase III trial weekly, the case count would have been much higher and the studies would have been much harder to interpret but also much more expensive. Symptomatic cases, hospitalizations and deaths were the object of study and that's all that matters on a large scale.
BTW, he really does a good job alienating the medical community. I've not seen him having a reputable guest from the health sciences field for a reason. Like he had two PhDs talking about how people should not take the mRNA vaccines and that COVID is made in a lab. I look them up and let's just say there's a reason they didn't survive in academia...
BTW, he really does a good job alienating the medical community. I've not seen him having a reputable guest from the health sciences field for a reason. Like he had two PhDs talking about how people should not take the mRNA vaccines and that COVID is made in a lab. I look them up and let's just say there's a reason they didn't survive in academia...
Yup. Them. All you do is look them up in Google Scholar, and their scientific output has been underwhelming. Let's just say I am a few times more qualified to make statements on my field than the two combined, and I would not make such bold statements without very strong corroboration. (Scientific output isn't the best measure, like there was that psychologist with the power pose TED talk, who got >10K citations and her study could not have been reproduced..., but it's still a good measure to spot noobs).
He's very often super wrong in his medicine-related statements. Like cannabis advocacy is great, someone who conveniently forgets that smoking joints on the regular doubles lung cancer risk is not a person to take medical advice from
Sharon Osborne's discussion (the last of these shows that I watched) backfired as fuck. She said something along the lines of "nobody's perfect, there is good and bad in all races". That was like the most racist shit I've heard in a while... Becoming a martyr for defending Pierce Morgan?! That guy sounds like a heap of horse manure with a monocle.
Somebody should show that to Hurt. He’d probably begrudgingly put his mask back on. As much as he hates masks, he hates the idea of being seen as a liberal more, I bet.
It's a personal thing for us (and many I suspect) actually going into a restaurant to dine. We've finally made plans with some friends to do it next week, although they do have outdoor seating as well but we're not sure how it will go.
There's no guarantee that everyone will be vaccinated but in California the positivity rate just fell below 1% for the first time since the pandemic started, more than 2/3 are now vaccinated and we still have a mask mandate (which is probably why it's so low here) so we're feeling pretty good about it.
I kinda gave up on being totally up to date on COVID stuff but here my assessment on masks and mask mandates:
1. The use of masks correlates with better pandemic control. At this point it's both supported by:
- physics experiments (barrier testing showing reduced droplet travel and count),
- biochemical studies showing reduced viral particles below in vitro infectability,
- biological studies (in lab animals mask-like barriers reduced transmissions),
- retrospective medical studies (from the SARS-1 pandemic),
- prospective data from hospital workers and self-reported adherence data from large (>100K) surveys.
That's almost all the levels of evidence you need. A study like DANMASK-19 could have completed the picture, but (besides the noob errors) such study is very hard to ethically execute (meaning, on a larger scale you can't use a control group where you tell people not to wear masks, when the above evidence is already piling and suggesting that you'd hurt the people in the control arm).
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2. The pandemic and policy interventions should be evaluated in waves, so it's generally not black and white.
- There is a consensus that the global pandemic response was abysmal even before the 1st wave hit and I think it was mainly luck for some countries like Czechia to avoid it.
- The second wave was avoidable as seen per the EU data vs. the USA. This is where policy did make a difference. Mask mandates (could have) played a crucial role here:
(Note that the counties with the mask mandates were the highest populated, so if we compared matching groups with matched population density, the differences would have been even more striking.)
- The third wave was again somewhat inevitable (it's a seasonal virus after all), but again could have been mitigated.
- For the 4th wave it again became a policy/implementation game. Countries on top of vaccinations averted it. You can look at the EU vs. the USA here. This is also the first time in the pandemic where we did quite well!
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3. Now if you look at the policies on masking, you can also see that in the newest studies mask mandates lost their impact, but adherence to masking DID NOT. By now, a 10% increase in self-reported mask adherence was associated with a 3.5x higher (!!!) likelihood of pandemic control, yet mask mandates did not reach a statistical significance in increasing self-reported mask adherence.
To translate this, Rand Paul and ilk would try to spin this as "mask mandates don't work". In reality, it's more like "mask mandates don't motivate people to wear masks [good leadership does]". Part of it is being influencers (I count politicians here) telling people that masks don't work do significant damage.
Face masks have become commonplace across the USA because of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic. Although evide…
I was rather impressed over the last week down in Florida, how the majority are still wearing masks and the number of places requiring masks on entry. In Florida!
I was rather impressed over the last week down in Florida, how the majority are still wearing masks and the number of places requiring masks on entry. In Florida!
Regardless of crazy right wing Governors, the people still have fears of going into public places unmasked and it's up to business owners to make their patrons feel safe.
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, but it's still a good measure to spot noobs). 
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