I think some don’t wear masks because they don’t feel it will benefit themselves and they are not that moved by arguments that it benefits others (which in a round about way will benefit them as well since they are less likely to get sick if there are fewer other people who are sick).
Regarding the contact tracing video-it would work in the USA or anyplace if they controlled the virus. If a place doesn’t control the virus and then has to shut down and then opens when the RO is above 1 (as much of the country is doing), then of course contact tracing is going to be pretty hard, but it is the ONLY thing other than increase mask usage that we have. I am disturbed by those who want to open up quickly, not use masks, not contact trace. What is the plan? Let tons of preventable deaths happen? Have the economy die completely as people aren’t safe enough to really go out and revive the economy?
Contact tracing certainly can work. It works elsewhere. You need wide spread rapid testing to do with it, something we also don’t have in place yet (but are opening anyway, in spite of the promised tons of tests and contact tracing being in place before we do).
I add to that, better than very poor decisions by leadership and a good % of the population taking away our freedoms by really having a horrible response to a pandemic that could have had a much better response.
There are other countries where stay home meant stay home. There are countries that didn’t let people go out almost at all. There are countries like ours that meant you could go out quite a bit without restriction to how much or how long. The comparisons of what happened is pretty clear. Staying home more = less spread. yes, some places are safer to go than others. It is probably impossible to make decisions that are going to make everyone happy.
That video bothers me. The people who focus on ‘their rights’ are so very different in their thinking than me. I don’t believe they are going to do forced vaccination on people. I don’t believe that part of the video. I think the person making the video, the people concerned with this issue should be instead very concerned about the pandemic and the spread.
The idea that everyone in North Korea has a cell phone is laughable. The rural parts of N Korea people live in incredible poverty.
Once all is said and done and all the deaths happen, the virus that could have been controlled if we all worked together lingers and continues impacting life, restricting lives and causing earlier deaths for generations to come, people probably forever having a very different life than before, those people might still be clinging to ‘their rights’. I will be thinking how had they been as interested in helping stop the virus we could have a fairly normal situation rather than the ‘new normal’ which is what we will be left with.
Kid Rock lives in Nashville part time. He has a bar here. Not surprisingly, it refused to close when the initial close orders were issued. He’s quite controversial. There was an incident where he was removed as Grand Marshall of the wonderful downtown Christmas parade a few days before the parade. It wasn’t pretty. There’s a history… I don’t think he’s going to be a mask spokesperson.
I actually don’t know much about him but he must live there now as they were both introduced as Brooklynites. I know that Rosie is definitely a native.
It wasn’t a video. They were on the dais with the Governor and both spoke.
I don’t think anyone cares about his politics, and obviously Andrew Cuomo doesn’t or he wouldn’t have been asked to help. A virus isn’t political. A virus doesn’t care what party you are in or who you vote for, and neither should what needs to be done to keep people safe be political.
Both KR and RP will be doing PSAs for NYS. Also, the winning PSA done by just a “regular” NYers will be airing. The videos were fantastic. So well done. I saw the 6 finalists and the 6 honorable mentions. It’s amazing how creative some people are. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.
The most recent serology tests from Florida are just in, and they paint a picture consistent with the CDC central estimate of 0.26% IFR in the US generally.
Let’s take Miami Dade, a county of 2.7 million people. Approximately 633 people have died of COVID. 7.5% tested positive for antibodies, implying virus penetration of ~7.5%.
I outlined the rough methodology employed to extract an estimate for population wide IFR in my post 4944 above (cite below), so I will only go through the numbers here for clarity, for Miami-Dade, as well as Broward and Palm Beach:
Palm Beach is the outlier, which is not surprising given the age skew there (skews older than Broward or Miami-Dade). Obviously, given the age skew in Florida generally (it is not called “God’s waiting Room” for nothing), these calculated IFRs are not inconsistent with the CDC estimate for the United States as a whole at 0.26%. This is just not that deadly of a disease, despite the media hype and the curious reluctance of people to apply elementary mathematics to the data we have.
How are you calculating? Deaths divided by total population? That’s not an accurate fatality rate for those who get the virus. If you do deaths divided by total cases, that looks a lot different than your numbers. Your numbers look like they are based on the idea that every single person in those counties in Florida have already caught the virus, but that is not what virus prevalence studies looking at antibodies show us. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you??
Florida is averaging about 32 deaths a day. Maine is at 1 death a day. Florida’s population is 16 times that of Maine. Maine has the oldest population in the country. So Maine is doing really well in comparison to Florida.
Note that it considers both ingress (protection of wearer) and egress (protection of others from wearer) separately. The reviewed evidence in favor of mask wearing appears to be stronger for egress (protection of others from the wearer).
The paper also mentions sociological considerations like risk compensation behavior (false sense of security, though they suggest that this is “unlikely to undo the positive benefits at the population level”) and stigma associated with wearing a mask (including giving the appearance that the wearer is sick, or racism against the wearer). It also has a figure graphing the estimated effect on R0 based how well masks work and the percentage of people wearing masks.
This review references 104 other papers that you can look up if you want.
