Pandemics and Epidemiology (COVID-19, monkeypox, etc.)

Interesting, did you cover every house doing census work? Back when I did census work in the UK (2011) the census workers got sent to specific houses that hadn’t returned their census forms. Which meant I wasn’t getting a true random sample of the local population, but one curated based on factors that make a person not do their census paperwork on time. Is it different in Canada?

900 people is a good sample size for a local area, but you’re still liable to have sampling biases and any regional biases from that area, plus the geographic bias of your specific country.

It’s the only one being offered, so without an alternative it becomes the official line.

See my stance is that if you’re sick you shouldn’t be going anywhere unless absolutely necessary. If I’m sick I don’t put a mask on to go into work, I call into work sick and don’t come in.

Now I work a job where I can do that, I understand why people who can’t do that should resort to masks (as should people who have to go out for other reasons, like to get food), but the end goal shouldn’t be sick people working in masks, it should be sick people being on paid sick leave.

“74.4% of my countries population are double vaccinated (59.1% triple vaccinated) and even though we’ve lifted all restrictions cases, hospitalisations and the number of people on ventilators/in the ICU are continuing to trend down.

Masks are still required medical establishments but elsewhere they’re gone unless you personally feel like one. This system is working fine and could be mirror by others.”

I’m more than happy for you to scrutinise that argument, it it should be scrutinised, not the people making it browbeaten.

Uh, I meant more an argument against wearing masks specifically. There's a lot of garbage about how masks in general are apparently completely useless or harmful. There's a difference between "I don't think they're as necessary any more" and "I think they're bad because [shit reason here]." I don't really agree with the idea that we're past the point of needing them, but that's about the one argument I won't make a huge deal about.

And the census was kind of a mix. The messaging about it was kinda vague and I was in the first wave of enumerators, so most of the people I was talking to had gotten the notice a couple weeks earlier and had forgotten to do it or didn't realize it was mandatory. It wasn't every house, I was sent around to about 12 different neighborhoods over the course of my time there, but it was a good third at least of the houses in a given area. (There was one area where the people living there had clearly gotten sick of me because I'd been sent around like 15 times by the time the job ended) Uh, note: I'm not counting multiple visits to the same house in that 900 number, the repeat days were usually way shorter. And a big chunk of them were from a set of apartment buildings I spent a week on.

Unfortunately, I would love to not be able to go out when I'm sick, but I live on my own and affordable grocery delivery isn't really a thing here. Sometimes I don't have a choice and a lot of other people don't either. The mask has been super helpful for my pollen allergies though, so I'm gonna keep wearing it until it's not an issue even if the pandemic magically goes away.

Edited by Zendervai on May 25th 2022 at 8:27:37 AM

That’s the only argument that’s ever been made in this thread, and you’ve had very strong reactions when it’s been made, so you’ve got me rather confused here.

So the same as when I did it. That taints your sample, because your sample was actually curated to people who failed to follow government instructions when given them. That’s going to include a fair number of anti-goverment cranks alongside the people who were overworked, forgetful or simply had other major events happens (when I did it know one couple hadn’t done the census yet because they’d just had one of their children die).

So while your sample was sizeable, it wasn’t truly random.

Sure, we shouldn’t begrudge anyone who wears a mask out of choice and we should push people to wear masks if outside when sick, but that’s a far cry from full restrictions that are similar to what we’ve had earlier int he pandemic.

I’d honestly be okay with us permanently requiring masks when in public areas of medical establishments, it just kinda makes sense.

Let me clarify. I don't agree that we're ready to drop wearing masks. But if I see enough reliable evidence that the pandemic actually is going away for real, I'm okay with mask use going down. The stuff Redmess shared on the last page is enough to make me want to be more cautious.

The anti-mask arguments I was referring to were ones like "but it'll stunt the development of children!" (This isn't true on several levels) as well as the blatantly awful ones like the idea that masks cause covid. The development one has been brought up a couple times in the thread.

The idea that mask wearing in most social situations would slow the growth of neurotypical children’s ability to recognise facial expressions, looks logical on the surface. What the hidden logical failing with that argument?

The existence of television, where faces are shown all the time?

Yeah, for it to follow through, it requires the kids to never see faces at all for several years straight. There's TV, but there's also their families because basically no one supports masking at home all the time.

Kids don't actually need to be exposed to dozens of faces on a regular basis to develop expressions fine, they just need to be exposed to a wide range of expressions in general.

Edited by Zendervai on May 25th 2022 at 9:17:37 AM

I guess I'm still not sure what the ideal "end of the pandemic" situation would be here. Is the worldwide vaccination rate creeping north of 70% not a good indicator? What about fatalities and hospitalizations falling across the board, including hospitalizations for post-COVID symptoms? What evidence would be considered "enough" in this situation?

With what little I remember about statistics, I think having a 95% vaccination rate would be more or less enough. I will note though that this 95% would consider that everyone has their third vaccine shot.

But kids don't interact with faces on television, while they do interact face to face, where that especially matters. While it isn't nothing, perhaps, I feel that would be a poor substitute for actual maskless interaction.

But that’s talking about the growth being stopped, I’m talking about it being delayed. For that you just need the removed facial learning to be a contributor to learning.

Still, I get the idea that kids get all their facial expression learning at home and that other interaction is superfluous, but that seems to assume that kids are getting all the different environments and emotions at home, which doesn’t seem a given.

I believe that with original COVID we were looking at 60-70% with 2 doses being enough, I’ve not seen updated numbers since then.

If we use the UK as a model due to it seeing a continuous decline in hospitalisation numbers then that 70% number may actually hold, as while we’ve had over 85% of people over 12 vaccinated for a while we’ve only just hit 74% at double dosed.

Or we could look at the UK’s triple dosed numbers and say that 50% of the population having three doses is also a requirement.

The other possibility is that it’s not down to vaccination rate but instead down to infection rate. Vaccination being how you keep infections from being fatal/serious for most of the population, but they still get infected and you build your resistance by combining past infection and vaccinations. In that case the way out is by having a high percentage of the population have recovered from COVID, which only works if you’ve got good vaccination level to avoid a massive death toll from that infection spread.

Edited by Silasw on May 26th 2022 at 10:31:34 AM

You must know different kids than I do, because I have definitely seen kids interacting with faces on television.

I'm not sure what "interacting with faces" is supposed to mean here. If you mean that the kids are seeing emotions in response to their own actions, that's not actually that important.

Especially since the timeframe for learning how expressions work and stuff is kind of...before kindergarten. Like, it's a thing infants start to learn. If a kid somehow manages to get to school with no idea how expressions work, there's something else going on.

This idea that teachers and other students wearing masks means that a five year old will have stunted emotional expression is a really strange assertion because it assumes that a five year old is on the same development level as a toddler. At that age, the important thing is verbal interaction, to cement in the rules of language and how they work in context.

Like, whenever anything about childhood development is used as an excuse to justify something, it tends to either be wildly off or assume the kids are a lot less developed than they actually are. It also tends to involve a lot of dodging around the big hanging question of whether or not the traditional approach to schooling is actually good for development or not in young children.

And, to reiterate, do you really see that many 5 year olds with blank or really limited affects? Kids tend to tone down their affect significantly after some time in school. These fears sound like they're talking about 1 year olds or younger.

Edited by Zendervai on May 26th 2022 at 10:37:51 AM

It’s rather funny (and simultaneously not funny) that we were talking about masks recently. As of today at the store I work at, they made our employees’ wearing of them mandatory again.

Yeah, I fully expect us to continue the trend of "cases drop, lift restrictions, cases rise, reinstate restrictions, rinse and repeat" for years to come. Sure, more people are vaccinated now, but so many just don't care anymore.

I swear, my faith in humanity was low to begin with, but this clusterfuck has obliterated faith I never knew I still had.

I apologize in advance if this makes me sound like one of those "First-World Problems" types. ^_^;; -frustrated sigh- I've got to get my writing career launched. All this constant switching between masks being mandatory and optional is driving me nuts. x_x Hopefully this will be my last Memorial Day weekend of being a grocery store worker.

You and me both. I lost a friend of mine to COVID in early 2021 (he was not anti mask) before the vaccines were made available to the public. I felt such anger towards the anti mask (now anti vaxx) crowd in a way I have not felt in years. The whole experience made me bitter and I'm still bitter towards people in general.

I still play it safe and wear a mask, especially since it's not a hassle.

Heck, I'll probably still wear the mask more often after COVID-19 is not an issue anymore since it seems to help with my allergies during Spring.

I’m starting to think I should have done that when I was having that hay fever. >.< ^_^;;

Geez, I'm sorry. That's terrible.

Fortunately, my area is generally pretty, shall we say...intellectually sound, but there are plenty of exceptions of course. Hell, my own dad is a Trumper who went anti-vaxx over the past few years- and he had covid! A bad case of it that nearly put him in the hospital, in fact.

I don't get it.

Is it safe to assume that your dad is in denial of having it? I read how a lot of anti vaxxers and maskers who caught COVID denied that it was such and some literally died on that hill.

Nah, he (rather shamefully) admitted to having it, and even admitted it was pretty brutal. But, at no point did he express any regret for not getting vaccinated. After he recovered, he just declared himself "bulletproof" by immunity after having had it before. I didn't even bother answering.

Welp, someone in my immediate family caught it. Little brother. And a week before he was planning on coming back up here for an extended visit. Luckily he has mild symptoms and wasn't sure if it was just a cold or covid until a PCR test confirmed it.

Which got me thinking about colds. Other than strep way at the beginning of the pandemic, I haven't had cold-like symptoms that have lasted more than a few hours, and those are usually runny nose or congestion after waking up that I've had for ages. Sometimes I wonder if I might've caught covid and not known it, but then I have to think, "when could I have had it?"

If it's something you had before the pandemic started it probably wasn't COVID-19.

Last month I got very sick and even thought it was COVID. It turned out it was just a cold (not even a flu), which was astonishing because I've never had a cold that bad.