Stupid

[liv]

I keep seeing comments from people who, like me, believe that we should be doing more to avoid catching Covid repeatedly, complaining that others, the pro-Covid or the vaxxed-and-relaxed or the post-pandemic factions, are stupid. To which my response is: stop being on my side!

Particularly irritating when it's people who are able to support their households with a fully remote job, or live on pensions or investments, complaining that anyone who spends time indoors with strangers must be stupid. It's not stupid to do what you need to do to earn a living or otherwise meet your responsibilities! The supposedly smart people with these views usually don't have young children or other dependents, and don't have medical or care needs requiring regular interaction with other people.

It's not stupid to decide your children need an education and it's not stupid to send your children to school when they or their classmates might be infectious, when the alternative is criminal penalties and losing access to public education altogether. For people who are in a position to withdraw their children from school, it's not stupid to consider that homeschooled children also need opportunities to join with group activities, both educational and social. On a related note, I am definitely of the opinion that Covid and the actual pandemic did far more harm to children than pandemic mitigation measures including school closures, but claiming that lockdown was somehow just like the summer holidays is complete bullshit.

Also, nurses and bus drivers and food service workers are not more stupid than people with office jobs. It's easy to assume they are because there's a climate of (intellectual) snobbery where it's just taken as read that white collar knowledge workers are somehow naturally superior people to those with practical or service jobs or who are unable to find suitable paid work at all. This snobbery is a self-reinforcing cycle: professional jobs are better paid, and we have a bias towards assuming the richer people are more deserving and more intelligent.

Sometimes you get a superficially liberal cast on this calling people stupid for not having full control of their circumstances. Oh no, "we" must do something about scientific literacy / critical thinking skills! Oh no, these poor unfortunates are deliberately exposing themselves to Covid because they don't know how to read scientific papers or debunk conspiracy theories! Or, they don't understand viral transmission or epidemiological statistics, if only we could educate them! That sort of thing is superficially more polite than stuff like one of the most prominent pro-mitigation voices on Twitter simply ranting about how we have to deal with stupidity to deal with the pandemic. But it's the same attitude: people catch Covid because they make stupid (or uninformed or uneducated) decisions.

It's not just people whose lives give them more opportunity than most to limit their Covid exposure feeling intellectually superior. It's also this really irritating false hindsight, claiming that the scientific consensus now, after three years, was always obvious and anyone who believed the previous best advice must have been stupid. Sure, you always knew that vaccine protection against infection would wane within months. You always knew that Covid was airborne and that handwashing and surface cleaning were pointless. You always knew that only respirator masks are effective. Suuuuure. There's a bunch of information that still isn't completely established, and people who have come to a particular conclusion from their own analysis of all the contradictory evidence have entrenched themselves in the position that their view is completely obvious and anyone who thinks otherwise must be stupid. How common and how serious is Long Covid? We don't know; I personally am inclined to consider it a significant risk and arrange my life accordingly, but I don't think it's stupid to look at the evidence out there and conclude that it's a rare outcome and no worse than post-viral syndromes caused by other diseases.

So people have different health behaviours (with respect to Covid, but also other health things) not because some are intelligent and thus protect themselves from disease, while others are stupid and take a load of risks that harm them. But because some people have more ability to protect themselves than others, and because people are making different trade-offs, and because intelligent people can come to different conclusions about a complex body of evidence. It's similar to healthy eating; people don't eat food that is bad for them because they are stupid, but because that's the food that is available and affordable and enjoyable for them. And also because there isn't a single consensus on how to eat "healthily", and because just as there is marketing pressure and propaganda to sell unhealthy food and cover up its bad effects, there is also marketing pressure and propaganda to sell expensive healthy food and diets which in fact aren't beneficial.

A much more useful take on how we can use our minds for Survival in the Great Age of Plagues is siderea's recent multipart Covid post. siderea starts from the assumption that simply being smart, passively existing as a person with high intelligence, doesn't magically protect you from disasters. You have to actively use your mind to seek out and evaluate information and act on what you learn. And she is also very aware that Those who have more money and power will be better able to protect themselves.".

I don't agree with everything in siderea's post, and anyway it's only an introduction to a hopeful future series. I do think it is a useful collection of issues to consider regarding what an intelligent person can do in the circumstances we find ourselves in. Curating information as well as evaluating it. Reasoning from (sometimes imperfect) knowledge, not just abstract thinking. Procedural as well as semantic knowledge. Acting on your conclusions even if that goes against authority or social consensus.

One thing I am sure of is that letting yourself believe that your good health is a reward for your superior intelligence is a dangerous mistake. It's not only that it's mean, it's morally bad to call other people in less fortunate circumstances stupid (which it is). It's that investing in such a belief is likely to lead to bad decisions, in the same way that imagining yourself too smart to be scammed directly puts you at risk of certain kinds of deceit.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for this. I am so very grateful that I have not run into this attitude yet myself.

[seekingferret]

I've been really struck by a post I made in May 2020 about an outdoor minyan held in my town, in direct contravention of local Vaad instructions. I walked past it, immediately turned around and walked home and was really angry at them, and I still think they were wrong because the Vaad's order explicitly concerned mar'is ayin as well as sakanah, but... setting that aside, in retrospect they were right and I was wrong! There's a very strong body of evidence that says that their outdoor, distanced prayer service was reasonably safe and certainly it served an important emotional and spiritual need.

I try to have a lot of humility about my COVID related choices and whether I am right about my approach.

[liv]

Yeah, it's tricky. I was all about outdoor events in 2020 even when it was banned by (poorly drafted and enforced) laws. But I was also completely committed to cloth masks for a long time and I was very wrong about that.

And your example is a really salient one for lots of reasons. Marit ayin and sakanah both matter – for example I don't reckon there's much marginal benefit in wearing a mask outdoors, but I sometimes do so, because I want people around me to observe that I am taking the pandemic seriously. And following community norms matters even if I happen to think I know better how to interpret the scientific evidence than the authorities. The same goes for national laws; there was some benefit, not unlimited and not at all costs, but some, in keeping laws even when I considered they were incorrect, eg limiting time people could spend out of their homes when really it would have been better for everybody to be outdoors as much as possible.

[switterbeet]

I like the healthy eating analogy. I think there are even more similarities to it that are psychosocial and that are strongly influencing people regardless of their intelligence.

You're more likely to eat similarly to people around you, you're more likely to eat the food you grew up eating, if someone you know suffers negative health consequences due to their diet, you might re-evaluate your own, you might also HAVE negative health consequences because of your diet, but be unwilling/unable to change because the discomfort of changing is higher than the discomfort of the consequences. You might eat differently in different social contexts.

Like, there is so much MENTAL, SOCIAL, and EMOTIONAL game in people's pandemic-related behaviours (including the info they have access to and their ability/willingness to modify their behaviours with that information) that really need to be considered if we're going to assess anyone's individual approaches. (My 2 cents is that we shouldn't putter about with individual approaches, and should instead focus on higher-level policies which might actually help.)

Another thing is that acting morally/intellectually superior to a group really just alienates that group so like, it's not actually helping if some covid-cautious people are acting better than.

[genarti]

Yes, agreed!

One of the other things that's struck me is that there are real emotional needs that are important to balance with the infection risks in an individual approach, and they'll be different for everyone.

Like, I am relatively privileged, and relatively cautious. My job was fully remote before the pandemic started; my household is all adults who agree with me about our general approach to precautions; I have no children or frequent medical appointments to deal with. I was fully on board with self-isolating to protect others (including those who for various reasons couldn't self-isolate as fully or much at all), and I still wear an N-95 mask almost all the time when I'm indoors at a space more public than a friend's home.

And yet, those months of self-isolation did a real number on me, emotionally and psychologically, in a way I'm still wading out of. There are risks I take now that are worth it to me because the social and emotional benefit of it is significant enough. I'll mask up, I'll be cautious in other spheres to try to minimize any infection spreading consequences, etc, but in that calculation, the pain of not doing the thing is greater than the benefit of not, to me personally.

Everyone's calculus is different. And sure, some people are (for a variety of reasons) flinging their hands in the air and assuming they're fine. But a lot of other people are looking at their own mental and social and emotional and financial situations, and making different individual choices, for various internally valid reasons. And coming along to nitpick their risk calculations based on my own will only annoy and alienate them, because it's almost never starting from a place of assuming that their own calculations are as valid and reasonable as the nitpicking person's.

(Also, I agree with your 2 cents.)

[lnr]

Can I just say I agree with all three of you here!

[liv]

Thank you, this is a really important point. Even for broadly privileged / advantaged people, even the supposedly easy, low-cost mitigations are not without consequences. Personally, I think isolation was way over-used; it should have been an absolute last resort after all other mitigations had been breached, which in fact might never have happened if we had put proper mitigations in place. Towards the start of 2020, in early hit countries like Italy and the UK, it might have been necessary, but to keep letting infections spiral out of control and then pulling the only stop lever left of making everybody stay home for months at a time was terrible policy.

You are quite right that there are a lot of factors that go into risk calculations and mental and emotional ones are really important. Also, for some people the big barrier is the calculations themselves, I know quite a lot of people who can't cope with constantly assessing, is this activity I want to do bringing me enough benefit to be worth the risk? Particularly because the risk itself shifts over time, and the cost of avoiding an activity for a few months is very different from the cost of never ever doing the thing. So they default to just living their lives as normal, or they take one narrowly defined set of precautions (mask everywhere is common, no international / long-distance travel is another), but don't try to weigh up all these complex things all the time, because that's just draining.

[liv]

Yeah, I kind of had the healthy eating analogy right there in reach because I have a lot of opinions about judgemental and unscientific approaches to diet and nutrition. But yes, people don't just mechanically weight up the evidence (nor should they), they are influenced by social and emotional factors and by all the parts of their lives which aren't in the control of individuals.

Part of why I'm against calling people stupid is that it alienates them and makes it harder to persuade them to change their minds and behaviours. But the main reason that as you say, individual approaches aren't going to get us anywhere, we need public and environmental strategies. So even if some people do take risks out of stupidity, there's no point putting lots of effort into convincing them otherwise.

[switterbeet]

I agree with ewt that the smoking analogy is probably more accurate, due to the potential effects on others sharing air, but diet definitely has parallels as well.

I think individual precautions are incredibly valuable at an individual level (i.e. protecting one's own health and that of one's family/close contacts) and actually the only protections we can really have any degree of control over, especially as many people "resume smoking in public". But they're not going to get us, as a world, out of the pandemic, because it's clear this is a population/ global challenge. And as you say, calling people stupid for making different individual risk assessments isn't gonna help at an individual OR population level and even encouraging more precautions at an individual level, maybe except for direct contacts whose choices may impact your own health isn't a great use of time. (For example, if my partner decided to not bother masking indoors, I sure as hell would invest time and effort in changing his mind. Folks at work who I don't live with? Meh, why make my life any harder? They've already made their assessments and choices. But if our work/province had a masking/vax/air filtration policy, that's much more likely to have an impact.)

[ewt]

I'm not smarter than most people, I'm just extremely privileged:

- I read siderea's 'flu pandemic posts and was, I think, a bit more mentally prepared for covid than I might otherwise have been; not hugely, but enough to be slightly ahead of the curve at a few points that this mattered
- I quite like being outdoors
- all the people in my household can work either from home or while wearing a respirator mask
- we are all on roughly the same page re: risk tolerance and have been willing and able to give up or seriously circumscribe social activities and hobbies that involve indoor gathering (this hasn't been without cost or consequence; but I think that none of us are subjecting others within the household to substantial risks that they wouldn't otherwise be taking, and I think that does make it much easier for all of us)
- we don't have children
- we can afford to throw some money at certain practical problems

I am still intensely frustrated when I see people who took many precautions in 2020 and 2021 and don't appear to be taking any precautions now. I know that those decisions are not made in a vacuum, and I know that I don't always see either all that someone might be doing or all reasoning that they are taking into account in their decision-making. Nevertheless, it also seems to me that there is a non-trivial number of people who really do think that the pandemic is over, and I do believe they really are putting themselves and the rest of us at significant risk. Calling them stupid won't get us anywhere, but neither will pretending that everyone is making good, well-informed decisions. Some people are making the best of a bad situation. Some people are making bad decisions. I don't know how to change either of these.

I am also intensely frustrated at the lack of support for mitigations like ventilation and air filtration in workplaces and public spaces, preferably starting with schools and hospitals; and for better worker protections around working from home where it's feasible to do so, and paid sick leave. I would certainly like to see more from unions about workplace air quality and safety. The political decisions not to have those things are also not made in a vacuum, and while I understand that these interventions are expensive, to me they seem considerably less expensive than the path we have collectively chosen. I don't know how to change this.

In the face of such intense frustration, I can understand how some people resort to calling others stupid. I... don't think it's a great move, personally, not least because it doesn't give people who aren't currently taking precautions much room to change their minds later. But I can understand roughly how people get there.

[ewt]

Reflecting on it further: I think it's a lot more like smoking than "healthy" eating, in terms of the effects on other people when some people are unable or unwilling to take certain precautions. Is it entirely understandable that some people smoke? Yes, of course; and my own status as a non-smoker is not because of my intelligence as much as it's due to having been lucky enough to never have started.

But people who smoke in public spaces do impact the health of people around them, whether they are thinking about it or not, and this is largely why we have laws around smoke in workplaces.

I didn't go to pubs much when there was smoking in them (with the exception of the Pembury, specifically because it was non-smoking), and then I did more often when they became non-smoking, and now I don't again, because it's hard to drink in a mask and there usually isn't any information available about whether there's any ventilation, never mind enough information for me as a non-specialist to be able to tell whether it's adequate. (And when there is outdoor space, which would be safer in terms of COVID risk, it is often full of smokers. Sigh.) That's entirely my choice, but it's a choice I'm making partly because of the behaviour of other people, even if it's from a position of relative privilege.

[switterbeet]

^^^Good point

[liv]

I mean, completely, I don't disagree that some people are making bad decisions and those bad decisions increase the risk to others. But the whole point is that focusing on those individual decisions is a distraction. In order to actually deal with highly transmissible disease, we need a coordinated public health response, not just a bunch of people individually trying to balance the things they need with minimizing risk.

For example, the main reason I'm taking fewer precautions now than in 2021 is that my employer decided we had to go back to in person work from September 2021. While initially they put a lot of effort into keeping campus safe, including paying for regular PCR surveillance, so were able to actually demonstrate that there was no transmission within campus for 6 months, when the government declared the pandemic over in spring 2022 they removed most of the mitigations. None of that is really in my control short of actually quitting my job.

That's the biggest difference but there's a bunch of smaller stuff too. In 2021 most venues were set up for at least communicating about how much it was possible to be outdoors and quite often offered actual outdoor space and remote options. Since 2022 not so much, and there's just fewer options for Covid-cautious people to participate. And in general I'm working with less information, about case rates aside from anything else.

I completely agree with you about all the political decisions, yes, I very much think it would be a worthwhile investment to improve ventilation at least in schools, and to have better employment protections. Those things would make a bigger difference than a particular individual choosing to wear a mask or not, to eat indoors or not, and also would empower more people to make the right decisions.

[nameandnature]

I am still intensely frustrated when I see people who took many precautions in 2020 and 2021 and don't appear to be taking any precautions now

I guess it kind of depends on what your moral foundations are, right?

I'm someone who did follow the rules in 2020 and 2021. I switched to FFP2 masks when it seemed that was a better thing to do, although the recent Cochrane meta-analysis has made me doubt that, I guess I can do better than the population at wearing one "properly".

I now wear an FFP2 mask if I have to go to the pharmacy with a cough, but otherwise don't, and I attend large-ish social dancing events unmasked. That's because the situation has changed from 2020 and 2021. In England, COVID is less deadly than flu because of vaccination/previous infection and the reduced virulence of omicron. In the UK, everyone now had the chance to be vaccinated, for free. Most people have had COVID one or more times, which is probably why all cause mortality for the vaxed and unvaxed is converging.

There are still people who are especially vulnerable (perhaps they couldn't be vaccinated), but pre-COVID the less vulnerable didn't restrict their lives because of the chance of giving flu to someone more vulnerable (with the exception of not seeing your frail grandma if you were ill, say). If you accept that there is some large number people whose happiness at seeing loved ones, going out dancing etc. is worth the risk of a contagious disease harming a small number of people, then the point is made, and we're just arguing about the price. I think we rightly accept such tradeoffs all the time.

Relatedly, the marginal gain of me deciding to mask up and avoid large indoor gatherings is tiny, because the number of people doing that here is negligible and my doing it wouldn't influence more people to do it, even if I wanted to.

The previous paragraphs are kind of a utilitarian view, though, so perhaps you're a virtue ethicist or follow some sort of rule based system. I do worry that there's a subset of people who had the fear of God (or rather, COVID) put into them during the pre-vax period and are naturally more scrupulous than others, who're now missing out on life for very little gain, though.

[ewt]

If I were only worried about mortality I might be roughly where you are -- though with higher COVID deaths in 2022 than in 2021 I'm not certain yet, to be honest.

But disease caused, well, disease, not just mortality, and three years in we don't really know much about Long Covid other than that it exists and some people don't appear to get better. Several people I know have it; they have a range of symptoms, none of which I wish to add to my existing chronic health problems. Some of them are, predictably, being horribly gaslit by medical professionals, and having great difficulty accessing appropriate care.

I also think that pre-Covid, we weren't taking influenza seriously enough; but the rates of long-term illness from influenza are, to my knowledge, lower than Long Covid rates. It's hard to say for certain, though, because we weren't really taking 'flu (and the possibility of longer-term illness caused by it) seriously enough...

Further, I live in a situation where I can't easily isolate myself from other household members if I do get sick. That means it's highly likely that if I get covid, all three of us will. That means triple the chance of me or someone I love getting Long Covid. No thanks. And between us we do have several risk factors for mortality, too, though that is less immediately concerning now that we have all had several vaccinations.

I am currently missing out on:

• indoor social dining and drinking
• choral singing, though honestly that's mostly because I'm still annoyed at the attitudes of people in the choirs I would otherwise be singing in. I do have an elastomeric FFP3 that I'm pretty happy to sing in (and the sound quality is perfectly adequate for amateur and semi-amateur choral contexts; and I am a professional musician and yes, I can tell).
• travel, largely because of indoor dining difficulties

So -- don't feel too sorry for me.

Meanwhile I also haven't had a cold since February 2020 and I'm a lot less worried than I otherwise would be about catching and passing on influenza and other airborne illness (I've had chicken pox already and I've had my measles jabs; those are just two diseases that are airborne and which can cause difficulty in under-vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. We don't routinely vaccinate for chicken pox in the UK, and there are more and more people refusing MMR vaccination.)

But it would be nice if I were less worried about those because of measures like improved ventilation/filtration of air in workplaces and public spaces, and a cultural shift to wearing masks in crowded areas such as public transport, rather than because I personally happen to have access to well-fitting masks that work for me. I would like people who don't have my privilege to be safer, too.

[nameandnature]

though with higher COVID deaths in 2022 than in 2021 I'm not certain yet, to be honest.

As far as I can see the registered deaths in England and Wales due to COVID (meaning COVID was the underlying cause on the death certificate) sum to 66073 in 2021 and 21808 in 2022 (I'm summing the weekly figures on both the downloaded sheets), so about 1/3 as many in 2022 compared to 2021. Apparently there was bad information circulating on Twitter saying 2022's deaths were higher, though.

You've implied that you now treat flu as more serious than you did before the pandemic, is that true?

I'm on the fence about Long COVID because there were certainly people with post-viral problems prior to the pandemic and I'm not aware of good evidence that COVID causes those more often or more severely than existing viruses. On the basis of that, I don't think there's justification for being annoyed with people who used to take precautions who now don't. How you deal with that uncertainty is going to depend on how risk averse you are, people who are less risk averse are going to place less weight on the worst cases.

[ewt]

Apologies -- I got my cases and deaths confused at some point, deaths were indeed higher in 2021 than 2022, while confirmed cases were the other way around. Given the lack of testing I suspect actual cases are quite a bit higher.

Yes, I do now take influenza more seriously than I did -- perhaps more importantly, I take airborne spread of influenza more seriously, rather than defaulting to the "oh it's probably fomites not aerosols, so wash your hands a lot but there's not much else you can do" view that was previously pretty mainstream.

I certainly personally know more people with persistent post-covid symptoms than I know with suspected post-influenza symptoms (other than long convalescence, which I think is probably a separate thing), but then nearly everyone I know has had covid, and some quite severely... quantity has a quality all its own, and a 5% or 2% risk of long-term illness from something less infectious than covid is a very different thing.

I am annoyed with people who used to take precautions and now take none (other than having been vaccinated) because they are imposing their risk calculations -- made on the basis of what they think their own risk is -- on me and on people who are as risk-averse as I am but with fewer resources available to them to avoid infection. I think it is reasonable to be annoyed at people who endanger me because they estimate that they will be safe.

[shreena]

Fwiw, I agree with that.

But also I followed all the rules because they were the law and as well as being a utilitarian, I am also a law abiding person

[liv]

Hmm, I think this moral reasoning is somewhat flawed. It doesn't entirely make sense to balance large numbers of people's happiness at doing fun social things in groups, with small numbers of people being harmed, if the harm comes from infectious disease specifically. (I've altered your wording because Covid is infectious, not contagious – it's airborne, it's not significantly spread by touch.)

For example, I might look at the question of recycling from a utilitarian point of view: is it worth the hassle of sorting my rubbish and the societal cost of setting up recycling facilities, in order to preserve oil stocks and avoid pollution? Or I might take a virtue ethics view: it would be better for the world if everybody recycled, so I personally will recycle even if my individual methods of disposing of rubbish don't make much difference. But essentially me recycling or not recycling have negligible effects on whether anyone else recycles.

Infectious disease is different, though. Because me going about mixing with others when I might have Covid much more directly impacts the people who might be infected by me, for one thing. And also because the proportion of people who have Covid matters a whole lot more. If 10% of people recycle, we can probably estimate that avoidable production of new single-use items goes down by about 10%. But if 10% of people have Covid, that is much more than 10X worse than if 1% of people have Covid. People who do want to take precautions are less able to do so when case rates are really high, because most things including vaccination, masks and so on will be less effective. There is a much higher chance that one of those immune compromised people will be infected and consequently breed a new, more harmful variant which will then have knock-on effects on everybody, in the worst case nullifying vaccination.

It is much less possible to run an effective health service when big proportions of patients and medical professionals have Covid, so this leads to lots of people suffering and dying not of Covid directly, but as a result of not being able to access medical care. And less acutely, but it's still the case that the same goes for running other parts of society, constant very high rates of infectious disease mean things don't get done that actually do need to be done in order for people to live decent lives.

That's the big reason Covid is different from flu, too. Yes, of the two diseases, Covid is slightly less deadly to a vaccinated person. But we had more than 10X as many cases of Covid in 2022 than flu, so overall, Covid did far more harm including lethal. I wouldn't in fact be against flu surveillance and getting people to take precautions during flu season, we have the technology now, and the flu season is usually short, so having a bit less social mixing for a few weeks in winter would have quite a big impact, especially if we timed it right so it didn't disrupt Christmas.

So it feels like, balancing individual desires to do beneficial but high risk things, with individual risk of harm from Covid, and counting up the numbers, is the wrong paradigm. Within that paradigm, yes, it makes total sense to say, I'm vaccinated and so is nearly everybody else who wants to be, so utility is maximized by taking few or no precautions. But actually, infectious disease needs to be approached as a whole society, because the nature of the problem is that it affects societies and populations. This leads me to the view that we should have well ventilated spaces for dancing in, not that we should ban dancing, and honestly given that dancing is usually quite energetic anyway, I'm sure most people would find it more, not less, enjoyable if there was plenty of fresh air. The downside then would be, money spent on ventilating spaces (and heating them when they were open to the air) would be money not spent on other things that might have more benefit than being able to go dancing without catching Covid. That might be the case, but it's a very different argument from the individualistic paradigm.

I personally don't believe in wearing masks when the mask directly interferes with the activity you're trying to do. So if I were in your situation, I would wear a mask to travel to the dance venue, but take it off to be able to dance enjoyably. I would also (not hypothetically in fact, this is a thing I actually do) test regularly to lower the chances that I would accidentally attend a crowded event while infectious. So I wouldn't try to eliminate the risk of giving Covid to others, but I would try to reduce it.

Those are the trade-offs I'm making, because we are in fact in a situation where the whole of Covid prevention has been left up to individuals. But public health shouldn't be down to individuals doing the right thing, because in fact that is always going to converge on most individuals not doing the right thing, the cost to them is unacceptable, especially when few other people are doing it. That's where I'm coming from with the original post: there's no point calling someone stupid for going to crowded indoor spaces without a mask, because it's not actually stupid for that person to do that. But it's a bad way to organize society to ask people to sacrifice doing all the things they want and need to do with other people.

[davidgillon]

I'm masking much less, but it's not simply a mask/don't mask question, because I find it very difficult to wheel in my chair when masked. I don't have any medical diagnosis that would have justified not masking while restrictions were in place, but the practicality is that I get out of breath faster, and I steam up my glasses even with the mask pinched in around my nose (and my vision without my glasses is poor enough I'm not comfortable wheeling without them). I suspect my situation when wheeling is closer to using a mask while running than to the normal walking volume of breathing and it's overwhelming the mask's ability to leak gas without breaking the seal. I'll still wear a mask if I'm sitting still, but even then it's not practical to keep it on while eating and drinking.

In spite of that, so far I've avoided Covid entirely, probably helped by not actually going out that much.

[liv]

That makes perfect sense, and you're completely right it's not binary, always mask or never mask. I broadly don't wear a mask when I'm outdoors, unless I'm in a big crowd or I'm with people who prefer it, because although I physically can walk or cycle with one, I think I'm way more protected by being out in the open air than by a mask. I definitely can't run in a mask and I am not surprised that wheeling is more like running than like walking in terms of aerobic effort.

Sometimes I wear a mask to travel to a venue but take it off when I'm actually there, not because I think the event is in principle safer than the train or bus, but because the mask impairs communication particularly with deaf people. When I'm a passenger I'm not really trying to communicate anyway so I might as well have the safer option.

[silveradept]

I try to save my ire for the people who have the power and resources to make environments safer and refuse to do so or to mandate that it happens. Individuals who have to take on additional risk as a consequence of keeping their job aren't stupid, they're being exploited.

I'd much rather have everywhere doing all they can to mitigate the issues they can so that people can interact as safely as possible, and people who are compromised or unable to fully use all of the Swiss cheese methods can participate, instead of being shunned or having to have increased risks.

[liv]

Yes, I definitely agree. Employers who force people to work sick and don't provide any environmental controls to stop spread are not stupid, they're deliberately maximizing their bottom line at the expense of people's health. The employers who nevertheless turn up to unsafe work spaces are indeed being exploited. And yes, I very much agree that the Swiss cheese model is the most useful one (also quite like the hazard pyramid). There is no one intervention that protects everybody, particularly because some people can't be vaccinated, some people can't wear masks, some people can't avoid high risk crowds, etc.

[damerell]

So, IDK. I have to go into work; I was both the first of the IT staff here to return (and that was as soon as any of the normal business of the building resumed) and the first to stop WFH entirely. I don't think that's stupid, the work demanded it and I need the money, and obviously I don't think it's stupid of anyone else who was similarly compelled (and ofc many people are in much tighter circumstances and were even more compelled).

However, there's also a lot of essentially gratuitous face-licking and I'm not so sure about that. Indeed, I've had the 'rona once and it was fairly directly a consequence of doing something relatively foolish - if I can call my own decision bad, I think I can do it when someone else makes it too.

I take your point behind it, that focussing on individual behaviour isn't helpful, but I still find it pretty frustrating (and daft) that most of the country is pretending the plague is over because that would be more convenient.

[liv]

I sympathize a lot with your frustration. I'm frustrated too because other people's risk taking is impacting my life. But pretending the plague is over isn't a decision by separate individuals acting independently, is the thing. Part of it is that, well, there were phases in 2020 and 21 where the only permitted things were work and school, and I don't think we should aspire as a society to live like that forever. Yes, in some ways anything that's not necessary for earning a living, education, medical needs etc is gratuitous face-licking, but it's really miserable, and I don't think actually called for from a public health perspective, that ever doing anything fun counts as a foolish act where getting sick is the expected consequence.

The second thing is, I have a theory that some of the Covid frustration is because of clashing paradigms about risk. Some people use a risk budget approach, so if they have to be exposed to indoor breathers for work, school etc, then that uses up their risk budget so they avoid doing fun things that would add additional risk. (That tends to be my approach.) But some people are using a maximum risk approach: well, if I have to commute to a public-facing job, there's no point avoiding going to the pub to see my friends, because I'm exposed anyway. And I'm sort of sympathetic to that view, but mainly I just don't think it's tenable for the whole society-wide approach to infectious disease to be based on people voluntarily choosing to only do things that are strictly necessary.

Partly because the virus doesn't care whether your face-licking is necessary or gratuitous! The risk is still just as bad if the reason for your presence indoors with strangers is "necessary" or "compelled". So if roughly everybody has to go to work, and there are no precautions in either public spaces or places of employment, then Covid will continue to circulate at high levels, even if people do cut out all their gratuitous social mixing. And that 'even if' is a silly counterfactual, because actually people won't cut out all their gratuitous stuff. Not if it's going to be forever, not if there is no public education about risk reduction, not if there's strong social pressure to return to 2019-normal. And not if there are no sensible alternatives.

Therefore, what I want is better alternatives. Ventilated spaces, options to do as much as possible outdoors and hybrid like we started to develop in 2021 but then shut back down again. Not for people to choose between the bad option of getting Covid repeatedly, and the bad option of trying to minimize all social contact indefinitely.

[finding_helena]

I've always had to go in to work too, and the idea of going in to work but then limiting how much I see my friends... man, I did that for a long time and it just sucked. We were so careful for so long, we limited our social interactions for so long, we did over a year of school at home AKA hell on earth, but at this point I feel like Covid is going to be a part of life from now on and if I don't stop taking various precautions now, there will never be a reason to, and some of these things I don't want to spend all my life doing or not doing. So anymore I wear a mask out when I or a family member are sick or might be sick, and I mask at work because it's required, but I do not wear one constantly everywhere like I did back in early Covid. If a particular person wanted me to wear one around them, I would. We never did travel or go out much, but we're about back to our baseline level. Everyone I hang out with socially is vaccinated. If I go back to my counselor at some point, I will have us both mask, because we're spending an hour in a small space together and I'm not sure if she's vaccinated. I'm unwilling to switch counselors.

It's been three years. I'm not sure at what point the health organizations consider it to be endemic rather than pandemic, but from now on we will always have some level of this. I don't know if in another year or three or six or twelve it'll be less of an issue than now, or not.

I'm not a real fan of the dropping of funding for treatment and testing. I think that is going to cause problems because a lot of people were leaning on the free services. But I think the government should be paying for healthcare anyway (I'm American). And unfortunately, we have enough idiots here that didn't want the vaccine that getting it to go away that way is impossible.

[ewt]

We can't get it to "go away" with vaccines alone because, while the vaccines we have are very helpful, they simply aren't that good at reducing transmission, and because this is a virus that mutates fairly quickly.

People who refuse vaccination -- for whatever reason -- are not the only (or, I think, the main) cause of being stuck with this virus for the foreseeable future. Calling them idiots doesn't help anything, which was kindof liv's point.

I do think getting vaccinated is still a good decision, vaccination has absolutely reduced hospitalisation and death rates from COVID and that's super important. But far too many vaccinated people are still transmitting COVID for vaccines to be the only tool we use.

My own stance is that I will keep taking some precautions until we put into place, on a societal level, enough structural mitigations to significantly lower my risk of giving someone I love a serious long-term illness for which there exist no known cures. The other factor that might change my behaviour would be if my personal life changes such that I could greatly reduce the chances of transmission within my own household. Currently this would be very, very difficult: we have three adults and two bedrooms and one bathroom. A situation with more rooms and with at least one "spare" bathroom would be more tenable, but that is not where we are.

Ventilation in workplaces and public spaces is a huge factor, and probably easier to implement than better sick pay and free testing, though those would still help. Even if we only targeted schools and hospitals for better ventilation and had mask mandates only on public transport, that would probably make a big dent in transmission.

[finding_helena]

"Ventilation in workplaces and public spaces is a huge factor, and probably easier to implement than better sick pay and free testing, though those would still help. Even if we only targeted schools and hospitals for better ventilation and had mask mandates only on public transport, that would probably make a big dent in transmission."

Agreed completely.

"People who refuse vaccination -- for whatever reason -- are not the only (or, I think, the main) cause of being stuck with this virus for the foreseeable future. Calling them idiots doesn't help anything"

True, though it makes me feel better to call a spade a spade in many cases, as in my experience a lot of them are idiots. XD

I do take some precautions... but basically, at this point, I take precautions I would be okay with taking forever. Like, this is life now?

I was more careful back when I still had an unvaccinated family member (my youngest child was too young to get the vaccine when it was approved for kids). Then my whole family, except me, got it anyway and it was mild. Kiddo is vaccinated now. I know it could happen again and I do try to stay masked at work, and we mask at large gatherings like concerts, plays, etc. but I'm just not nuts about the idea of having the kids mask at school indefinitely.