Pretty sure prior to omicron it did result in less spread of the virus, but you were still opposed to vaccine mandates then.
That “long existing legislation” that often cited is for actions of a temporary nature (usually 3 months). We’ve gone way beyond that time frame.
I won’t argue that.
And you know every state’s legislative history? I know that there are lots of functioning state legislatures; I just don’t live in one.
The issue being discussed isn’t “wearing a mask”. It’s the mandate and its source of authority to promulgate. Don’t conflate “I have a problem with a mask mandate” with “I won’t wear a mask unless I’m forced to”. (While those who are in the latter camp will be in the former camp; but the converse isn’t
true.) And as Marcie pointed out, if it’s a “mole hill”, why are you so adamant that everyone obeys a mask mandate? In addition, why do you assume that I don’t obey such a mandate?
And I’m well informed with my local situation; I used Southern IL as an illustration of a region far from Chicago that will have very little interaction with IL’s NE metropolis. If their area is bad, their local health department will know and should be able to enact a mask mandate for the impacted area.
- How many of Chicago’s cases influence my area? How many of them influence Southern IL?
- I’m sure that local hospitals know the region that their patients come from and they can inform local authorities about related areas to watch. Doesn’t require the guvonur to make a decision.
- And many rural areas are doing great. I know of many rural areas (most notably, Eastern KS) that have ignored statewide mandates as a community; now it becomes a matter of how enforceable is a mandate from a guvonur by law enforcement? Not enforceable at all since what law has been broken?
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I didn’t make the bold claim, I was pointing out an exception to the bold claim to disprove it.
The boldness of the claim depends on how broadly you interpret that “we” in LN’s post.
Unsure why this was a reply to me.
I don’t think the US has ever backed down from a fight. If you have to force people to go to war then the war is not worth it.
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Never been for universal vaccine mandates. I just don’t think it’s worth the fight with the people that are opposed to it. I would have mandated it for flying as soon as they were released and that would have gotten almost entirely all the people who really move around a lot and spread from location to location vaccinated. At this point though this virus is going to be spread to every single person unless they die from something else before they get it. Also there is no evidence that the currently available vaccines are all that good at containing spread so continuing down this path is even more unadvisable.
Deoends on what backing down means. In Vietnam and Afghanistan the US realized it couldn’t win the fight it had gotten into and left. After the bombing in Lebanon in 1983 Reagan vowed the US would stay and then left (not criticizing the decision but it is backing down).
The cost to you is a mole hill. But the impact to society is not. We have to do lots of things that are lower cost to us but higher benefit to society. Like go through metal detectors when we go in public buildings and get measles vaccines before starting school.
Recognizing that distinction is not the same as agreeing that every mask mandate is going to be appropriate for all time, FWIW. I remain cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to ditch mask mandates in another month or two.
what if we get better vaccines? i’m sure that better vaccines are coming soon. there is one in the works that covers all variants. are you still against it?
That was a term used by someone else. I never said that the issue was a mole hill.
My position is around how mandates are currently promulgated and how I think they should be.
It seems that many on the left see this position as a “mole hill” while many on the right see it as a “mountain”. And many on each side refusing to see the other’s point of view. (Note: I’m not saying this about posters here on GoA, that is a general comment.)
Not a RCT study, but Canadian excess death data is pretty illuminating. You can see some plots of excess death by province from Stats Canada at the bottom of this news article: https://www.ctvnews.ca/excess-mortality-rate-spikes-in-b-c-and-alberta-for-reasons-beyond-covid-19-1.5697451
I extracted the data from the figures and summarized it over the period of I think March 18, 2020 and sometime in September 2021 after which excess numbers weren’t as available by province.
region tot.excess
nu -170.
pei -65.1
nb -50.3
ns -23.6
nl 29.2
on 49.0
mb 49.9
ca 55.7
qc 66.3
ab 90.5
bc 109.
sk 113.
nt 187.
where region is the province/territory and tot.excess is the sum of the weekly excess death estimates/100k population over the entire period.
The Atlantic bubble provinces (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick) which all had strong covid lockdowns (e.g. restricted entry into the region from outside, strong masking requirements, business closures, etc.) had vastly lower excess deaths than other regions. Newfoundland was a bit of an outlier (only 1 of the 4 with positive excess deaths, but a smaller than the Canadian average increase in excess deaths), likely because our health care system is in a particularly bad place. The provinces with vastly looser rules (e.g. more open travel, less stringent use of masking, fewer closures/restrictions) all had significant jumps in excess deaths. So yeah, covid health and safety restrictions can save lives.
I should note that part of B.C.'s increase jump in excess deaths can bet attributed to an extreme heat wave which killed off several hundred to the low thousands of people and there’s been a surge in drug overdoses as people moved from consuming drugs in public/groups to consuming them alone resulting in ODs being detected too late for life saving measures to be taken.
Have you heard about this place called the Ukraine?
If we could guarantee no one would ever get Covid again with one shot I would consider a mandate. Making someone take a new shot every 6 months for the rest of their life to slow the spread of a virus that will basically be a bad cold moving forward? No shot.
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That’s not our fight.
Is it a guarantee that COVID will “basically be a bad cold moving forward”? There’s an expert established consensus on this?
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Why do you limit it to one shot? Kids have to get five shots for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, and 3-4 shots for multiple other disease before the age of 5.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html
How do we know? Because the company developing them say so? When the current vaccines were rolled out they didn’t know they would only last for a few months, did they? If they did, they withheld crucial information from the public. And we’re supposed to take their word that there will be no long-term side effects from these vaccines. How do they know? All that testing they’ve been doing…for how long? They can’t know…
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But Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, WW1, the Russian Civil War, Korea, Vietnam, Laotia, Lebanon, Cuba again, Dominican Republic again, Korea again, Cambodia, Lebanon again, Grenada, Libya, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia and Croatia, Haiti again, and Kosovo were?
Same can be said of COVID. We know some viruses cause long term issues, like chicken pox and shingles, hepatitis B and C with liver failure and cancer, HPV with cervical and other cancers (friend’s dad is dying of HPV related throat cancer), and recently connected Epstein Barr virus (mono) with multiple sclerosis. I wonder if at some point a previous COVID infection will be considered a pre-existing condition.