No reason to believe any of talking heads to see that even if they are as full of it as usual, the masks, social distancing, and travel bans are Better Than Nothing
I’ll have to respectfully disagree. I do mean respectfully because I value dialog and diversity of thought. I am sympathetic to the sentiment of “something is better than nothing”. However, I think there are hidden costs for these mandates that are verboten to discuss. I will discuss some of them at my peril.
Before I do so, I think it is important for me to say that I believe all of us assess the various risks in our lives every day and make choices based upon our acceptance of risk. The risks around covid that I have weighed go something like this:
The disease has a survivability rate similar to the flu. I am more likely to catch this disease than the flu due to it being a novel virus. Medical experts have said that most of the US population will catch it at some point. I am in moderately good health. I have chosen my actions based upon those factors and the fact that a very large number of our leaders who claim this virus is deadly are behaving like it isn’t. Now on to the forbidden discussion on the hidden costs of our Pandemic Protection Prescriptions:
I am dubious as to how effective the masks are. Non-mask wearing and low-compliant places haven’t fared worse than mask-wearing places. I can see how wearing a 50 micron cloth mask might help in some instances but I really don’t think it is very much protection and I don’t think most people are capable of using them properly (touching them, fiddling with them, mask riding below their noses, etc).
What are the hidden costs of mask wearing? I have noticed a lot less eye contact and social interaction among strangers. It was common in my area to say hello and interact with strangers before mask wearing became a thing. I miss that and I think it is very negative for our culture. I suspect that people see strangers wearing masks as something other than a fellow human when they run into one another in a store. We are also missing a lot of non-verbal cues that we use to communicate with one another when we cannot see one another’s faces. I also think that anonymity encourages bad behavior (think: how people behave in traffic and on Twitter).
I think that social distancing can be helpful to an extent. I am sure that staying 6 feet away from someone who is sick certainly decreases the likelihood of transmission of the illness. However, isolating completely from loved ones causes awful stress and poor mental wellbeing. I have multiple friends who are in poor physical health because of mental stress from loneliness. My friend’s wife is losing hair and cries daily because she hasn’t been closer than 15 feet to her 78 year old dad in 9 MONTHS. I cannot imagine how awful it would be if I hadn’t hugged my 74 year old dad since February (he has chosen not to self-isolate). People are literally killing themselves due to isolation.
Travel restrictions can be helpful for slowing the spread of a virus from hotspots. However, the biggest effect of our “lockdowns” is the destruction of our economy. I read a statistic that 82% of people don’t have the money to pay for a $500 emergency. That is up 60% from pre-Covid. There are millions of people close to losing their homes and/or jobs. The result is that those people are under a tremendous amount of psychological and emotional stress. We have had an increase in substance abuse and mental health issues as a result of the destruction of our economy.
I know people who have been homeless, who cannot afford to fix the broken transmission in their car, who pray that they can afford to pay their water bill. Most of them are “essential workers” who don’t have the luxury of not working. They count on the economy to do well so that they can earn a living. The economy isn’t doing well and it isn’t likely to recover for a decade or longer.
Thank you all for reading my perspective and rationale for my actions. I believe that rational and reasonable people can come to different conclusions on topics without one party acting in bad faith or being dumb or uneducated.