Kids today
Ron DeSantis chastised some high school students for…clowning around? Littering? Smoking? Laughing at him? Saying “like” too many times?
No.
The Florida Republican governor approached a group of students wearing masks who were standing behind a podium at the University of South Florida, where he was scheduled for a news conference Wednesday.
“You do not have to wear those masks. I mean please take them off,” DeSantis said to, at first, polite laughter. But he wasn’t kidding around.
“Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this Covid theater. So if you want to wear it, fine. But this is ridiculous,” he continued.
Why do we gotta stop?
DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw defended the governor’s statements on Twitter: “I mean, someone had to say it, after 2 years of propaganda that terrified and manipulated young people. Breathe free, feel safe and be happy.”
Or, get Covid, or pass it to someone else, or both. Whatever.
Here in Wisconsin:
As Wisconsin schools drop mask mandates, students are excited — and worried
Some of the masking stuff is dumb at this point, but the governor of the People’s Republic of Dumb Shit has no business commenting on it.
Once our mask mandate lifts later this month I’m done, but if I get a cold I’ll put one back on. Presumably the cloth masks are more effective for those. Maybe KN95s on planes, who knows?
So, our ministry of health has analysed the data. The measures New Zealand has taken to avoid/stave off Covid for nearly two years has been hugely effective against other respiratory diseases. So much so that we have negative expected mortality over the first 18 months of the pandemic – 2,750 people who would otherwise have died are still alive – out of a population of a bit over 5 million. Case numbers of flu, pneumonia, RSV, etc, etc have been way down. Turns out wearing a mask, staying home when sick, not shaking hands, keeping distance etc are all very effective at general disease control.
Rob: but New Zealand is of course the home of millions of sheep. So obviously the people are sheeple as well/ sarc
Free-Dummmmbbbbbbb.
I will admit some of the mask wearing is silly. A cyclist on a country road miles from other people? (Or my favorite, a cyclist (multiple) riding at dusk with dark clothes, no lights, no helmet, the wrong way down a major arterial at rush hour…but by gawd he was wearing a mask!)
Yeah, I wear a mask outdoors when I’m walking to my office from my car, but that’s only because with my hands full of stuff, I can’t stop to put it on before I go in, so I put it on before I pick up my stuff I have to carry in. And sometimes I forget to take it off, because my mind is on other things.
But in my part of the world, masks have not been a prominent feature. We had a mask mandate for about a month, and then the council decided we didn’t need one since the cases went down. Surprise, surprise. They went back up again. But no more mask mandates.
I might add that omicron made it through our border and broke out of a total lockdown that looked like it might contain or even eradicate delta. We’re now getting huge case numbers and look to be going through the sharp peak others have seen with omicron. What we do ave going for us is over 95% of the population over 12 are double vexed and around 60% are boosted. On top of that around half of 5-11 year olds have been vaxed. Those untaxed are 27x more likely to end up in hospital. While we’re not going to get through this Scott free, it looks like it will be better than most others have experienced. A very small slice of the population do seem to have gone down the Qanon, MAGA, anti fax, covid conspiracy rabbit hole sadly.
I’m double-vaccinated and boosted; I’m currently sick with what I presume is omicron, since it managed to get into a household of double-vaccinated and boosted adults, all but one of whom have or had symptoms to a greater (me and a grandson) or lesser (everyone else) extent, and all of those bar one (my husband) tested positive. Two of us, the two asthmatics, tested so positive that the test line went really dark before the control line appeared. We have one other adult in the house* who is still symptom-free and testing negative, and the only child has shown no symptoms and has consistently tested negative, despite only having had one vaccine dose so far.
I’m still sick (first symptoms eight days ago) but not as sick as I have been, and I am as certain as I can be that it’s not going to kill me; as certain as I am that it would have killed me before vaccines.
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*We have a three-plus-generation household. Grandparents (hubby and me), parents (our daughter and her partner of twenty years) their adult sons in their twenties plus their partners (the eldest son and his fiancée are currently abroad at university) and their youngest son, a thoroughly-outnumbered eleven-year-old. Plus two big dogs and five cats between us. Before the pandemic, we also had sheep. Our ewes were still wintering with a much larger flock owned by family friends when the first lockdown happened two years ago, and for various reasons we’ve never bothered to get them back.
I will confess that wearing masks made running difficult, and it became my excuse for cutting back to the point where now I have to start from scratch again. But the reason I wore them was that I had read a story that the exhaled droplets from a runner can trail more than 65 feet before they drop to the ground, and the canals in Phoenix could be crowded at various times when I had the opportunity to run. I’m still not sure if that’s true, but it makes sense. I wasn’t worried about myself, but about the people behind me. I was anxious in passing other runners if they were unmasked, though, and that’s another reason that I avoided running.
It’s March, and the snow and ice are melting. It’ll soon be time to start it up again.
But I’ve never understood the anger over mask wearers. No one has told me to take mine off, at least not yet. Not even the largely conservative motorcycle riders I group ride with, they’ve all been maskers themselves. I’ve only had one person, now a former friend for other reasons, tell me that masks were stupid and wanted to know why the flu has been less deadly over the last two years. Her thinking was that most of the covid-19 deaths were actually the flu and not the “china virus.” Masks and handwashing, and people slathering themselves with alcohol sanitizers everywhere and everyday certainly helped.
I’ve I was a kid forced to stand hear DeSantis, I would wear my mask with no hesitation. He’s not the boss of me.,
I live in foolish, farfetched hope that masking will become normalized in crowded and poorly ventilated indoor settings post-pandemic. . On a bus or a subway? Wear a mask. In the airport or on a place? Wear a mask. Sitting in a lecture hall or a theater? Wear a mask. To my mind, the only downside is the environmental impact, so I also hope for the development of highly effective reusable masks.
While I’m listing my desiderata, I might as well mention my wish that going around in public while sick will come to be recognized as an act of extreme rudeness. It’s not acceptable to go shopping or eat out or socialize if—pardon my earthy language—you’re puking or shitting your pants. So why is it acceptable to do these things while you’re coughing or sneezing? Nobody wants your cold or your flu anymore than they want your stomach bug. And while the symptoms of respiratory illness don’t create the same mess as those of gastrointestinal illness, they are still very unpleasant for everyone in the sufferer’s vicinity.
Building on this: we should create a world in which it is not only expected but feasible for sick people to stay home. I want paid sick leave, with no nasty strings attached, for workers receiving hourly wages. (If nothing else, speaking from a purely selfish perspective, I don’t want the person rolling my burrito or ringing up my purchase to make me sick in the process.) For people in white collar jobs, flexibility to work partially (or perhaps even mostly) from home should be a given, as should the understanding that if you head into the office sniffling and sneezing without a compelling reason, you’ll be shunned as a selfish bastard rather than hailed as a hard worker.
One last item for the wish list: better ventilation everywhere. Put in HEPA filters! Open windows whenever possible! Dedensify occupancy of indoor spaces!
It just amazes me that we’ve gone through more than two years of this pandemic and so many people still don’t grasp the concept of an airborne contagion, or realize that we can make collective choices that lead to more or less illness in our day-to-day lives. The people who insist that we need to get sick to stay healthy are the worst. Fifty thousand years ago, our ancestors weren’t sitting in a jam-packed subway car with a hundred other people every morning, then spending all day in an “open office” with a fifty coworkers and nary an openable window in sight, then sitting in a different subway car with a hundred different people, then spending the evening at a restaurant or bar with oh, let’s say, another fifty unique individuals. Living the majority of our waking existence in enclosed spaces inhaling the exhalations of hundreds (and, over the course of a year, potentially many thousands) of other people is not actually good for us.
Oops, that is longer than I realized. Sorry for the wall of text—I have capital-f Feelings about people who want us all to get back to living amid a constant smog of respiratory ailments.
Those with the deSantis attitude tend to be found clustered (huddled maybe?) on the Right to Far Right side of politics. As for covid, so for climate change and other environmentalist issues. Whether it is acceptable, true or false or believable, or damned-well not, depends on its perceived effect on business-as-usual.
The facts of Nature, as revealed by science, are all classified as accepable or otherwise depending on how they are seen as affecting said business-as-usual.
What they could all use is a common shield out of the tradition of heraldry and knights-errant. Such symbols and coats of arms commonly feature a bird, usually an eagle; the USA has one, for example.
The best bird to represent the Far Right is undoubtedly the ostrich. It could be rampant, couchant, or best of all, ‘tête dans le sable’; head-in-the-sand.
Thus we have the Ostrich School of Climatology, the Ostrich School of Epidemiology, and the Ostrich School of Everything Else We Don’t Like. These of course are all subdivisions of the Ostrich Schools of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. There was an Ostrich School of Geology, but it had to close up shop when its president, in a dispute with Newtonian gravity, got wiped out by an avalanche.