COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I don't have a problem with teacher unions opposing reopening schools, my problem is when they make absurd demands like limiting online instruction to 2 hours a day maximum, when such absurd demands are made they should not be listened to and one should go Reagan 1981. I still moderately oppose reopening schools but I just find it insane what the unions are doing.

Sounds like you know literally nothing about teaching. Keep it up.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I don't have a problem with teacher unions opposing reopening schools, my problem is when they make absurd demands like limiting online instruction to 2 hours a day maximum, when such absurd demands are made they should not be listened to and one should go Reagan 1981. I still moderately oppose reopening schools but I just find it insane what the unions are doing.

Sounds like you know literally nothing about teaching. Keep it up.

Explain why the unions should be listened to over their demands of limiting live instruction to 2 hours a day? Shouldn't the goal be to as close to as normal school as possible?

“Instruction” is not the only meaningful interaction teachers have with kids. There is on-the-spot feedback, conferences, workshopping, one-on-one coaching, questions and answers, independent work time for the kids... Two cumulative hours of straight instruction in front of 30 kids is more than what most teachers would give even on a normal school day. There are innovative ways to offer “instruction” alongside all the other things I mentioned as part of distance learning. In total it is still a full day’s work for teachers. It just means they are not necessarily live on camera for two hours.

Most parents do not want their kids staring at a screen for that long anyway.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Frankly, I think it’s selfish that entire counties have locked down for 0.4% of the population - without any consideration for the other 99.7%. How the fuk does that make any sense to anyone?

Because we're a society with a social contract where we agree to a modicum of concern for the most vulnerable even at mild inconvenience to us?

Okay. I can’t get appropriate care for a severe health issue I’ve been dealing with for several years. And how about all those that can’t support their families now? The half billon who will spiral into poverty around the world. How about increases in suicide, drug addiction, and alcoholism? How about the destruction in major cities? I could go on.

Social contract my ass.

Not to mention screwing Millennials over for a second time (I.e., Great Recession)
 
And now many of you - Generation Z - will be worse off than Millennials, who are the first generation to be worse off than the previous one.  I would be very scared if I were you - not because of the virus, but because you’re on course to being a truly lost generation.

College bubble has popped (which does make my degree much more valuable)
And if you think closing down schools is a good idea, then you’re really screwed.
Plus the economy, which will eventually burst too.
The trillions added to the debt in just the last few months.
Bankrupt social security.

Again, I could go on.

Huh! With so many people totally screwed over, it’s almost as if our economy is broken and needs a total restructuring!

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Interesting how there's no commentary whatsoever about how it's significantly more challenging to lead a vaccination effort in a state of 20 million than it is in a state of less than 2 million...

[HagridOfTheDeep]

It's really amazing how much more f-cked our vaccine situation is here in Canada compared to you folks. Vaccine distribution is the defining issue of our day right now, and Trudeau's head is going to be on the chopping block whether it's fair or not.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Maybe it’s weird, but Canada is doing four months between shots, so I’m not really sure you have much to worry about in comparison...

[HagridOfTheDeep]

AstraZeneca vaccine is 79% effective against symptomatic Covid-19, company says

AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine showed 79% efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100% efficacy against severe disease and hospitalization in a new, US-based clinical trial, the company said Monday.

The findings from the new Phase 3 trial, which included more than 32,000 participants, may boost confidence in the vaccine, which was originally developed by the University of Oxford.

The trial showed that the vaccine was well-tolerated and identified no safety concerns, the company said. An independent committee "found no increased risk of thrombosis or events characterized by thrombosis among the 21,583 participants receiving at least one dose of the vaccine," according to AstraZeneca.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/health/astrazeneca-vaccine-efficacy-us-based-clinical-trial/index.html

Great news. Seems like Canada has been buying up a lot of the AstraZeneca shipments that other countries have decided they don't want anymore.

I'm in a "high-risk" profession that wasn't previously being prioritized for vaccines, but BC recently changed course and is going to offer the unexpected AstraZeneca vaccines to front-line workers. I'll take it, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't previously been a bit bummed about getting AstraZeneca. I know I shouldn't have been, because they're all "good" vaccines and you take what you get... but 95% sounded better. Anyhow, long story short: This news satisfies me.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I don’t even want to know what the percentage is for Canada. Sigh.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

The only reason lockdowns don’t work is because callous, selfish people are choosing to break them in large enough percentages. Perhaps that is reason enough not to bother with the lockdowns at all, but if we’re going to say they don’t work, I think it’s worth pointing out why. The idea itself is not fruitless.

I will admit, though, that I go back and forth on my feelings around the health measures and sometimes struggle to crystallize my internal thoughts or even hold a consistent opinion. On the one hand, I am feeling like it’s true that the mortality rate is, overall, very low, and it kind of pisses me off to think of the ways our response has ruined me over the last year (I’m absolutely living in a spiral of depression, exhaustion, and self-destructive choices), especially when I stop and realize it’s very possible I’d get this thing and have no symptoms at all. The lockdowns were originally marketed as a way to prevent non-COVID deaths and deaths from severe but treatable COVID because we’d be keeping hospitals from overflowing so the doctors could still do their jobs. It seemed, at first, like there was an understanding and acceptance that this virus would kill people. We would let nature run its course—in essence, we’d “let” the virus spread—but do it in a way that would not claim people who should otherwise have been able to recover from it. The goalposts did move.

We can talk about the merits of that movement, but it’s no longer about the hospitals and it’s now about spread in general. I absolutely believe we should all be taking reasonable precautions like masking, trying to stay distanced, and washing our hands, but I don’t think everything should shut down when many people are really suffering as a result of these measures, despite the fact that the vast majority of people are not going to die from COVID. Maybe the people who are more likely to die should be the ones staying home. I get that spread in the community still poses a higher risk to them, but we are reaching the point where—I can’t believe I’m going to say this—“it is what it is.” People are losing their livelihoods.

That said, the reason I am not prepared to say I’m “anti-lockdown” or any of that is because there are so many proud and stupid people who are just making ridiculously terrible choices, and I don’t want to be thrown in with them either. Going to a restaurant with six people all from different households is a hugely dumb thing to do while others are making sacrifices. Lifting mask mandates is ridiculous when wearing a mask is such a simple way to add a layer of protection. Having full stadiums of sports fans spits in the face of the realities many people are facing in this pandemic.

So I guess where I stand is this: Full lockdowns and the shuttering of businesses are not fair and probably not even going to accomplish much. We need to stop handwringing and fussing about the pandemic. This doesn’t mean we stop doing the really basic things we can do to make a small difference. We all know what those things are, and we can all identify what would be a ridiculous choice and what wouldn’t. But if you’re not willing to do those easy things, I’m out of respect for you. The conversation changes slightly when we’re talking about fully vaccinated folks, but here in Canada we’re so embarrassingly far from that discussion that it’s not worth visiting. Do your part, weigh what you really need to do against what you can sacrifice, and consider your risk. If everyone had consistently been taking a moment to be even a little considerate while making choices in this pandemic, it wouldn’t have been so bad.

This turned into a rant. I’m just sick of this f-cking COVID bullish-t.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

https://twitter.com/business/status/1431139669970980866
Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot

eople who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.

The largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity -- gained from an earlier infection -- to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant.

The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered.

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant,” the researchers said.

People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered.


Anti-vaxxers, drinking de-wormers, are gonna be like: ooh ah, ooh ah, yeah, ooh ooh!


Disclaimer: it's a pre-print that hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.

The data was posted as a preprint article on medRxiv, and hasn’t yet been reviewed by other researchers.

Link to the study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1.full.pdf

I think this finding, if true, has more interesting repercussions on whether boosters are actually necessary. If vaccines are highly effective against serious disease, and disease is effective at significantly boosting immunity, relying on very mild infections among the vaccinated might be better for the pandemic overall than hogging vaccines that could go to less-vaccinated developing countries.

I am double vaccinated. Had a fever two weeks ago for a day and some persistent sniffles and a throat tickle that lasted a week. Didn’t get tested but mostly isolated until symptoms went away. If that is what COVID looks like for a generally healthy person who is double-vaxxed, I hardly think boosters are needed for everyone. Maybe for the most vulnerable, but not for me. I’ll get one if that ever becomes the policy in British Columbia, but I’m not sure it should.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Our healthcare systems are going to have to become a lot more agile. If my understanding is right, the vaccines that are currently being administered are still vaccines based on the original variant that was first identified almost two years ago. That seems like a pretty woeful response when we think about how much the world has been through in the last two years. What is stopping these pharmaceutical companies from using mRNA technology to clone the spike protein of the new predominant variant instead? What is stopping governments from encouraging and then approving these hypothetical vaccines? We need to get Omicron spike RNA into arms as soon as possible... this whole Omicron situation doesn't need to be a problem.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Code:

The cost of doing nothing is so great that governments need to be going at least as far as they are now. If Omicron does turn out not to be more dangerous than Delta or even somehow less dangerous, that's great but it's better to take a precautionary approach and act to prevent the pessimistic scenario when our knowledge is so poor.

Really?  What are the costs of doing nothing, exactly?  And what are these effective measures governments need to take - more masks?  They've worked so well to stem the tide of Delta (not), I'm sure they'll be effective against a variant that is far, far more infectious.  Travel bans?  Its already in Europe, across multiple countries.  Its almost certainly already on every continent by now.  The last thing governments should do is ineffective, virtue signalling travel bans and NPIs just to make it look like they're "doing something" to their scared, sheep populaces.

Mass death and lockdowns obviously. The cost of preventing the pandemic at the very beginning, or keeping out later variants, is so much less than the cost that America has ultimately suffered.

Or what? Like it or not, Covid is becoming an endemic disease and we are beyond the possibility of ever eradicating it. So what are we supposed to do? React like this to every new variant and make this an annual tradition for ever and ever and ever? Because now we have the vaccine and the ability to adapt that vaccine within weeks for what is, at the end of the day not the deadliest of diseases - we are going to have to accept that that is the only way we are going to be able to control the disease without restricting ourselves forever on the hope that it someday goes away.

Because like it nor not, lockdowns and travel bans are not cost free options. And the more we do them, the heavier and heavier those costs become relative to the actual costs of the disease. Especially for people who are isolated or vulnerable; or who are lower income; or those of us with families abroad. I missed my grandfather passing away because of travel restrictions earlier this year, I have just lost the opportunity to meet my nephew for the first time because of the hysterical overreaction to this variant. Plenty of other people have far, farworse or more harrowing stories because of the fact that some people have developed and irrealistic overreaction to what is becoming a treatable disease.

Honestly, this take is also my take. If our reaction and response to a new development with COVID today is a response we would be uncomfortable taking in three years (i.e., “I don’t want to be wearing a mask in 2024!”), we should be uncomfortable taking it now, too, because as far as I’m concerned, the COVID situation is now going to be the same forever.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Previous rules of virus are 'out the window'

The latest surge, which has sent case numbers exploding across the globe, is fueled by the Omicron variant, the most contagious coronavirus strain yet, health experts say.

The virus is now "extraordinarily contagious" and previous mitigation measures that used to help now may not be as helpful, CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner told CNN on Friday.

"At the beginning of this pandemic... we all were taught, you have a significant exposure if you're within six feet of somebody and you're in contact with them for more than 15 minutes. All these rules are out the window," Reiner said. "This is a hyper-contagious virus."

Now, even a quick, transient encounter can lead to an infection, Reiner added, including if someone's mask is loose, or a person quickly pulls their mask down, or an individual enters an elevator in which someone else has just coughed.

"This is how you can contract this virus," Reiner said.

I'm sure all the anti-restriction people on this forum want this information suppressed, like Trump would. If this were widely known, a substantial portion of the population would lock themselves down, and then large parts of the hospitality industry would likely close due to suddenly being unprofitable, all of this with zero intervention by the government. This would be totally unacceptable to these people who demand their hospitality options open at all times come hell or high water.

Quite the opposite: I expect this news is what will finally make people throw their hands up and say “enough, then.”

That’s where I’m at. Short of completely shutting down your life, there’s literally nothing you can do to avoid infection. People used to talk about “layers of protection” like they were slices of Swiss cheese: The holes in one slice would be covered by the areas in the next slice that didn’t have any. We’re at the point where that’s total BS though, because entire slices are one big hole. So why layer on with a mask and distancing and hand sanitizer and glass partitions when they don’t matter? You get this virus by walking past someone.

What I’m also getting at with the Swiss cheese nonsense is that I feel like health officials use that metaphor to justify the inconsistencies in their health orders. In BC, you can go to a hockey game with 9,000 people or to crowded Boxing Day events at the mall, but you can’t go to the gym. The virus is coming, the rules don’t make sense, and it’s becoming more and more clear that there’s nothing we can really do. The cost-benefit analysis should lead us to give up, at this point.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I think the big problem is that the risk a COVID infection poses to someone who has been triply vaxxed has dropped significantly as the pandemic has worn on, even in the midst of this Omicron surge, but the risk COVID is currently posing to our society and infrastructure is huge because of how infectious it is and because of how many hospitalizations we’ll have to deal with among the unvaccinated.

Individual ease but collective peril is sort of hard to wrap our minds around, and it makes it easy for us to throw up our hands in frustration and say we’re finished. But even for those of us who have done the right thing, an overwhelmed hospital system and a fire department running at 35% really isn’t good.

So if the reality is that our society is still under threat even if our own lives are less so, what do we do? I am done sacrificing, and honestly, I think that’s fair. Seems to me we need to marginalize and exclude the unvaccinated as much as we possibly can in order to suppress their case rates and keep them from clogging up hospitals. That’s easy to say in British Columbia where we’re at, like, 90% vaccinated, because society is on board… but what do you do in places where 40% of the people, including many of the people who are running things, are not on board? Compliance with any measure to exclude the unvaccinated is going to be pretty low in some parts of the country. Long story short, the US really is in a bind.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

The dumbest thing of all of this is that there is all this rage and hatred towards mask mandates, the mitigation measure that is low cost, low effort, and doesn't prevent anyone from doing anything. You'd think we were talking about business closures or something that actually hurt the economy and peoples' livelihoods with this kind of rancor.

The only thing masks don't prevent, is spreading Omicron. They are extremely high cost, high effort and extremely if any low efficacy. Probably high efficacy on polluting Earth, though  

There is, though, a thing extremely low cost, zero effort and extremely high efficacy. It spells:
V-A-C-C-I-N-E.

Taking the focus from vaccines to masks is dangerous.

Hearing that masks are "low cost" that don't prevent anyone from doing anything is disheartening. I'm curious to know if compucomp supports both mask and vaccine mandates. He favors the former, but may very well oppose the latter.

KN-95 masks are literally being given out for free by the government, cheap medical masks are available for free at plenty of establishments, and comfortable washable cloth masks like the kind I wear go for about $2-3 apiece.  So yes, they are low cost.

Masks have not prevented me from doing anything and I don't really see how they're preventing anyone else from doing anything.  What is the activity that requires you to be in close proximity with others AND not wear a mask?  Being in a choir?

I wasn't saying that masks aren't freely accessible. I'm saying that there are not of a low cost, socially or psychologically. I have had to wear a mask at my job for nearly two years now. Your opinion is different if you have to spend seven or eight hours wearing one.

Let me ask you this. Would you support imposing permanent mask mandates? I've said before that it's obvious there's a large segment of the population that accepts masks as part of being the new normal.

No, I do not support permanent mask mandates.  I think we can get rid of mask mandates once two conditions are met.  The meeting of both of these conditions will, in my book, be sufficient to reduce COVID to an endemic flu nature.

Here are my conditions:

1) The spread is no longer at absurdly high numbers, overwhelming hospitals and in particular ICUs.  So long as hospitals are completely overwhelmed even with the safety measures in place, it is beyond foolish to remove those safety measures, thus overwhelming hospitals to an even greater degree.

2)  Sufficient protection is available such people have the capability to no longer be threatened by COVID.  Most likely this comes from good vaccine technology, but it could also come from COVID rates being so low that it's no longer a threat.  The point being, I should be able to go out and enjoy my life without being afraid of unmasked people giving me COVID and seriously harming my life.  This was not true for most of 2020 and 2021 when running around unmasked among other unmasked people was a good way to get a very serious disease.  Here in 2022, so long as Omicron remains the variant responsible for almost all cases and can be easily combatted with the vaccine, I consider this condition satisfied.

So (1) will probably be satisfied in about 1-2 weeks as cases continue to collapse and hospitals regain the ability to manage COVID -- so it's not irresponsible for the government to increase their burden.

(2) I consider already satisfied.  But that could change if there is another new variant.

I consider both conditions (1) and (2) to have been satisfied from about May-August of 2021, in that lovely window where we had effective vaccines but Delta had not hit yet.

I also think vaccine mandates can be removed at the same time, since the point of the vaccine mandates is also to satisfy (1) by keeping people from overwhelming hospitals with severe COVID.  I don't agree with the Horus take that anti-vaxxers should just be left on the street to die.  However, I do think it is reasonable for the government to add the COVID vaccine to the normal vaccine schedule required for the military, schools, foreign entry, etc. and to heavily encourage people to get any annual boosters required to keep the virus -- especially in its original and Delta forms -- at bay.

See, to me, this is all very reasonable and it’s exactly the kind of messaging we need from governments. We need a plan out of this pandemic, even if we’re not quite there. Right now, it feels like a lot of these very left-wing places are reacting to the virus without considering whether the public actually wants their reaction. If the instinct is always to react without a clear focus on why, we will be doing this forever.

The only things our responses should be coupled to are the science of what works and the vulnerability of our health care systems.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

This thread (and Twitter replies) sometimes feels like a different planet.  Masks are uncommon enough here that I do a double-take on the rare occasion I see one.  The grocery store is the only place you see them, and it's even a minority there.  Apart from a vague understanding of things being different elsewhere, the Delta and- especially- Omicron waves have felt culturally a lot like the 2009 swine flu.  You know that people are getting sick, but probably don't know anyone who has been seriously ill*, and don't think too much about it.

*I'll be honest- I don't know a single person who has had anything worse than the seasonal flu from any variant of covid.

I feel the same feeling in the exact opposite direction! Masks are almost universal here in indoor public settings that I do a double-take on the rare occasion I see people flouting the mandate. I had many friends who got sick during Omicron, none seriously, and it seems like almost everyone was at least exposed at some point; almost everyone I know changed their behavior in some way or another. I've known people who died due to COVID at the onset of the pandemic. People in this thread are hurled into a paroxysm of madness whenever they see a mask but I've never heard anyone in real life who's had a more negative opinion of a mask then "sometimes they make my glasses fog up". Nobody wants the mask mandates to last forever, but I've heard many people (especially older folks) say, "I think I'll just start wearing a mask in the wintertime so I don't get the flu", and I've definitely heard many folks say (and I myself agree!) that masks are kind of nice in the winter when you're outside because they help keep your face warm, like a scarf.

It just goes to show you what bubbles we all live in. To both of us, this thread seems like an unrelenting stream of opinions we can't understand; we also have cognitive biases to fixate on the opinions we disagree with and ignore the ones that we agree with.

I am also living in a place where everyone wears a mask indoors. My read of the situation is that everyone tolerates them, people don’t often complain about them, and nobody loves them. This paranoia that we all want to wear masks forever is ludicrous. We don’t want to wear them forever—it’s just that, you know, we’re still in a pandemic. We need to be careful that we won’t be too scared to revert back when it’s time, but even though we might be close, it’s not time yet. We are just getting past our peak of record hospitalizations.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

This thread (and Twitter replies) sometimes feels like a different planet.  Masks are uncommon enough here that I do a double-take on the rare occasion I see one.  The grocery store is the only place you see them, and it's even a minority there.  Apart from a vague understanding of things being different elsewhere, the Delta and- especially- Omicron waves have felt culturally a lot like the 2009 swine flu.  You know that people are getting sick, but probably don't know anyone who has been seriously ill*, and don't think too much about it.

*I'll be honest- I don't know a single person who has had anything worse than the seasonal flu from any variant of covid.

I feel the same feeling in the exact opposite direction! Masks are almost universal here in indoor public settings that I do a double-take on the rare occasion I see people flouting the mandate. I had many friends who got sick during Omicron, none seriously, and it seems like almost everyone was at least exposed at some point; almost everyone I know changed their behavior in some way or another. I've known people who died due to COVID at the onset of the pandemic. People in this thread are hurled into a paroxysm of madness whenever they see a mask but I've never heard anyone in real life who's had a more negative opinion of a mask then "sometimes they make my glasses fog up". Nobody wants the mask mandates to last forever, but I've heard many people (especially older folks) say, "I think I'll just start wearing a mask in the wintertime so I don't get the flu", and I've definitely heard many folks say (and I myself agree!) that masks are kind of nice in the winter when you're outside because they help keep your face warm, like a scarf.

It just goes to show you what bubbles we all live in. To both of us, this thread seems like an unrelenting stream of opinions we can't understand; we also have cognitive biases to fixate on the opinions we disagree with and ignore the ones that we agree with.

I am also living in a place where everyone wears a mask indoors. My read of the situation is that everyone tolerates them, people don’t often complain about them, and nobody loves them. This paranoia that we all want to wear masks forever is ludicrous. We don’t want to wear them forever—it’s just that, you know, we’re still in a pandemic. We need to be careful that we won’t be too scared to revert back when it’s time, but even though we might be close, it’s not time yet. We are just getting past our peak of record hospitalizations.

When do you think people should stop wearing masks in their day to day lives?

The only metric should be how close hospitals are to being overwhelmed. As I said, British Columbia is just coming down from its all-time peak in hospitalizations. To remove mask mandates now could send numbers shooting right back up, which is not what we should want to happen given we don’t have a ton of wiggle room. I agree that we should let go of the mandates once we’re clearly through this wave. If another wave of some other variant comes, we should wait to understand how the variant is affecting our hospitalizations before we jump into panic mode.

That said, it is unvaccinated people who are driving our hospitalizations, so I am absolutely on board with doing whatever we can to explicitly limit spread among that group by keeping them out of high-risk places. Restrictions on those folks should be very different from restrictions on everybody else.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

The Lancet: "COVID-19 mortality and excess mortality among working-age residents in California, USA, by occupational sector: a longitudinal cohort analysis of mortality surveillance data"

Workers in essential sectors have continued to bear the brunt of high COVID-19 and excess mortality throughout the pandemic, particularly in the agriculture, emergency, manufacturing, facilities, and transportation or logistics sectors. This high death toll has continued during periods of vaccine availability and the delta surge. In an ongoing pandemic without widespread vaccine coverage and with anticipated threats of new variants, the USA must actively adopt policies to more adequately protect workers in essential sectors.

and notice the workers in essential sectors are some of the least likely people to  expect the world to shut down over covid.

Yeah, but a lot of them are probably also the least likely to get vaccinated and boosted lol.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

It’s not the inconvenience of wearing a mask one time. It’s the inconvenience of wearing a mask every time, forever. Many of the people who still wear masks can’t clearly communicate what it will need to take for them to stop. That’s scary, because the situation with the virus really has come such a long way. Most other people have realized that what’s going on with COVID now is what will be going on with COVID next year, which is what will be going on with COVID the year after that and the year after that.

At this point you’re either in it forever or you’re not. I’d rather not be, and I’d rather my logic stay consistent. If you’re going to change your mind and stop wearing masks in five months, it’s not because the science will have changed—it’s because you will have tired of it. And if that’s your thinking, why waste the next five months wearing a mask?