COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[MRS DONNA SHALALA]

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.

This is honestly a fairly reasonable post. At the least I'm glad you're not in the forever COVID camp, unlike compcomp who opposed the lifting of mask mandates for vaccinated people even when COVID was at its nadir last spring and proved that nothing would ever be good enough.

That's because masks are low cost, low effort, and don't prevent anyone from doing anything. It's literally putting on a piece of clothing. I said at the time, and maintain now, that it was a huge public health messaging blunder to put together social distancing and masks. There is good reason to hate social distancing, since it can cause serious economic damage and ruin people's livelihoods, and it's not a sustainable practice. On the other hand, masks could totally be sustainable long term if people just would get over themselves and get used to them.

You can feel that way if you want. Just don't complain when people accuse you of wanting this to go on forever, because you very clearly do.

That's not for me to decide. That's for the virus to decide. Somewhere in the middle of all this discussion it was lost that there is a highly contagious respiratory pathogen that is still causing illness, hospitalization, and deaths far in excess of the seasonal flu, and has shown a capacity to evolve to our detriment. The virus is a force of nature and we don't get to dictate what it does, we can only react to what it does.

Except you just said that you favour mask mandates to continue indefinitely. And, even when the virus wasn't posing a threat to anyone last spring, you were still in favour of mask mandates. If you wanted to try the "it's not me, it's the virus line", you shouldn't have just admitted to wanting mandates to continue indefinitely. This is clearly not about the virus, this is about you and the way you think society should be.

It's wrong to say the virus wasn't a threat to anyone last spring. The pandemic was heading on a trajectory towards zero, but it had not gotten anywhere close to zero, nor did we ever reach Fauci's 10K benchmark that would indicate the spread is under control. Also the lifting of mask mandates for vaccinated people is a cop-out, as we saw quite quickly it meant the lifting of mask mandates for everyone, and once that happened it was hard to bring the mask mandates back anywhere. Only the cartoonish case numbers of Omicron has managed to do that. It was essentially a risky bet that the near-sterilizing immunity of the vaccines would hold up, a bet which lost spectacularly when Delta and Omicron hit. In hindsight I was 100% correct to criticize the May CDC mask guidance.

Again, you're perfectly free to feel that way. No one is stopping you from holding these views. Just don't complain when people accuse you of wanting this to go on forever, because as you have clearly demonstrated more than once now, you do in fact want it to go on forever.

Again, it doesn't matter what I want. It matters what the virus does. I strongly believe that at no point during the pandemic has the risk from COVID dropped to a level where the minimal cost incurred from mask mandates would not be worth the benefit gained, emphasis on minimal cost. If COVID magically disappears like SARS did, then fine, get rid of mask mandates. If we can really sustain 10K cases a day, then fine, get rid of mask mandates. But if we can't ever get there, and it's definitely plausible that we won't, then mask mandates should be in place forever. That doesn't mean I want the pandemic to go on forever, but if it does in fact go on forever we will need mask mandates forever.

I'm glad to see you admit it.

Admit what? Of "wanting" mask mandates to go on forever? Again, somewhere it got lost that there is a pandemic of a highly contagious and still deadly virus going around and masks help slow the spread. If this virus and its descendants keep spreading around forever, of course I want mask mandates, a minimal cost mitigation measure, to go on forever. Since the weather gets cold every winter, you put on a coat every winter to go outside. But winter coats are funny looking and a bit cumbersome, so instead you'll burn the coat and go outside now in shorts and t-shirt? Has anyone ever said I only want to wear coats on a temporary basis and eventually winter must cease to happen and we only have summer?

Is there a jacket mandate?

No, because hypothermia is not a contagious disease, which COVID emphatically is.

Let's look at another example, airport security. I'm old enough to remember what it was like to go through security before 9/11. Since then all kinds of restrictions and procedures were added, strict ID check, only ticketed passengers at the gate, taking off shoes, throwing out liquids, going through that vertical scanner, etc. Is it annoying to go through that? Yeah, it's annoying. But all those procedures came about because some terrorist exploited a weakness in the prior procedure. Since the terrorists aren't going away, these procedures aren't going away either, and by now they've become part of "airport culture" and people have largely gotten used to and stopped complaining about it. I'm not old enough to remember the introduction of indoor no-smoking mandates but I imagine it went through a similar pattern of initial resistance and gradual acceptance. If COVID doesn't go away and continues to cause illness and death at the current levels I think mask mandates will go in the same direction.

This is a good example in that, while I think most of us agree that airport regulations are largely annoying security theater that isn't very effective and has a lot of flaws, we also know that no administration is going to scale them back and give the other side an easy weapon (especially if a terrorist attack is attempted or, god forbid, executed after the policy is rolled back).

Similarly, it's hard to see an administration rolling back mask recommendations and risk giving the other side an easy political cudgel to beat them with, especially if there's a new wave or variant.