538: Biden's own fault he got Covid, has been too lax about pandemic

[lakeview]

Beautiful takedown in the comments:

This is your science writer?!

This is nonsense.

The vaccine changed the game and made it so that by and large getting seriously ill from covid was a matter of choice. Therefore, we could restart the economy and evade a recession or worse.

The opportunity to do better than this was missed in 2020 when Trump's went FAR beyond "cavalier attitude to party planning". He suggested internal use of bleach as a remedy (never mind that it would kill people) and basically did everything possible to undermine the science-based response and politicize proper personal protective measures, and did nothing to dissuade people from using horse paste.

Meanwhile, his administration was outright stealing supplies from the states to the point that states were trying to hide when supplies were coming and where they were coming from.

And this article is a perfect example of why they mostly got away with it. Typical "both sides" nonsense from the corporate media, when only one ignored all science and good sense. I'm starting to think Trump never be properly blamed for any of the unmitigated disaster over which he presided.

But Biden gets blamed for...getting people properly vaccinated and then letting them go on with their lives? Did you think everyone was just going to wear masks for eternity?

Republican escapes blame, and Democrat is deprived of credit and given the blame. Typical US media, never bothering to actually delve into cause and effect (for instance, where did inflation start? With tax cuts for the rich and global stimulus thanks to the shut down global economy due to the covid that Trump was doing nothing to deal with.

And again, the most shocking thing is -- THIS IS YOUR SCIENCE WRITER.

Get a new science writer. Maybe one that actually writes about science, or does so with scientific rigor. Or, here's a crazy idea, both!

Disagree about it being a "beautiful takedown." I see a TDS-fueled rant that grossly overstates the effectiveness of the shots.

"Therefore, we could start the economy." LOL, I guess the author of the comment is telling the truth, in a sense. In places run by Democrats, they were always going to wait to "start the economy" until the shots arrived, because that's what their newfound religion dictated.

This fighting between sects (the moronic "Biden got Covid because he didn't enact policies that eliminated Covid" side, and the equally moronic "you can't say that, because it weakens our message that Covid is all Trump's fault" side) hurts the Democratic Party. So I guess I don't mind it, aside from the loss of brain cells I'm suffering from reading the commentary.

[lakeview]

I'm not "pro-pandemic." I want this pandemic to be over, but wishing it doesn't make it so. Quite frankly, I'm appalled that this D-majority site is so anti-mask. It's not a big inconvenience.

I share this sentiment. Anti-lockdown turned into anti-mask (and for a subset, anti-vaccine). I'm 100% against lockdowns so long as hospitalizations and deaths are under a certain level. If we reached a point where hospitals are completely swamped and overwhelmed and deaths are 4k+/day, we would need to consider more drastic action. Fortunately, the vaccines are preventing that from occurring, despite the attempts by the anti-vaxxers to create a more virulent strain.

Even this far into the pandemic, I still don't understand the anti-mask sentiment. There is something in between always masking up and the people that apparently think they should burn their masks. It's called masking sometimes. If cases are way up, we mask up. When cases are way down, we can feel free to take them off. I really don't see the issue here. I'm not even calling for mandates, just recommendations (although most government mandates over the private sector on this aspect have essentially functioned as recommendations, so maybe it should be a mandate functioning as a recommendation).

Part of the issue is "cases" ebb and flow with absolutely no regard to whether anyone is "masking up," so it's like watching people do a rain dance and being absolutely convinced it will bring rain. Another part of the issue is that "cases" aren't even all people who are actually sick -- hell, I'd argue the majority of "cases" at this point are people who wouldn't have been considered sick by pre-2020 standards (just some sniffles or whatever).

So, to sum up, you have people: 1) obsessing over an irrelevant metric, and 2) operating under the delusion that the ritual of mass mask wearing is affecting this metric in a positive way, when it isn't.

It is mass psychosis, and if you're wearing a mask "just because of an uptick in cases" or "just out of an abundance of caution" or whatever namby-pamby justification you've copy-pasted from MSNBC or the Washington Post to rationalize this ridiculous behavior, you are feeding that mass psychosis.

That's the issue.

[lakeview]

I'm not "pro-pandemic." I want this pandemic to be over, but wishing it doesn't make it so. Quite frankly, I'm appalled that this D-majority site is so anti-mask. It's not a big inconvenience.

I share this sentiment. Anti-lockdown turned into anti-mask (and for a subset, anti-vaccine). I'm 100% against lockdowns so long as hospitalizations and deaths are under a certain level. If we reached a point where hospitals are completely swamped and overwhelmed and deaths are 4k+/day, we would need to consider more drastic action. Fortunately, the vaccines are preventing that from occurring, despite the attempts by the anti-vaxxers to create a more virulent strain.

Even this far into the pandemic, I still don't understand the anti-mask sentiment. There is something in between always masking up and the people that apparently think they should burn their masks. It's called masking sometimes. If cases are way up, we mask up. When cases are way down, we can feel free to take them off. I really don't see the issue here. I'm not even calling for mandates, just recommendations (although most government mandates over the private sector on this aspect have essentially functioned as recommendations, so maybe it should be a mandate functioning as a recommendation).

Part of the issue is "cases" ebb and flow with absolutely no regard to whether anyone is "masking up," so it's like watching people do a rain dance and being absolutely convinced it will bring rain. Another part of the issue is that "cases" aren't even all people who are actually sick -- hell, I'd argue the majority of "cases" at this point are people who wouldn't have been considered sick by pre-2020 standards (just some sniffles or whatever).

So, to sum up, you have people: 1) obsessing over an irrelevant metric, and 2) operating under the delusion that the ritual of mass mask wearing is affecting this metric in a positive way, when it isn't.

It is mass psychosis, and if you're wearing a mask "just because of an uptick in cases" or "just out of an abundance of caution" or whatever namby-pamby justification you've copy-pasted from MSNBC or the Washington Post to rationalize this ridiculous behavior, you are feeding that mass psychosis.

That's the issue.

Ah, I see. MSNBC and/or WaPo said it might be a good idea, so it must be wrong. There's apparently no logical reason to reduce airborne transmission of an airborne pathogen. I assume you'll be taking your weekly/monthly/(or whatever) regimen of ivermectin and snake oil soon?

Nope, you don't see. Based on your retort, you're the embodiment of this mass psychosis I'm talking about.