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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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COVID did have one positive lasting effect: masking on public transit. In many East Asian cities, it was normalized/acceptable preceding the pandemic for the purposes of limiting the risk of the flu and the common cold, and I'm glad wearing a mask on crowded subways won't be considered weirdo territory.

As far as broken people and their brains, though, the most significant social COVID risk is on education. Most immediately, students suffered severe learning loss, both for the material they were supposed to learn and the processes needed for learning. We'll see those effects for a lifetime. But the institutional and cultural changes driven by COVID are also significant. COVID laid bare the reality that the institutions responsible for education aren't really interested in education: learning and intellectual development may be good side effects, but they're not the primary goals. And institutions have learned this lesson. If some desired policy results in plummeting test scores, that's to the discredit of the test scores, not the damaging policy. This has been happening for awhile, but COVID tempered that principle. Schools, informed by the experience of COVID, will increasingly discard objective measures of learning and student well-being for the sake of alignment with the faddish ideas of the day. That's the long COVID we need to worry about.

Is there any data to support the belief that masking on public transit reduces one's chance (long term) of getting a cold. In the sense that it might reduce your chance of getting a cold right now but won't reduce your chances in general due to your weakened immune system. I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.

Talking out of my ass here as someone with only a GCSE education in biology, but does this 'weakened immune system' thing actually make any sense? The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.

I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.

I mean, n=1

I think we're all talking out of our ass here. Speaking of N=1, one of the posts above said they did an "A/B" test and determined that wearing a mask helped reduce their own incidence of getting sick. How many colds must they suffer to glean any useful information? Surely, hundreds or thousands at a minimum. How truly awful things must be for them.

The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.

That makes sense, but think about the consequences of that statement. There are thousands if not millions of different cold variants. A subway station can have hundreds of people crowded into a small area, many who are contagious. You would be nearly assured of getting sick every time you rode public transit. As this doesn't happen, it stands to reason that your immune system does protect you against some novel pathogens.

The unanswered question becomes: does your immune system become generally weaker when not exposed to pathogens? My lay person answer is yet, but with low confidence.

On another note, it's rather sad that we have to resort to this level of lay person reasoning because, with Covid, our public health apparatus has completely abdicated their responsibility to provide accurate and unbiased information. Even if an expert were to come here and refute me, I would be skeptical of their information until I knew more about them.

I, for one, would like to see the data confounders added to such a study:

  1. Do participants pick their nose?

  2. If so, do they consume the fruits of their labor?

  3. Do they breathe in through their nose while showering, carrying humid air through their virus-infested nares into their lungs?

  4. Do they take any vitamin D or zinc, daily or weekly?

And so on.

I don't think I agree with your take as far as COVID normalizing masking on public transit. I think that in some places it may have had the opposite effect. Anecdotally, when I would in the past see a person on the train or walking along a city street with a mask on, I barely thought anything of it. To the extent that it stood out, I just assumed that person maybe had a cold and was a little extra conscientious than the average. It didn't seem particularly weird, and it communicated a completely negligible amount of information to me about that person.

But now, after everything, when I see a person in a mask it means something different. It's no longer an empty signal that tells me nothing about the person. Now it communicates to me that the person is weird. That they may be still gripped by fear, that they may be mentally ill, that they may be excessively credulous when it comes to authorities that I consider untrustworthy, or that they may be an extreme partisan of some kind. For some reason they are still not over COVID as a phenomenon.

It's hard to see a random masked individual any other way now, and I don't like that. I don't like that my initial read of someone who is wearing a mask is now "this person is a COVID weirdo that I should avoid", rather than "this is just a slightly more conscientious person than average." For one thing, now I don't even like putting on a mask at times when my own personal level of conscientiousness suggests would be appropriate, due to the perceived symbolic power of the mask. I don't want to look like a weirdo.

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