The sheer amount of people who stopped wearing masks as soon as they were optional demonstrates how many people never understood why they were wearing them in the first place, which is a tremendous and ongoing failure of institutional public health
@currentbias lots of people ranting in here about people not wearing masks, but I want to know, when do we stop wearing masks?
Covid is not going to go away without a fully 100% effective vaccine.
Do you expect people to wear them for the next 50, 100 years?
@mcmullin@currentbias I don't worry about Ebola because there isn't any in my country.
I don't worry about Zika because my climate doesn't have enough mosquitos to worry about it.
I don't worry about Lyme disease because I'm not out hiking around ticks.
At some point there has to be a threshold of "there aren't enough Covid cases to take extra precautions", but everyone here seems to say "that threshold doesn't exist"
@mcmullin@currentbias my local government's Covid dashboard says that currently we are "below the transmission threshold" of 3% of weekly ER visits. Currently at one of the lowest points ever, 0.49% of visits.
Wastewater measurements are 4.2% (~280k) of the peak we reached in January (~6.28m).
I am not saying long covid doesn't exist/isn't bad, but right now things seem about as best they've been. How much lower do things need to get before people say "ok maybe you don't need a mask?"
@juliewebgirl you can also see here that the wastewater detection has gone significantly down since the January spike.
In January the peak was 6.8 billion, versus today which is only 280 million, a decrease of 95%!
@juliewebgirl@augieray
Yes. I read the article, I looked at the graphs, I looked at the trends. Everything it shows is that we are at the lowest point of transmission right now relative to what's in the past, and what's in the future. That's good right?
Yes, cases will go up again and we will have another surge. But that is the reality that we're stuck with at this point.
@juliewebgirl@augieray best case scenario, people are vaxed and otherwise healthy, what do you want them to do right now in this moment, when relatively cases are at one of their lowest points?