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Mask Theater
Today I had to cancel a scheduled medical procedure because I would not wear a mask.
I had no interest in causing a scene in the office (or in driving an hour to the office only to be turned away) so I called in advance and told them I would not be wearing a mask. The receptionist was polite and checked with my primary care provider, who is a Nurse Practitioner and was going to perform the procedure in the office. It was a minor procedure (removing a small cyst on my head that has been there for over ten years, which has not ever grown). The receptionist reported that the NP said I didn’t have to wear a mask in the office with her while she did the procedure, but that I would have to wear a mask in the waiting room and the hallways. So I cancelled the appointment.
I told the receptionist that if the NP thought the procedure was urgent — which was not my impression from the last time I had spoken to her — that she would have to grant me a medical exception to wearing a mask. The exception being, I’m not going to wear a mask. So if she wants me to have the procedure, then it’s medically necessary for me to not wear a mask in the office.
The backdrop of this is that I had my annual checkup with her a month ago and did not wear a mask, despite a sign on the front door that stated masks were required. No one asked me to wear a mask — not any of the receptionists, the lower-level nurses, or my NP herself. During the check up, she checked my cyst, saw that it hadn’t grown, but said if I wanted that she could remove it, so I said sure.
However, since then, the governor of New Hampshire, the ironically dubbed “Live Free or Die” state, issued an emergency order for a mask mandate for any place, public or private, where more than 100 people are at the same time. I thought maybe that the doctor’s office, between staff and patients, might meet the threshold. The governor’s order includes fines for everyone involved and also authorizes law enforcement to “enter private property…including without the consent of the owners” to enforce his dictates. Gov. Chris Sununu is reportedly a Republican, and I may even have voted for him twice, but only because his opponents were insane Leftists. I’m beginning to wonder what the differences are between him and a Democrat, though.
Meanwhile there are currently 12 people hospitalized in our entire state (population 1.3 million) with symptoms of COVID-19, and we have the 5th lowest infection rate (518 per 100,000 population) of all the states. This with no state mask mandate of any kind until the aforementioned order last week. To be clear, I see lots of people wearing masks in stores. That is, lots of people wearing masks incorrectly — under their nose, pulling them down to talk, over giant beards, etc. I saw one women pull into the parking lot at the grocery store, get out, open her trunk, and grab a mask from the floor of her trunk, and put it on. Presumably she takes her trash to the dump in the trunk of her car, as well. (For those of you who are city dwellers — those of us who live in the country take our own trash to the dump.)
So anyway, that’s how I came to have an appointment today and why I called in advance instead of just showing up again. I tried to be as calm and firm as possible. The receptionist told me that the mask was to protect the other patients. I told her I wasn’t interested in debating the issue and that I don’t care about the other patients. This of course is something you’re not supposed to say, but it has the benefit of being true. I have no responsibility for the health of people that I have never met.
So I cancelled the appointment. In the end, mask theater is more important than medical procedures.
Published in General
Unfortunately, so can I. Sigh.
What are “many”, and how do we know they were infected by patients they treated? Is it not possible they got if from somewhere else?
Read back through Fauci and the Great Scarfini’s early musings and you will find them contemplating exactly this. The “flu shots” signs are already up outside the neighborhood drug store. Our expert lords and ladies have already established that the steps to “slow the spread” are the steps to reduce the number of reported flu cases this season.
If Trump is not reelected, you have called the exact short term future.
Kentucky’s Covid death rate has dropped below 2% (divide the confirmed cases by deaths) yet the ‘news’ folks in collaboration with certain bureaucrats have absolutely panicked normally sensible people into believing this virus is so deadly that any and all measures are essential. Our over reaction is causing much more harm that the disease has or will. That’s not to say that Covid is fun though for many it is unsymptomatic meaning you don’t even notice it. We could protect the vulnerable without wrecking businesses, killing jobs and debasing the currency with massive injections of currency made of thin air but that would not increase the hold our Betters have over our lives. Between that and pure politics we are paying a heavy and unnecessary price for little or no gain.
I’ll wear the freaking mask in public for whatever little good it may do but these shutdowns and bailouts are causing great and lasting harm as will the galloping willingness of formerly independent minded people to be herded along by ‘experts’.
They were willing to compromise with your mask fetish to accommodate you during the procedure.
But you couldn’t even cooperate in common areas where you were in contact with other patients.
Yeah those are the facts.
I’m glad you aren’t my patient. So we are even.
We are the ones who diagnose them.
We see about 50 patients a day for Covid testing.
It is not “less deadly than the flu”. Thats not true. But keep on repeating that stupid talking point.
I am of the opinion that everyone has free choice here. Max was right not to go there and cause a scene about it, the doctor’s office is perfectly within their rights to ask people to wear them. He didn’t have to go. Same goes for a store or restaurant. When a restaurant that I want to go to asks me to wear a mask while walking to my table (seems very silly to me) I comply because IT IS THEIR RESTAURANT. I don’t have to go there if I don’t want to do it. Then again I also think restaurants should be able to decide for themselves about smoking etc.. as well.
FJ/JG,
Extreme Germaphobes were classified as suffering from obsessive/compulsive disorder, you know, mentally ill. I don’t see any reason why this diagnosis should be abandoned now. This is the result of having a horse’s ass like Fauci waffling away at the top for 6 months. Now paranoia is taken seriously.
Continued human existence will not be feasible if this kind of hysteria is allowed to hamstring society. Get rid of captain lame, Fauci, now. Put in Atlas or somebody equally as sane.
Regards,
Jim
I think you missed the part where the receptionist told me that I didn’t have to wear a mask with my NP (and the fact that a month ago I didn’t wear a mask at all in the office or with my NP), but only in the hallway to perform for other patients.
My NP is not worried about exposure, as demonstrated through her actions. It’s just theater.
You don’t get to say that I have a mask fetish, Kozak. Not wearing a mask is normal. Wearing a mask is abnormal.
To say that doing something normal is a fetish is absurd.
I’m not sure how that chart is considered useful. Not a single one of those numbers is COVID by itself. (“All deaths involving” is not “All death caused by” Covid.)
Oh, but they can’t decide about smoking.
I cant remember the name of that women doctor who is up there with Fauci, but I remember her stating that as high as 30 percent of all the US Deaths reported as covid are miscounted.
The UK government was forced this month to revise there numbers down by ten percent.
Two facts about the UK I found interesting. They are currently on track to have more deaths from preventable causes. Basically people who couldnt go to the doctor normally during the shut down, than covid deaths, especially with the revised numbers its now standing at 42k dead.
Also that in 2018, they had a bad flu season that killed 50000 people above the normal flu season expected losses. They didnt shut down the country in 2018.
To me the mask mandate is all part of mission creep. Why the USA is still in Afghanistan after 20 years. The mission to drive out Al-Queada and get Osama, has changed into a never ending war that will never go away. Event the soviets had the sense to get out, but I digress.
Look if a private sector business asks you to wear a mask you should do it. Its there business. What your problem is with your idiotic Governor. And the solution is to get rid of him. Or make him a face of ridicule.
Peter Hitchens in the UK is doing great work exposing his government as grossly incompetent in handling the crisis.
He goes around wearing a WW2 gasmask. I saw soviet era chemical gear available on Amazon for 65 dollars. I suggest you wear that to get your point across.
https://www.amazon.ca/Original-Civilian-Protective-Activated-Charcoal/dp/B086JC5N8W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3K3UOJT8BSOPM&dchild=1&keywords=soviet+gas+mask+with+filter&qid=1598368634&sprefix=soviet++gas+mask%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-1
OK. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Thanks for taking the time to clear that up. :)
Max,
Isn’t it odd that the average age of COVID deaths is higher than the average age of deaths in the general population? Could COVID be prolonging life!? Well, something is off. But, hey Max, all Masks aren’t bad. Even a little Mask theater can be entertaining.
I apologize in advance for this.
Now I apologize in arrears for this.
Regards,
Jim
Again, you are making assumptions. If a doctor knows that you are sick with a contagious disease, that doctor will surely take precautions. This happens every day with TB patients… doctors practically work in self-contained breathing suits. Risk abatement is obviously reasonable, and nobody would argue with that. But you’re stealing a base, because we’re not talking about a sick person who is contagious. We are talking about a situation where people are asking everyone to pretend that they are sick just in case they might somehow be contagious with an illness they don’t know they have. You cannot assume any of those things to actually be true (a. that they’re sick, b. that they’re contagious, c. that these measures will do anything).
You make several claims that simply aren’t true.
I really don’t get the emotion behind the anti-mask position. And it’s a bad look for conservatives as we head into an election.
Yes, Kozak, I am capable of reading worldometers. Funny thing about that… in the UK, official death rates had to be cut nearly in half, because they were following WHO recommended policies and counting deaths as follows: If you test positive for CV19, whether sick or not, and then you subsequently die, you are a covid death.
Is that how you fill out death certificates? Test positive for strep throat a year ago and then die in a car accident, yep… died of strep.
That is why I said that, while the “official” numbers, which I acknowledged, and which you so helpfully copied and pasted here, say upwards of 180,000 … I’ll give you 100,000. It is likely far less than that.
Kindly go back and read what I said. If that many people have it, it is less deadly than the flu. It is very, very likely that we are going to discover this to be the case… and you’ll be left scratching your head. And then you’ll figure it out.
Though, even misreading it as you did, it’s still true… unless you simply cannot read numbers. If you are under 70, Covid is less deadly than the flu. That is a simple fact. If you are under 20, it is significantly less deadly than the flu.
The politicians that are forcing this down our throat need to talk about its actual efficacy as a public health intervention. None of them have done it. I get why you need good masks for extended time in close quarters, but beyond that I don’t buy it. None of those guys can give a persuasive pitch for it. I would love to see just one state attempt to legislate it. Full public vetting.
Max, aren’t you afraid you’re going to jinx yourself with talk like that? Haven’t you seen the headlines about people who scoffed at the virus and then got it?
Trump at a news conference last week gave a stat that I find interesting. He said that around 2.7% of all COVID related deaths were people 44 and under.
Then he pointed out that some colleges had reopened, experienced a high number of positive tests, so closed up again, sending the younger, very low risk students back home to possibly infect their older, more vulnerable family members.
With so low a mortality risk for under 44, would not the world, and those at higher risk, be far better off if the high risk people quarantined themselves, and the low risk people went ahead and let the virus take its course? Would it not save more lives if the young were to have big ‘covid’ parties and infect each other to build the herd immunity quickly? (When I was a young parent we did that with Chicken Pox for our kids, as they were far safer to get it young than to avoid it and chance infection later in life, when it was far more dangerous.)
Like mask mandates, quarantining the heathy is illogical. It only ‘flattens the curve’, in other words, stretches out the crisis.
I fear that has been the goal all along. Not saving lives, but creating panic, chaos, and economic destruction.
Exactly. I have great sympathy for medical workers and store personnel who make face-to-face contact with multiple strangers every day, not to mention the sheer discomfort and inconvenience of wearing that darn mask eight hours a day. So, I wear a mask indoors as a show of sympathy and respect for others.
I don’t feel any great need to display my independence in this issue by defying official policy on this issue. I’ll wait for a bigger issue to show my defiance.
It sounds like we have to wear masks forever. People will die from COVID even with a vaccine, just like people die from the flu even with a vaccine. We see daily statistics on COVID yet no stats day today for anything else. Masks are mandatory until there are no more deaths from anything,
I don’t follow this point. You concede that PPE is effective when someone is contagious. Masks being a significant aspect of PPE, particularly when dealing with a virus expelled through the mouth and nose, I think you would have to concede then that masks are effective when someone is contagious. By “effective,” I only mean that they make some difference, not that they guarantee anything. And, if the virus is indeed passed by an infected person expelling droplets carrying the virus into the air, how could masks not be at least somewhat effective?
If it is further true that a person can be contagious and not know it (which certainly seems to be the case given how quickly the virus spread undetected), doesn’t it logically follow that “having everyone wear masks” will reduce the spread, at least a little bit?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281600911006142464.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/07/15/a-scientific-look-at-the-mask-fallacy-and-why-were-told-to-wear-them/
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1280978585273196544
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/07/08/enough-with-the-mask-bs/
https://fee.org/articles/europes-top-health-officials-say-masks-arent-helpful-in-beating-covid-19/
https://www.naturalblaze.com/2020/07/physician-and-medical-journal-editor-healthy-people-should-not-wear-face-masks.html
I listen pretty closely to the Dan Proft podcast. It’s actually a radio show on Salem so he has producers and all kinds of guests. He’s extremely anti-mask and anti-lockdown. He had a doctor on recently that was pretty hostile to his views and I noticed that the doctor didn’t say one scientific fact about the efficacy of masks as a public health intervention. Proft has data almost every other week about non-efficacy masks for changing the r0.