COVID Theatre Kills

 

Today the New York City Mayor’s Office announced that like it’s doing with restaurants, soon storefronts will be doing business outside. Just in time for the balmy months of winter, famously temperate and mild in the Northeast United States.

This is yet another anti-science response to COVID. Throughout contact tracing efforts, we’ve never seen grocery stores or other retail operations prove to be a hotspot for COVID, if they were, we’d all have had it in March and April.

I think to some extent, masks are another part of our COVID theatre. They have been billed as a magic bullet that will save us all, except, they aren’t.

It’s the same story in Europe. John McGuirk, an Irish writer and political commentator wonders:

We now have far more cases than we had in the spring, when the official consensus from Governments was that facemasks are bad.

How can this be so? Are there other explanations?

First, remember what the argument against masks was, back in the Spring:

Here in Ireland, HSE lead for infectious diseases Prof Martin Cormican recently reviewed guidelines on mask-wearing for hospital staff and came to the conclusion that there was no evidence to support the wearing of surgical masks by healthcare workers for close patient encounters and staff meetings.

Citing WHO advice, Prof Cormican suggested mask-wearing by people with no symptoms could create unnecessary cost and create “a false sense of security”.

That’s the HSE lead for infectious diseases, warning that masks might actually be counter-productive, saying that wearing them could lead to people dropping their guard.

Is that what’s happened? Is there a sense, perhaps, that wearing the mask is a good enough protection and that other attempts at self-preservation have fallen by the wayside? How many people, for example, still keep hand sanitiser in their cars, and use it immediately after getting in? How many people have stopped doing that, and now take their mask off using hands they’ve touched fourteen or fifteen surfaces with?

Repeatedly, in the spring, we were warned that facemasks would pose hygiene risks – that people would touch them, not clean them properly, and mis-use them in such a way as to actually heighten the risk of virus transmission. Do those warnings look more, or less, prescient, today?

Of course, there’s no going back. Because for most people, masks do provide a sense of security. But could it be that the sense of security is, in fact, what’s proving fatal?

This has been my thinking on masks over the last few weeks especially, as I’ve seen the social distancing we know slows the spread slowly fading, as folks around me relying on whatever protection they think they’re getting from their masks. This is an extension what I call COVID theatre, the games we play that make us think we’re safer, but really do little more than lower our guard.

Earlier in the pandemic, we saw another important part of COVID theatre taking center stage: temperature checks. At several local businesses, they were performed outside, and I always liked to sneak a peek at the number and laugh: usually our temperatures were in the 93-degree range; even in the heat of the summer. On one outing I noticed all of my kids’ readings were “too low” on the thermometer gun, which I saw as we were waved in for admission.

I recalled this today as I read a powerful profile of Herman Cain from BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray, and in her piece, she talked to Cain’s family about his decision to attend the President’s rally in Tulsa.

Melanie Cain Gallo believes he could have been more careful — after the Tulsa rally, she said, she questioned him herself about why he wasn’t wearing a mask in the photo he tweeted. He told his daughter that he felt comfortable enough to do so because of the event’s temperature checks, a measure that was popular early in the pandemic that scientists increasingly say offers little protection.

We know one effective preventative in the fight against COVID: physical distancing (which, frustratingly is more commonly known as social distancing). Regular hand washing and avoiding touching one’s face doesn’t hurt either. With all of the additional COVID theatre, I think at the tail end of this epidemic we’ll wonder how much it actually contributed to the death toll. At the best, we may learn it led to a feeling of complacency, and at the worst, we may discover it made viral transmission worse.

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  1. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    MiMac (View Comment):
    The relook at the study demonstrated that the cloth mask group that used quality washing WERE PROTECTED in a similar fashion as those wearing surgical masks.

    Yes, but protected in regard to this study is a relative term.

    • #91
  2. Weeping Inactive
    Weeping
    @Weeping

    MiMac (View Comment):

    For those constantly citing that masks make it worse-(based on the study of healthcare workers in Vietnam wearing cloth masks-a study with a number of problems in evaluating the use of masks in the community) the article you cite has been superseded by additional work by the SAME authors- and their conclusion is: “A well-washed cloth mask can be as protective as a medical mask.”

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32988954/

    Do you think most of the masks being worn by the general public are well-washed?

    • #92
  3. MiMac Thatcher
    MiMac
    @MiMac

    Weeping (View Comment):

    MiMac (View Comment):

    For those constantly citing that masks make it worse-(based on the study of healthcare workers in Vietnam wearing cloth masks-a study with a number of problems in evaluating the use of masks in the community) the article you cite has been superseded by additional work by the SAME authors- and their conclusion is: “A well-washed cloth mask can be as protective as a medical mask.”

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32988954/

    Do you think most of the masks being worn by the general public are well-washed?

    Perhaps not-but they also do not face the viral load that healthcare workers in high risk wards do either. You are entering into speculation at this point- I am only pointing out the FACT that this study DOES NOT show cloth masks are dangerous and it showed that cloth masks (when hospital laundered) were equally protective as compared to surgical masks.  Again, this study is not very useful for evaluating our current situation (flaws in design, not community use, not the same class of virus etc)- and there are several observational studies of actual coronavirus outbreaks which demonstrate that the community use of masks helps limit spread- which closely mimics the situation we face now. The reason I point out this study is, it is one of most quoted by anti-maskers (especially the older version before the re-analysis) and it doesn’t really support their position. This, like the NEJM opinion piece of May 2020, is a favorite of the anti-mask crowd & that article has been, for all practical purposes, retracted. It is essentially  intellectually dishonest, at this point, to claim these 2 articles  show that masks don’t work.

    ADDENDUM- it is difficult for the lay public to be aware that these oft cited articles have been modified/retracted so that they no longer are useful in claims that masks don’t work. But, in the medical community such things are not hard to see because to truly understand a study you have to read its particulars AND read the letters to the editor over the ensuing several months. It is very common for the understanding of issues to evolve when other experts look at & critique a study and many famous retractions have occurred because of that process. To provide a crude  analogy, no one cites Ptolemy anymore as an authority in astronomy, nor Newton in particle physics because subsequent work has superseded their work- and these 2 articles have been superseded as well.

    • #93
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