Not in September. There were massive riots and political rallies, remember?
> they are refusing to get vaccines
A lot of them are already immune due to having had covid. About half, assuming random sampling. And last year _nobody_ had any vaccines.
> people are not protecting themselves
Protections that are currently deployed are mostly "covid theater" anyway. Nobody even checks your body temperature when you go into a grocery store or board a plane.
> Plus we have a new variant of COVID—Delta—that is both more contagious, and may hit you harder.
The first part of that is true, but the second is not - Delta seems to be more contagious but less deadly. This is a fairly common progression in viral evolution.
> Not in September. There were massive riots and political rallies, remember?
Yes, in September. There were riots and protests in some places, but most of the country was very much in lockdown conditions with significantly more restrictions in place than there are today.
PCR cycle threshold was reduced in January, so if anything we should be getting a lot fewer false positives now (and a lot more false negatives), even though testing throughput is 1.5x of what it was in Sep 2020. But again, half the people had the disease, and well over a half had the vaccine. We should not be seeing what we're seeing. Remember - 4 times as many people aren't even on the radar, they have mild cases and never go to the hospital.
We should be asking questions as to whether multi-trillion dollar bullshit we've been doing to "stop covid" (which can't be stopped) is effective or not, yet there's a very notable lack of journalistic inquisitiveness in that regard. It's becoming a religion, basically, where if you challenge the dogma you're branded an apostate and excommunicated instead of anyone trying to persuade you with facts.
FWIW, not a single soul is even asking the obvious question: what scientific justification is there to require vaccination for people with _confirmed_ previous covid infection? Science says they already enjoy immunity superior to any vaccine available on the market. And yet they are considered "unvaccinated", and could lose their livelihood if they live in blue states or work for (or even _with_) the federal government. Especially the medical frontline workers that just last year were "heroes" and had covid in droves: a lot of them have lost their jobs yesterday in NY.
If this was about science, it'd focus on vulnerable populations. During the entire duration of this pandemic, only a little over 400 children have died with covid, and less than 1400 people in the 15-24 age range. Yet where is the public discourse focused now? On vaccinating the children and the young adults. Why? I have a thousand such "why"s and the whole situation, to me at least, stinks of corruption, ineptitude, and science denialism, because nobody has a coherent answer, even the people who should know better. And the less educated folks, while they might not understand the subtleties of this debate, can smell the bullshit too.
Vaccines are effective at reducing severity of the disease, sure, cold, hard data supports that. Masks though? In confined spaces like airplanes and especially if you did not even screen for basic symptoms like fever beforehand? LOL. Fact is, there is absolutely nothing standing in the way of a symptomatic COVID carrier getting onto a plane and infecting everyone inside. From which we can conclude that the masks are 2020 version of TSA: security theater aimed at pacifying the public and little else.
Airplanes are also stuffed like sardine cans with people, some of whom may be contagious. Not even N95 would save you after 5 hours in that environment. Nor are they sanitized after the previous group of passengers disembarks. Just give it up already, you know I'm right.
> Airplanes are also stuffed like sardine cans with people, some of whom may be contagious. Not even N95 would save you after 5 hours in that environment
Airplanes shove the air from their cabin through hospital-or-grade air filters every 1.5-2 minutes (that is, the amount of time air can "hang" before being filtered maxes at 2 minutes if on the lowest setting, 1.5 on a normal setting. Those filters will catch the particles half the size of COVID at at least 99.99%. Also, the airflow is designed to get replaced with air from outside the plane regularly, and airflow is designed to really be isolated in any 3 seat element (obviously, not exclusively, but most air is only going to be shared with your neighbors.
Being on an actual airplane is probably one of the safer places to be indoors. Everyone knows about contagion on cruise ships. Why aren't there stories about airborne outbreaks on airplanes?
Not in September. There were massive riots and political rallies, remember?
> they are refusing to get vaccines
A lot of them are already immune due to having had covid. About half, assuming random sampling. And last year _nobody_ had any vaccines.
> people are not protecting themselves
Protections that are currently deployed are mostly "covid theater" anyway. Nobody even checks your body temperature when you go into a grocery store or board a plane.
> Plus we have a new variant of COVID—Delta—that is both more contagious, and may hit you harder.
The first part of that is true, but the second is not - Delta seems to be more contagious but less deadly. This is a fairly common progression in viral evolution.