Hahaha. You think our government would shut down anything because of a few new cases?
Seriously, thanks for the update. Until there’s widespread immunity through vaccination, this is going to be life for the foreseeable future: opening and closing, tamping down flare-ups as they occur.
I was in a store this morning. All the employees were wearing mask. Very few had them covering their mouths. There was a trend that I saw, the older the employees were, the more likely they were to wear mask correctly.
Oh- and there was a sign at the front of the store requiring a face covering of all who entered. Guess that low pay and lack of health insurance is enough to risk catching COVID.
Spec’s has a mask-wearing policy for customers, but they don’t seem to enforce it. HEB doesn’t seem to have one. I get it: it’s hard for a retail establishment to have security on the door to eject customers.
As usual, it comes back to the fact that this should be nationwide policy, with leadership by example from the top. Instead you have the White House constantly flouting mask-wearing and social distancing in front of the cameras, with reports that it’s worse behind the scenes. How is Joe Public supposed to get the message through his inch-think skull when he sees the President on down ignoring basic anti-transmission practices?
I’ve seen people wearing masks without covering their noses. How do you wear a mask without covering your mouth? Does that even count as “wearing” a mask?
At Home Depot I was expecting the not-wearing-masks crowd to be mostly the white-Boomer-wearing-a-US-flag-shirt type, but there were people of all ages and colors not wearing masks.
The White House showing why it’s going to be difficult the re-open while there’s still no vaccine:
Trump Urges U.S. Back to Work While Combating In-House Outbreak
President Donald Trump faces a tricky proposition this week, as he tries to convince Americans it’s safe to return to work and social life while combating a coronavirus scare moving closer than ever to his own office.
Vice President Mike Pence has been self-isolating from the White House following his press secretary Katie Miller’s diagnosis of Covid-19 on Friday, said three people familiar with the situation. A spokesman said he’d be back at the White House on Monday.
11 Secret Service employees infected with coronavirus, 60 in self-quarantine
At least 11 U.S. Secret Service employees were reported to be infected with the coronavirus and about 60 other staffers were in self-quarantine, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
This will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next 9-12 months. I was in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City last year and, because of the high-particulant pollution and population density, everyone wears masks when they are going about their day. I asked a local why the young women especially wore their masks even on clear days and inside and she said that it’s 1) a positive peer pressure fashion statement based originally on social good hygiene and 2) they feel like it allows them to control their social interactions better. Incidence of unwanted advances are waaaaaay down when wearing a mask since the masks hide the appearance and the assumption is the person may indeed be sick.
Thanks for the link. The science is always evolving on this matter, but the observations/conclusions in the article make sense to me. Mainly because they are similar to more conclusive knowledge from other airborne viruses. I also suspect that one day, we will learn that the infectious dose one receives is an important factor in their severity of illness.
Anyways, it’s hard at this point to convince people that any COVID-related science is true these days, but those conclusions offer a lot of guidance to the public, at least for those who are willing to learn.
There is indeed a growing list of evidence-based initial findings that support this. Virus load appears to impact two discrete vectors: 1) higher load increases the severity of disease (which is counterintuitive with virus propagation) and 2) higher load increases the chance of disease (which is commonly typical with virus propagation).
The other day at the grocery store everyone was wearing masks but multiple shoppers would pull their mask down in order to speak with the employees, utterly defeating the purpose.