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I think it's time to seriously think about putting the same amount of effort into non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) development as we put into the vaccines. As inspiration, note that parts of the US are have environments that can support malaria; malaria can spread very aggressively when conditions are favorable [1]; and that malaria used to be a major public health threat in the US. It is not anymore, despite the fact that there is no vaccine, because of NPI's. It was initially beaten back using NPI's and has been controlled using NPI's ever since [2]. What if we had an affordable, comfortable mask that worked so well that you have no practical chance of contracting an airborne virus while wearing it? I get that current N95 and surgical masks are not that, but I don't see why it would be impossible to create one within the physical laws of the universe, especially if you put power and air supplies on the table. Scuba gear and air-supplied biohazard suits seem to be existence proofs, the question is whether they can be made practical. If everyone had such a mask, we would have a new strategy available for controlling delta and any other variant that emerges in the future: everyone could mask up full-time when outside the house _for a limited amount of time_ until transmission drops to a low level. From that point, local outbreaks could be controlled by local bouts of masking, plus aggressive testing and contact tracing. I get that anti-masking would be an obstacle, but part of the difficulty has been messaging risk and uncertainty to people who start from a skeptical place. A mask that _positively_ protects the wearer, and that can remove the need for restrictions within a finite, predictable time, would be an easier sell, especially after the strategy is seen to work once or twice. 1: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm... |
"I feel that being vaccinated is good enough criteria to stop wearing a mask or social distance"
The problem is that the goalposts keep shifting with this pandemic. Biden said earlier that if you got vaccinated you wouldn't need a mask any more. That was true for maybe 1 month here in Maryland. Goalposts have since shifted. What is the endgame? Nobody seems to know. It's just a nebulous incoherent mixture of random arguments involving protecting the unvaccinated, preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed, protecting children and immunocompromised, preventing covid from mutating, etc. Heavy handed public health policies aren't free. You might accomplish some public health goal, but at the cost of increased social discord, decreased citizen morale, increased mistrust of the government, increased illwill toward the government, or other factors which could have far worse long term consequences.