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Why is Biden Still Wearing a Mask? (3 Viewers)
- Thread starter ekbeats
- Start date
matuski
Footballguy
The fact that masks are a comforting symbol is the result of the dogma.
It is ridiculous imo.
gianmarco
Footballguy
Last edited by a moderator:
AAABatteries
Footballguy
gianmarco
Footballguy
Stealthycat
Footballguy
I doubt Biden even knows why he's wearing one -
matuski
Footballguy
The definition is the explanation.
The CDC itself leads with labratory studies of cloth masks and an obervational study of 2 (yes, two) hairstylists and their customers. The studies in general are observational, and rely on interviews.
But don't you dare question it. Or wonder why you need to wear one when vaccinated. Or wonder why you wear one walking to a table then take it off when you sit down then put it on to go to the bathroom then take it off when you get back then put in back on to walk out.
Dogma - a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Masks are now a political symbol.
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks for the reply but I don’t see most of this as incontrovertibly truths. A lot of it is precautionary.
When The NY Times starts piling on about ridicule mask mandates outdoors, probably time to revise the guidance...
‘A huge exaggeration’
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
But the number is almost certainly misleading.
It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark — 10 percent — so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.
That benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
This isn’t just a gotcha math issue. It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky. C.D.C. officials have placed such a high priority on caution that many Americans are bewildered by the agency’s long list of recommendations. Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, writing in The Atlantic, called those recommendations “simultaneously too timid and too complicated.”
They continue to treat outdoor transmission as a major risk. The C.D.C. says that unvaccinated people should wear masks in most outdoor settings and vaccinated people should wear them at “large public venues”; summer camps should require children to wear masks virtually “at all times.”
These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.
Today’s newsletter will be a bit longer than usual, so I can explain how the C.D.C. ended up promoting a misleading number.
The Singapore mystery
If you read the academic research that the C.D.C. has cited in defense of the 10 percent benchmark, you will notice something strange. A very large share of supposed cases of outdoor transmission have occurred in a single setting: construction sites in Singapore.
In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.
This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.
The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.”
As Shashank did further reporting, he discovered reasons to think that many of the infections may have occurred indoors. At some of the individual construction sites where Covid spread — like a complex for the financial firm UBS and a skyscraper project called Project Glory — the concrete shells for the buildings were largely completed before the pandemic began. (This video of Project Glory was shot more than four months before Singapore’s first reported Covid case.)
Because Singapore is hot year-round, the workers would have sought out the shade of enclosed spaces to hold meetings and eat lunch together, Alex Au of Transient Workers Count Too, an advocacy group, told Shashank. Electricians and plumbers would have worked in particularly close contact.
Migrant workers in Singapore being tested for Covid-19 last year.How Hwee Young/EPA, via Shutterstock
Are schools outdoors?
How, then, did the Singapore cases get classified as they did?
When academic researchers began collecting Covid data from around the world, many chose to define outdoors spaces very broadly. They deemed almost any setting that was a mix of outdoors and indoors to be outdoors.
“We had to settle on one classification for building sites,” Quentin Leclerc, a French researcher and co-author of one of the papers analyzing Singapore, told me, “and ultimately decided on a conservative outdoor definition.” Another paper, published in the Journal of Infection and Public Health, counted only two settings as indoors: “mass accommodation and residential facilities.” It defined all of these settings as outdoors: “workplace, health care, education, social events, travel, catering, leisure and shopping.”
I understand why the researchers preferred a broad definition. They wanted to avoid missing instances of outdoor transmission and mistakenly suggesting that the outdoors was safer than it really was. But the approach had a big downside. It meant that the researchers counted many instances of indoors transmission as outdoors.
And yet even with this approach, they found a minuscule share of total transmission to have occurred outdoors. In the paper with 95 supposedly outdoor cases from Singapore, those cases nonetheless made up less than 1 percent of the total. A study from Ireland, which seems to have been more precise about the definition of outdoors, put the share of such transmission at 0.1 percent. A study of 7,324 cases from China found a single instance of outdoor transmission, involving a conversation between two people.
“I’m sure it’s possible for transmission to occur outdoors in the right circumstances,” Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania told me, “but if we had to put a number on it, I would say much less than 1 percent.”
Customers at a pub in Bexleyheath, England, after a national lockdown was lifted last month.Mary Turner for The New York Times
Britain’s scientific approach
I asked the C.D.C. how it could justify the 10 percent benchmark, and an official there sent this statement:
There are limited data on outdoor transmission. The data we do have supports the hypothesis that the risk of outdoor transmission is low. 10 percent is a conservative estimate from a recent systematic review of peer-reviewed papers. CDC cannot provide the specific risk level for every activity in every community and errs on the side of protection when it comes to recommending steps to protect health. It is important for people and communities to consider their own situations and risks and to take appropriate steps to protect their health.
Erring on the side of protection — by exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission — may seem to have few downsides. But it has contributed to widespread public confusion about what really matters. Some Americans are ignoring the C.D.C.’s elaborate guidelines and ditching their masks, even indoors, while others continue to harass people who walk around outdoors without a mask.
All the while, the scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.’s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors.
The health authorities in Britain, notably, seem to have figured this out. They have been more aggressive about restricting indoor behavior, locking down many businesses again late last year and requiring masks indoors even as most of the country is vaccinated. Outdoors, however, masks remain rare.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be causing problems. Since January, daily Covid deaths in Britain have declined more than 99 percent.
‘A huge exaggeration’
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
But the number is almost certainly misleading.
It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark — 10 percent — so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.
That benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
This isn’t just a gotcha math issue. It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky. C.D.C. officials have placed such a high priority on caution that many Americans are bewildered by the agency’s long list of recommendations. Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, writing in The Atlantic, called those recommendations “simultaneously too timid and too complicated.”
They continue to treat outdoor transmission as a major risk. The C.D.C. says that unvaccinated people should wear masks in most outdoor settings and vaccinated people should wear them at “large public venues”; summer camps should require children to wear masks virtually “at all times.”
These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.
Today’s newsletter will be a bit longer than usual, so I can explain how the C.D.C. ended up promoting a misleading number.
The Singapore mystery
If you read the academic research that the C.D.C. has cited in defense of the 10 percent benchmark, you will notice something strange. A very large share of supposed cases of outdoor transmission have occurred in a single setting: construction sites in Singapore.
In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.
This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.
The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.”
As Shashank did further reporting, he discovered reasons to think that many of the infections may have occurred indoors. At some of the individual construction sites where Covid spread — like a complex for the financial firm UBS and a skyscraper project called Project Glory — the concrete shells for the buildings were largely completed before the pandemic began. (This video of Project Glory was shot more than four months before Singapore’s first reported Covid case.)
Because Singapore is hot year-round, the workers would have sought out the shade of enclosed spaces to hold meetings and eat lunch together, Alex Au of Transient Workers Count Too, an advocacy group, told Shashank. Electricians and plumbers would have worked in particularly close contact.
Migrant workers in Singapore being tested for Covid-19 last year.How Hwee Young/EPA, via Shutterstock
Are schools outdoors?
How, then, did the Singapore cases get classified as they did?
When academic researchers began collecting Covid data from around the world, many chose to define outdoors spaces very broadly. They deemed almost any setting that was a mix of outdoors and indoors to be outdoors.
“We had to settle on one classification for building sites,” Quentin Leclerc, a French researcher and co-author of one of the papers analyzing Singapore, told me, “and ultimately decided on a conservative outdoor definition.” Another paper, published in the Journal of Infection and Public Health, counted only two settings as indoors: “mass accommodation and residential facilities.” It defined all of these settings as outdoors: “workplace, health care, education, social events, travel, catering, leisure and shopping.”
I understand why the researchers preferred a broad definition. They wanted to avoid missing instances of outdoor transmission and mistakenly suggesting that the outdoors was safer than it really was. But the approach had a big downside. It meant that the researchers counted many instances of indoors transmission as outdoors.
And yet even with this approach, they found a minuscule share of total transmission to have occurred outdoors. In the paper with 95 supposedly outdoor cases from Singapore, those cases nonetheless made up less than 1 percent of the total. A study from Ireland, which seems to have been more precise about the definition of outdoors, put the share of such transmission at 0.1 percent. A study of 7,324 cases from China found a single instance of outdoor transmission, involving a conversation between two people.
“I’m sure it’s possible for transmission to occur outdoors in the right circumstances,” Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania told me, “but if we had to put a number on it, I would say much less than 1 percent.”
Customers at a pub in Bexleyheath, England, after a national lockdown was lifted last month.Mary Turner for The New York Times
Britain’s scientific approach
I asked the C.D.C. how it could justify the 10 percent benchmark, and an official there sent this statement:
There are limited data on outdoor transmission. The data we do have supports the hypothesis that the risk of outdoor transmission is low. 10 percent is a conservative estimate from a recent systematic review of peer-reviewed papers. CDC cannot provide the specific risk level for every activity in every community and errs on the side of protection when it comes to recommending steps to protect health. It is important for people and communities to consider their own situations and risks and to take appropriate steps to protect their health.
Erring on the side of protection — by exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission — may seem to have few downsides. But it has contributed to widespread public confusion about what really matters. Some Americans are ignoring the C.D.C.’s elaborate guidelines and ditching their masks, even indoors, while others continue to harass people who walk around outdoors without a mask.
All the while, the scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.’s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors.
The health authorities in Britain, notably, seem to have figured this out. They have been more aggressive about restricting indoor behavior, locking down many businesses again late last year and requiring masks indoors even as most of the country is vaccinated. Outdoors, however, masks remain rare.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be causing problems. Since January, daily Covid deaths in Britain have declined more than 99 percent.
And now an anecdote... Was running Sunday on a remote track in CT. One lady was there walking on the track, wearing a mask. Gave me a dirty look for not wearing a mask and stormed off the track. And this while the CT Governor is predicting herd immunity by this summer, with 71 percent of everyone in Connecticut over the age of 18 having already received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And Biden reinforces this stupidity when he walks around outdoors with a mask on.
matuski
Footballguy
If you don't think mask wearing is an incontrovertible truth, then you and I agree.
Of course this makes it weird that it has anything to do with leadership.
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Shula-holic
Footballguy
We had a fit high school football coach try running stadium steps with one here before they started practicing football this past year. Dude had to throw in the towel with the mask. Maybe it’s a mix of Alabama heat and humidity but he couldn’t cope with that strenuous of activity in the heat with a mask.
General Malaise
Footballguy
oh hahahahahahah....yet another joke about Biden's mental acuity. Why is this crap tolerated?
timschochet
Footballguy
Slavishly is not a word I would use (not sure I ever have.)
Experts are not to be absolutely followed, nobody is. But I do think that as a general rule we should give their advice greater weight than, say, somebody with political motivations.
timschochet
Footballguy
You first posted this over a year ago. Coming from you it would be a much stronger argument now if you hadn’t made it back then.
Well a little over a year ago Fauci was telling us we didn't need to wear a mask so ........
Because he ain't all there. Even though he said he intends to run again, if he remembers, even your Vegas odds don't have him as the favorite to last that long.
General Malaise
Footballguy
Who is the dude sipping the coffee? I want to put some money on himHarris +400
Biden +450
Trump +550
+800
General Malaise
Footballguy
Just reporting the Bovada odds, sir.Only one of those have announced they plan on running in 2024.
Right, now imagine what happens to the odds if either of the other two announce they are running. If Trump announced he would instantly become the favorite and that would be an apples to apples comparisons. Except Joe might be a bad apple because there is significant chance he doesn't make it that long which you can see reflected in the Harris price.Just reporting the Bovada odds, sir.
Insulting Biden’s mental acuity after the last guy seriously suggested injecting disinfectant
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/24/context-what-donald-trump-said-about-disinfectant-/
General Malaise
Footballguy
dozer
Footballguy
You don’t think Trump will lose support for continuing to spout the obvious lie that the election was stolen? Won’t people get tired of being lied to?
dozer
Footballguy
General Malaise
Footballguy
Dickies
Footballguy
But can Biden recite Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV?Insulting Biden’s mental acuity after the last guy seriously suggested injecting disinfectant
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
He told people to inject themselves with bleach and still very nearly won reelection. His base just doesn't care.
About the odds, me neither. But, you wondered why people can claim Biden is declining physically and/or mentally. It's because it's true and you can see it right there in the odds.
General Malaise
Footballguy
What I'm wondering is why it's okay to attack Biden in here for his mental acuity when any attacks on Trump for the same were met with the report button and an order not to say anything bad about Trump's mental or physical traits. Goose/gander and all that.
-fish-
Footballguy
The gambling sites made a killing on the 2020 election because they couldn't post odds bad enough to deter Trump supporters. The odds have nothing to do with childish claims of Biden's mental acuity, and everything to do with the fact that Trump bettors are willing to make irrational bets. Something like 80% of the money bet was on Trump. Gambling sites will continue to cash in on this, which is why Trump is a heavy favorite to win the Republican nomination even though he probably won't run.
dozer
Footballguy
Amused to Death
Footballguy
And stared into a solar eclipse.Insulting Biden’s mental acuity after the last guy seriously suggested injecting disinfectant
dozer
Footballguy
Dickies
Footballguy
Dickies
Footballguy
General Malaise
Footballguy
Yeah, most of us did do time for insults lobbed at Trump. And yet day after day after day in here it's "Gee, I wonder if Biden even knows where he is" hahahahahalalollllllooooolooollooooo
dozer
Footballguy
I hear ya.
I mean, I'm not saying that after living through 2020... I could probably use some sensitivity training.
But somebody has an itchy report finger around here.
Ehh, it goes both ways. Calling AOC a moron gets you a time out. Calling Biden or Trump would get you a time out as well. Seems silly but it is their board and their rules. We are all adults and as long as we aren't attacking other members it seems okay to me.
sho nuff
Footballguy
Shawnky
Footballguy
But he’s the best and knows more about anything and everything than anyone else.Insulting Biden’s mental acuity after the last guy seriously suggested injecting disinfectant
It's simple math. One shoe in nomination for the Republicans and (despite Biden saying he intends to run again) the Democrats do not know who their nominee is. The odds say it's likely Biden or Harris with the edge to Harris right now.
DeSantis is probably about +800? right now and that support goes to Trump if he announces. Now if Trump looses support of the Republicans, or legit challenger shows up and announces they are running the odds would change again.
I wouldn't recommend wagering lots of money without understanding how odds work.
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