Just made a response to a comment about the usefulness or otherwise of masks below a Youtube video somewhere and I can’t find it now. But I thought I’d reproduce my comment as I think it’s a good statement of where I’m at regarding all this.
The author of the comment was saying that most masks simply have a structure with holes big enough to let virus through with ease.
I don’t think he’s quite right or at least not always right. The thing has been raised before and there’s responses regarding different kinds of masks and the question of how the virus goes through the air (in a ball of water) and so on. It gets complicated.
So I decided to weigh in and said this:
I’m sure there’ll be many who’ll weigh in and poke holes in your figures one way or the other. It’s the same with everything.
With fomite transmission for instance – i.e. getting contaminated by touching a contaminated surface – arguments and figure contradicting each other all over the place. So I’ve just about given up entirely on that approach to understanding. That ‘under the hood’ approach.
Instead I stand back nowadays and just look at what’s happening and has happened over all. And the charts and graphs and figures after a year of it are many and easily available and clearly show that those places that didn’t bother with any of the hysteria: locking people away, wearing muzzles, disinfecting everything in sight – have almost everywhere actually done better than the hysterical places. Covid wise. In Covid deaths.
So that’s one thing. But another thing: they’re streets ahead, miles in front in avoiding the ‘collateral damage’ inflicted by the covid hysterical reactions. Amply documented by sunetra gupta’s ‘collateralglobal.org’ website. damage that starts right at home in your house and spreads out through your nation right out internatinally to some poor bugger starving to death under a thorn tree in Africa. True.
And they are streets ahead in avoiding all the economic costs of failed and damaged businesses, lower GDP and hence tax take hence available money for public services (though I think our pollies and administrators who decided this decimation would take place impoverishing us all individually and the nation as a whole, will still find their salaries fully available and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find them all submitting bills for an increase in salary, in fact).
And they are streets – miles, light years – ahead in that invisible, intangible, almost inexpressible magic thing called something like ‘the spirit’ of the human race or ‘the soul’ of the nation or maybe ‘the heart’ of the people for those people haven’t been turned into servile dogs to be sent to their kennels until further notice, not to be let out without muzzles and not to humanly touch each other and all of this without proof or rationale and even into an atmosphere wherein publicly protesting or asking inconvenient questions can get you arrested, prosecuted, banished, banned, an atmosphere wherein they are the craven objects dumb servile subjects of an authoritarian dictatorial unreasoning and unreasonable master class.
That’s pretty intangible all that. But that’s the most important of all. For that’s what humanity has been about from the very beginning and what all the world’s greatest literature, philosophy is about. It is what underlies our belief that democracy is such a wonderful thing. So there’s much to be learned simply by looking at those graphs. We can divide the USA, we can divide the world, into those that have been de-natured to the level of dumb drones and those who retain some human spirit and essence. It is very salutary. Very.