During the first year of the pandemic, before vaccines were available, they were clearly effective.
I believe that Mr. Leonhardt made essentially the exact same point in his opinion piece:
During an acute crisis — such as the early months of Covid, when masks were one of the few available forms of protection — strict guidelines can nonetheless make sense. Public health officials can urge people to wear tightfitting, high-quality masks and almost never take them off in public. If the mandate has even a modest benefit, it can be worth it.
“Early months”? Lockdowns started in March 2000 and vaccinations weren’t widely available until more than a year later. His “over the past two years” would mean back to July 2000, when nobody had been vaccinated. He’s an apologist for dumb fucks pretending the pandemic is over.
Mask mandates are still effective where they can be enforced.
As you’ll recall, for several months after the pandemic reached the US, starting in January 2020, the Red Hat covid deniers led by Trump did essentially nothing to try to manage the spread of the disease. The first CDC recommendation for universal masking in the US wasn’t until April 2020. New York issued a state-wide mask mandate that same month, but the earliest mask mandate in CA wasn’t until June. Some states never issued any mandated masking. Vaccinations didn’t start to become available to everyone over age 12 until May, 2021, about a year ago.
With these dates in mind, I don’t know why Mr. Leonhardt didn’t say “over the past year” instead of “over the past two years”, which is an exaggeration on his part. But he still cites some interesting information about covid spread in his opinion piece, and some accurate (in my view) sociological reactions to mandated masking vs. voluntary masking. He has a right to express his opinions, even if some people strongly disagree. And in fact I for one happen to agree with a number of things that he discussed.
The Bay Area mask mandates started in April 2020, the month after lockdown. I got my first shot in February 2021, when vaccines were first available to anyone 65 and over.
That was presented as a news article, not an opinion piece, though I guess a newsletter isn’t specifically either.
You’re right, I had the vaccination availability date wrong in my post. It was available to different people at different times. In late 2020, it was available to a select group, such as health care workers, etc. Then in January 2021 it became available to people over 75, and next to people over 65. (I got my first shot in Jan 2021.) By May 2021 it was available to all people over 12. I was implicitly referring to the last of these dates in my post but had the month wrong. It was May, not August. I’ve corrected that in the post. Still, closer to one year ago than two.
As discussed above - with the current SCOTUS majority it will be nearly impossible for any willing politician to “force” vaccines more on everybody who hasn’t done it so far. (and only vaccine mandates will at this point drive the vaccination and booster rates up). As a consequence, particular with variants were even vaccination and prior covid exposure don’t any longer more or less guarantee you to stay out of hospitals, masks are one of the more effective ways to avoid getting infected (and unfortunately with prior variants one could argue to not care about willingly unvaccinated people anymore and let them suffer/die - the new variants (and any future variants) have changed the balance even for vaccinated people as long as we don’t have highly variant-specific vaccines (which would require skipping clinical trials to arrive on time - which is questionable with the current FDA) or a pan-coronavirus vaccine which will take at least 2-3 years (if everything works perfectly) as these will need definitely clinical trials.
Clearly shows the idiocy of dropping mask requirements at indoor workplaces. Very useful to see which businesses / sectors are at fault, why haven’t we had this all along?
In L.A. County, outbreaks are occurring at work sites with the greatest number of employees, including airports. At the Transportation Security Administration at Los Angeles International Airport, 137 cases were reported among employees. American Airlines at LAX saw 94 cases among its workforce; Southwest Airlines had 38 cases at Hollywood Burbank Airport and 28 at its Terminal 1 facility at LAX.
Also affected are companies associated with food production and retail. They include Smithfield Foods in Vernon, which processes hogs, with 54 cases; Costco in Burbank, with 38; Whole Foods Market in Glendale, with 30; and Lee Kum Kee in Industry, which produces Asian sauces, with 28.
I’ve been following the covid plots in the LA Times for a very long time. Here’s one of them (from their website, today). It’s vaccination “disparities” by racial group, for LA County. The plot for SD County, where I live, is qualitatively (and almost quantitatively) the same. Asians and American Indians, et. al., seem to have their act together (and have had for a long time), vaccination-wise. The trends in the other ethnic groups have been discouraging and have hardly budged for the past year.
Not to place blame, but I wonder how closely these data correlate with the people who are currently in ICUs, as well as deaths, due to covid, putting aside reported “cases” for the moment. From what has been often said, it is the unvaccinated who have been and continue to be most at risk of severe disease and death.
And how many people in the named workplaces (in the LAT article) are in the lowest-vaccinated ethnic groups?
Well, we all know that. But vaccination still does keep people from getting severe disease, and from dying. Unless virtually all of the experts (other than yourself) are wrong.
And I wouldn’t have used the absolute term “nothing” in any case, when referring to infection." Reduced protection, yes, but “does nothing” isn’t really true.
Also, I specifically excluded “cases” in the post that you replied to.
Sure, but that’s irrelevant to the workplace cluster case counts.
It seems clear to me that vaccination does nothing to protect against infection by BA.5 given how many boosted and double-boosted people have gotten it. They may well be more likely to have asymptomatic or mild cases, but the two I know personally who got it last weekend are pretty miserable.
Any statistic of current case counts is irrelevant to what percentage of the infected individuals will be hospitalized or die.
There’s surely a correlation between working at a high-risk low-paid job and being a member of a less-vaccinated demographic, but that’s not Apple Store or Warner Bros. employees.
When you say that, you might be thinking that most employees at these two workplaces are middle-class (or affluent) White or Asian. Maybe so, but there’s no shortage of unvaccinated Whites in LA.
And what about the other workplaces mentioned in the article?
Fine with me, but you did, after all, post the LAT article about outbreak clusters in LA workplaces that leads to what I think are some reasonable questions. Your comment in in prefacing the link was provocative:
“Very useful to see which businesses / sectors are at fault, why haven’t we had this all along?”
