Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Chris Christie says he ‘was wrong’ not to wear face mask at White House” (The Hill):

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Thursday that he “was wrong” not to wear a face mask at the White House after testing positive for COVID-19 and spending a week in the hospital.

Christie told The New York Times that he thought he was in a “safe zone” when he attended the Sept. 26 event where President Trump officially nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Days later on Oct. 1, President Trump announced he and the first lady had tested positive for COVID-19.

The former governor announced his positive test on Oct. 3 and checked into the hospital after his doctor recommended he do so due to his asthma and weight. He spent days in the intensive care unit of Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey.

I wonder if this is a good illustration of the destructive power of faith in masks. A morbidly obese guy such as Chris Christie should be hiding in a bunker, not relying on a 2-cent surgical mask to keep coronavirus from finding its perfect host (his corpulence). Other than having gotten sick after not wearing a mask, what has Christie learned that would contradict this chart example:

Do we really want other morbidly obese guys pushing 60 to put their faith in masks because Christie thinks he would have had a different outcome if he’d used a bandana or similar for PPE?

Related:

• Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment? (every day we put our faith in masks is a day that we don’t reconfigure our world and our lives to be Covid-19-resistant)
• “Spain imposes state of emergency on Madrid” (BBC, October 9): after months of universal masking… a raging plague.

A Boston friend who is about 60 years old recently shared that the 50+ shutdown orders from the Maskachusetts governor had resulted in the loss of her fitness habits, a cessation in her gym visits, a substantial weight gain, and a general feeling of poor health. The shutdown that protected her from Covid-19, in other words, has rendered her far more vulnerable to Covid-19 than she ever was previously (see “Extra Pounds May Raise Risk of Severe Covid-19” (NYT, October 10, filed under “belaboring the obvious”).

Had this weakened her faith in the Church of Shutdown and made her think that we can’t prevent deaths, but only shift them from the elderly to the non-elderly? (see “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” for a partial calculation of how Americans will die prematurely over the coming years)

No!

She still believed in the religion for herself and others. I related to her the complaint of a 35-year-old helicopter instrument student that the shutdown was orchestrated by married people home in their big houses with their kids. “What about people like me,” he asked, “who still want to find someone to have children with? My social and dating lives were destroyed by the lockdown. Then, just as soon as things started to open a bit, I had to work 15 extra hours per week and go on the night shift because so many guys were home collecting their $600 per week and wouldn’t come back.” (I refrained from sharing that he might want to consider moving away from the jurisdiction of Massachusetts family law if his goal is to have children and remain part of their lives after the mom decided she needs to have sex with some new friends while hanging onto his paycheck.) Her response was simply to deny that the 35-year-old had suffered a loss. She imagined herself better situated to evaluate the impact of the shutdown on his life than he himself was.

She has some opportunities to observe high-school and college-age residents of the Boston area. As far as she can tell, they are not heeding directives to maintain social distance, wear masks when together, etc. As long as there is this substantial segment of the population ignoring most of the orders, doesn’t that mean that the plague will eventually spread widely, even if the orders could have worked in a more efficient police state? Apparently not!

For the Church of Shutdown faithful, Sweden’s lower death rate from COVID-19 can be explained primarily by the Swedes being masked and mostly shut down. By continuing to run schools, offices, restaurants, and gyms, the Swedes are merely practicing a variant form of shutdown. Without evidence or knowledge, American Shutdowners will simply assert that everyone in Sweden is wearing a mask. Sometimes white American Shutdown Karens will says that Sweden is a special case because the Swedes are vastly more intelligent than Americans (this might be a swipe at our darker-skinned underclass, which they believe does not exist in the Land of Blondes (in fact, 25 percent of Swedes are immigrants or children of immigrants)).

Enter @SvitlanaNosul, publishing smartphone videos that can be described only as “pornography” (showing humans doing things that are shocking to our sensibilities, e.g., riding the subway without masks). Examples:

Her Twitter bio:

I was born in the USSR, grew up in independent* Ukraine, and now live in the kingdom* of Sweden I stand for the truth and the right to be a free human being

She is lucky that she didn’t emigrate to Maskachusetts!