I'm not sure where you got that number, but it is very FALSE the way you state it! 1.8% of the US population would mean more than 6 million deaths.

The total number of deaths as of today was 611,611. The population is 332,391,067.

611,611/332,391,067 = 0.00184, or 0.184% of the United States population.

The 1.8% is about the death rate of reported cases, which even the CDC states is about half the actual number of cases in the country. This puts it at under 1% of the cases if the CDC estimate is correct.

Watch your numbers - there have been too many false claims already that a simple check can disprove.

I think the case numbers are underestimated even more according to other sources.

The best estimate I’ve seen for death rate was by the WHO in June of last year. They estimated the death rate was about 0.2-0.27 in healthy countries.

Naturally, the US has a high obesity rate. So I’d imagine estimated death rate of the disease is bumped up to 0.5% or so for the entire US: about 1.5 million people.

People are going to do their own cost-benefit analysis on mask wearing. I'd say that a large portion of the population don't want to wear a mask, generally. But if they want to go on vacation bad enough, and driving is not an option, they will wear a mask on the plane or Amtrak. Will they want to ride a tourist train bad enough to wear a mask?

So far, we haven’t had a problem with people not wearing masks. We have the TSA/FRA requirement noted on our website and our riders are also told when scheduling. I suspect that we might start getting some pushback as all precautions are lifted here in Ohio as Rick stated previously.

See, that's the problem.

People are very bad at performing cost benefit analysis on things like this.

The idea that "it could never happen to me" is very real.

It's the reason why we have all sorts of safety regulations that have proven, over the past 100 years, to make life in the United States significantly safer and healthier than it had been over the previous ones.

These regulations run the gamut from things like "you must wear a seatbelt" to "you can't plant bushes along the curb".

These are regulations put in place based off of the observation of people who actually study these things and have perspectives beyond "you're not the boss of me".

They end up saving lives because they protect people from threats they either don't know exist, haven't thought of, or have misunderstood the actual risk of.

It amazes me that I have to say this, but there are very good reasons we have laws and regulations in our world, even if those reasons may not be immediately apparent.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

I made a stupid math error - I moved the decimal over one place, which resulted in the erroneous 1.8% that I posted. (Reading Mr. Mitchell's posts caused me to repeatedly bang my head against my desk...)

Thanks for the correction.

For about a decade I was involved in how the National Weather Service messages warnings to the public across a number of channels. Our community was very well aware anytime we worked with local authorities to convince people to leave a shore when a tropical storm was approaching, there were always those who for various reasons would move towards the danger. In some respects, you sort of look at those folks, shake head, and stay focused on the majority.

Understand casualty rates with these sorts of events can be pretty subjective. When we hired a university to crunch numbers on the impact of heat waves in different cities (different cities react to heat waves in different ways so the message has to be tailored), we were taken aback by one researcher who pointed out while the death rates in some cities increased during the heat wave, the death rate dropped below normal _after_ the heatwave. They then statistically showed that some of those who died during the heatwave would have died in the two weeks after the heatwave of other causes. Should those people be counted? You can argue both ways.

Don't expect any firm COVID numbers. DO expect COVID numbers to be tweaked in various ways to suite specific political purposes and messages.

In my experience, country-wide Federal mandates, with a few exceptions, tend to be a mistake. The course of action at the start of COVID to push decisions to the local level using Federal (and State) guidance is a good one, IMHO (and the historically one). It would be best, IMHO, if tourist RR's were setting their COVID responses based on input from local health authorities. Different communities react to weather events differently. Same for COVID.

Bob

The whole problem with people being worried about COVID isn't so much that it'll kill folks, as yes the flu does that all the time, but it's the worry that people getting sick will choke the ERs to the point where people with other non-pandemic issues will die while waiting for treatment in a ER filled with COVID patients. That exact scenario is playing out all over the world at this moment and has also happened in several US hospitals.
I wouldn't have thought that people are just fine with taking that chance for all their friends and family just in the name of not wanting to wear masks, but I keep forgetting to never underestimate the selfish nature of people in any situation.
The problem with this is that with a hurricane, you're dealing with a short-term event that will kill many people in the storm surge and standing on the beach at that time.
With a pandemic, politicians are dealing with a long-term crisis, somethin voters really don't handle well. I feel for politicians because they're dealing with not only the reality of the situation but also an incredible (though expected) backlash from a lot of folks who simply want it to be over so bad, they'll ignore anything that doesn't get them there.
So, you have some governors making mask wearing a big thing, and others bowing to that voter pressure and saying, "Pandemic? WHAT pandemic? We're open for business, everyone!" to appears the voters.
And when that happens, it sort of nulls the argument that locals can handle themselves. In the end, the very people who will tell you what measures you must legally take are also the ones not sleeping at night worried about being voted out of office by those who want to ignore what's going on in the name of what they don't like.
The thing that really grates at me about all this is how many think that the ones making you wear masks want to do so out being some sort of comic book bad guy. Nobody wants to be the person who tells everyone they have to wear masks or get the vaccine to be able to travel publicly. They'd rather people go about their normal lives as that's the best way for them to get re-elected.
But it's really this simple; if people keep declaring the rules don't apply to them or denying the reality of this situation, will keep being where we are.
Why is that such a hard concept for so many?

I--and many other hearing-impaired people--canNOT understand people behind masks, especially an unfamiliar voice (say, a cashier, a police officer, a bureaucrat in an office, etc.).

It distorts their words, and removes my/our ability to lip-read to supplement my hearing aids. Hell, I can even tell on radio transmissions on the scanner who's masked and who isn't.

For that reason, a great many professors at a nearby university with which I work insisted on switching to see-through face shields while lecturing in halls without PA systems, on a campus where mask-wearing was mandated 24-7 except for eating, even outdoors. (They finally modified that policy a month ago, coming into harmony with recognizing vaccination rates.)

Further, there is a VERY real factor involved with body language and facial recognition. WE NEED SMILES. We need pouty looks. We need those looks that tell when someone is joking or being funny. Otherwise, we're all robots--and that's a factor public-service people have been confronting for well over a year, a "dehumanizing" effect, on both sides of the counter/bar/etc.
Some time ago (long before the pandemic, while I was involved with Asian anime conventions) I saw studies of this "dehumanizing" effect in Japan (where large numbers of people routinely mask against cold viruses in the winter) and China (smog there). The conclusions were not positive.

There are very valid reasons of societal interactions to reject the proposition that "wearing masks all the time harms no one else."

Ah... so you don’t want people to have the freedom to choose to wear a mask? How ironic!

If we were indeed "free to choose," this #*&%!@# thread wouldn't exist.

Further, that's not what I said by any stretch of the imagination.

I've been VERY sympathetic to small business owners that have medical reasons to be paranoid and, as one example, set up a counter at their outside door to take orders from patrons--but that also meant my spending with that particular store went down 75 percent because I couldn't peruse that day's produce and bargains, or find a product I hadn't tried before, which was sort of most of my point of going.

I’m sorry then, I thought you were saying nobody should be wearing masks at all. That’s my bad.

Sadly, it's a "bad" being repeated endlessly by millions upon millions nationwide.

Driven by the deliberate polarization of ALL subjects by politicians and sanctimonious "activists."

There exist middle grounds between the extremes that the media hyper-focus upon.

The blatant fact that you--and millions of others--can regurgitate a statistic like "1.8% of the entire US population were killed by this virus in the last 17 months" without immediately doing a common-sense, "wa-a-a-it a minute........." mental re-evaluation that should patently tell you what balderdash you are attempting to spout.............. is the reason we're in this national morass of aggravation, sanctimony, and acrimony.

The virus is now 90% less dangerous than you were previously believing, for whatever reason/source/bad math.

Would you not re-evaluate your stance or planned actions, based on this fact-check?

Lee, The lifiting of restrictions is mostly timed with significant reductions in active cases. It's not to appease voters, it's to reopen businesses that so badly need the business to survive.



Again, I'm baffled by whatever situation you're suffering in the Pacific NW. Meanwhile, in most states, the virus cases have dropped to such low levels. Look at the science and data. You must be really perplexed that the CDC has lifted mandates, despite your own beliefs. And, that's good, because we live in a country where we have the personal freedom mask to up long as you'd like.