Yes, my bad, fixed/edited. Thank you.

I did hoard a few N95 masks (and by "hoard" I mean "presume that doctors wouldn't want them if they're covered in paint dust" because I didn't throw them out). I used those under a cloth mask when the COVID numbers were bad. The fit is vastly better than a cloth mask, but I can only stand to wear them for a few minutes if I'm not also holding a sander or an angle grinder.

So they spread the lie that masks don't work in order to stop us from buying up all the masks and leaving none for the healthcare workers. Now they tell us this lie was necessary to protect us from healthcare workers running out of masks. So they had to lie to us for our own good. What else might they be lying about for our own good? Why not just tell us the truth and control the supply to make sure healthcare workers get them? And how do we know that was the real reason for lying about the masks not working?

Dr. Fauci told us the masks did no good because of the mask openings were too large to stop the particles. That was relative to that date and to all time after. So it is relevant today, and thus the question becomes, what it the point of wearing masks that do no good?

To that point, Dr. Fauci told us that masks were needed as a symbol of being good people who follow the advice of the authorities. That was the purpose of masks.

Then the purpose of masks was said to be back to protecting from the virus, but only for preventing people from transmitting the virus to others. It was said the do nothing to prevent people from receiving the virus. We had extravagant public service advertisements that featured dozens of people wearing masks and explaining that the only reason is that they care about the welfare of others.

Then soon after the CDC reversed that message to a new message (last fall) that said, "wear a mask. They protect others and the person wearing them."

The claim that a person wearing a mask only protects others quite conspicuously went out the window.

Because they figured out lying wasn't good public health policy. Your questions are just creating FUD, which is itself dishonest.



No, science does not work that way.

There is no "all time after" in science. Newton's laws got obsoleted by Einstein's, which have been obsoleted by all the stuff they're doing with quarks and hadrons.



Based on what the science had established at the time, yes. As with Newton, that understanding *will* change.

Scientists are very comfortable with that, and in fact perpetuate it. Science does not stop at the first convenient answer, like some people. The most powerful phrase in science is "I don't know". That seems like weakness, it's actually strength. It's what makes science different from belief.

Notably, almost every aspect of your life which differs from the life of Amish people came out of that very science.



Right, because science learned more facts.

This is how things work. It is normal.

There is obviously quite a gap between science and omniscience. That is normal too. Omniscience is the realm of gods, not people.

People have to get there the hard way.

It would seem to me that people who look for god-like performance in people would be susceptible to falling into "cults of personality". Some Pied Piper type jackass who says all the right things could lead them to bad places. Or at least, to forget themselves, their country, their education, their empathy, and their common sense.

Back to the question asked by the OP.

YES, if you're a tourist railroad carrying members of the general public ALWAYS adhere to the official policy mandates of the CDC/DOT/FRA. Always err on the side of caution and insist that all your staff and customers are fully masked.

That's how you'll stay out of potential trouble.

Real simple.....just wear the mask!!!

Ross Rowland

This is the mindset you're up against.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... ted-500784

NEWS FLASH:

STUPID PEOPLE EXIST.

Film USED to be at 11:45, when late-night TV hosts like Jay Leno and his successors would do "man on the street" interviews asking basic school-level-knowledge questions to "demonstrate" or "showcase" the inane stupidity of the average tourist or passer-by on said street.

Guess what.
If you gave correct answers as many most assuredly did, you didn't make it on national TV. You ended up "erased."

Media stories like this highlight anomalies and exceptions.
Nobody in the news media seeks out the skeptics that think the crisis is being exaggerated for political purposes, but still get vaccinated, mask up, and/or stay away from public gatherings because they'll go along with the "greater good."
No one in the media, save for specialized science magazines, seek out the cautious scientists that say "we still really don't know what we really need to know."
No one in the media goes to the airport and reports on all the take-offs and landings that happened without incident or crashes.
They seek out the extremists, the delusional, the paranoid, the crazy dressers.
And, indeed, covering "protest" gatherings like this (ditto street-blocking protests on the left) is exceptionally lazy "journalism." If you're looking for "wack jobs" of any type to garner appalling video, shock, and views, this is where to find them--the two bozos that think throwing Molotov cocktails does any good, the "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theorists, etc. It's the proverbial "shooting fish in a barrel."

As an audience, we LOVE to watch and mock what we perceive as "stupid people"--the ones who can't tell you "who is buried in Grant's Tomb?", the ones who crash on video after serious lapses in judgement, and people like the anti-vaxxer cited by this article. We delight in such mockery because they make us feel smugly superior, unlike, say, watching The College Bowl (or whatever they call the college-level trivia games now) or tackling a NY Times Sunday crossword (for most people, anyway).

If I found, and quoted, someone whose fear of the virus is such that they believe it warrants doing away with the Bill of Rights (and I have absolutely seen many such exultations online from people too scarily close to that made-up example), I would be grotesquely exaggerating if I said "this is the mindset we're up against, people who want to do away with the Constitution!"
But I would confirm the bias of many out there.
Which many would argue is the sole purpose of such "journalism."

Well it's just my opinion, but we seem to be past a tipping point. I'm not going to get into the "Media's" role - the Internet has made instant gratification and conspiracy theories universal.

There's lots of cell phone videos of folks behaving badly. It seems like that's encouraging copycat behavior.

So back to museums, tourist lines, restaurant, retail establishments etc., Have you prepared your staff on how to handle such a confrontation?

Especially now that mask up recommendations are becoming more common.

Brian

"This is the mindset you're up against."

And herein lies the problem.

This is why there's no rational discussion. Instead of rational analysis, we have mandatory displays of panic as civic virtue and signs of "right think". In short, Ed emotes rage, with a liberal dose of condescension against "the other" because the bell rang in Pavlovitico. Ding, ding... remember the treat: now snarl.

Look, if you are over 60, diabetic, immunocompromised, have cardiac or pulmonary issues or other known co-morbidities- then you need to be concerned about the potential effects of the infection. If you are under forty and in good health, you have virtually no risk of death.

My neighbors are septuagenarians. The wife, morbidly obese is in the same position as a stroke victim at this point. The husband, in relatively good shape because he walks and has a lawn care business (he has vitiligo and is concerned about the hazards of having been exposed to nuclear weapons while in the AF) despite the proximity of a married couple has repeatedly tested negative.

In short, all the people in the pool are probably under 40 singles, who probably face greater peril from excessive alcohol consumption or indiscriminate sexual activity than
COVID.

You know all the commercials saying that "Boomers" need to be on guard for Hep-C? It would have been good to distinguish the risks between those that were sexually incontinent and those that weren't-but that I guess would be "slut-shaming", because it is often transmitted via horizontal recreation.

Meanwhile, in yet another neck-snapping 180 that makes you believe that the so-called experts don't have a clue, we are told now that "fully vaccinated" people need to start wearing masks again.

At some point, crying wolf breeds not indifference, but contempt.

Then again, I don't turn to political rags for medical advice.

Last year my cousin's 101 year old mother in law died after being infected, along with her 90 plus year old sister. Notice what I said "died after", not "died from". She became mildly febrile and recovered, but passed away from old age. The sister is still alive, last I spoke to my cousin.

https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local ... 1bffe6a8ff

If I were still involved in train operations, I wouldn't be acting like Dwight Shrute-The Office character who was a "Volunteer Lackawanna County Sheriff's Deputy".

It's your job to ensure the safe and efficient movement of trains; not to be the mask Stasi.

A. Worse yet, you are supposed to wear a mask to protect those that CHOOSE to not be vaccinated. Hey, you have every right to choose to not be vaccinated. D**m if I'm going to protect you from the consequences of your choice.

B. As others have mentioned, a tourist line does have the responsibility to at least mention the mask up mandate.

So that brings up the chance that one of your "guests" goes ummm ....... Not politically correct.

Brian

Yes, fully vaccinated people with masks in "public places".

It's March 2020 again.

PC

People who are watching the data can see that this latest spike in new cases is not as deadly as previously because for the most part, the people who had been at risk have already been vaccinated and many of those new cases are younger people who are not as adversely affected.

Lets take a look at the following graphs. The new case rate is up, but case fatality rate is still dropping and new deaths per week is staying steady. This tells us that those who are getting infected now are recovering and that the vaccine is doing its job by protecting the vulnerable. This latest penchant for remasking is just THEATER and is not based on any real risk.

Oh, dear.

Fifth wave it is, then. Well.... remember the thing a month-odd ago where we declared



and tore our masks off?

Yup. Yup.

Rick yes, that's normal. I've been watching that data carefully since the beginning. It's totally normal 2 weeks into a spike to see no particular movement in death rates. Death rates tend to lag infection rates by 2-4 weeks. Covid doesn't stop your heart instantly, it gives you and yours a month +/- of of watching you cling to life on a ventilator to see if you'll pull through. We're getting better at treating it so prognosis is less awful than it was at first, but still deadly as heck to the unvaccinated.

Data is showing that even when Covid breaks through (typically the far more contagious delta variant, thanks Karen and Ken for that!), vaccinated people have much better outcomes.

The good news is now, we're in good shape for ER space *nationally*, though some of the red states are getting crushed locally, for reasons which are entirely unsurprising.


> Now people are getting vaccinated and mysteriously you can take the average scanner and scan your arm,” Kenny Hubbard, a Backwater Jack’s customer says in a Southern drawl. He contends the virus was purposely released by the government as a form of “ethnic cleansing.” None of this is true.

> THE government

It boggles my mind how people so practiced in casting conspiracy theories fail to realize there is more than one government in the world.

Some of them are not our friends, but do like to do things which affect us.

Again…. Looking at case and death rates as a percentage of the total population, the numbers aren’t too bad. HOWEVER, if you remove the vaccinated from the equation, the hospitalization rates are the same or getting worse among the unvaccinated than they were at the peak.

And again…. The vaccine doesn’t prevent you from catching COVID, it prepares your immune system to effectively fight it off quickly thus keeping you either symptom-free (yay) or out of the hospital (uh oh) or out of a pine box (boo). That is how vaccines work. That is the science. In other words, you can still catch it if vaccinated and shed virus and never know it. With the Delta variant so much more contagious and it’s higher viral load, and who knows what the next variant will do, I can see mask mandates coming back to protect the 30% or so of refuseniks that get their info from nefarious places and believe it. Don’t listen to the carnival barkers. The virus ain’t gonna burn out with such a large amount of readily available fuel. I predict that this will evolve into something like the flu or a cold that mutates and comes around again and again. Hopefully not in deadlier forms.

Globally, the scenario is much more grim. We have a long, long way to go before we can celebrate.

"The vaccine doesn’t prevent you from catching COVID, it prepares your immune system to effectively fight it off quickly thus keeping you either symptom-free (yay) or out of the hospital (uh oh) or out of a pine box (boo). That is how vaccines work."

No. no, no.

First of all, it's not a vaccine, it's an experimental genomic treatment-hence the desire by makers to insulated from product liability and the censorship of its inventor.

Caution is always warranted with new treatments. Why-because we know what happens when we rush them out-VIOXX. There's a reason that there was no vaccine for Ebola, discovered in the 1970's that was developed and approved until DECEMBER 2019.

There's also no vaccine for HIV either-the standard treatment are antivirals for life-and the cynic in me says "but of course", why have a once and done, when you can have a human annuity. The truth in medical safety only comes with time. Thalidomide was introduced in 1957 and by the early 1960's there was a realization that it caused birth defects. It was reintroduced in 1998-but with a clear understanding that it could cause fetal malformation.

Nobody gets a vaccine for Small Pox, MMR, Pertussis, or any of the other true vaccines and is told, hey you are still going to get infected, but it will just be milder. Some need periodic readministration but they are basically completely ineffective at preventing infection or asymptomatic transmission.

Meanwhile:

(Now tell me USA Today and NBC News aren't legacy media)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E7U9wm5XoAM ... ame=medium

NO. NOT to "protect the refuseniks". To reduce the size of the "petri dish" in which new mutations evolve.

The refuseniks' operating doctrine is in making their own choices and accepting the consequences and I have no quarrel with that doctrine. So I would never cite "protecting them [from themselves]" as a fair reason to do that.

The fair reason to mask up and do "easy-mode precautions lite, that don't really affect the economy other than being good for mask sellers" is so that we don't all learn the next letter in the Greek alphabet.



That isn't wrong, mRNA is a new approach... but nonetheless, that doesn't apply to the Johnson&Johnson vaccine.

Easier to find since it doesn't require the "cryo-freezer chain of custody" of the others. That and 1-dose makes it the darling of those serving itinerants or working poor who work 16 hours a day, etc.


Of course they do.

But this was an "all hands on deck, beat this virus before it destroys our economy" full court press led, full credit where deserved, by You-Know-Who. I don't think anybody was thinking that far ahead.

Also this is the first vaccine ever developed for a coronavirus. We (society/medicine) are really learning it as we go along.