Do you think there is any real substantive reason as to why people opposed masks so greatly? Was it a cultural issue? Was it a public health education issue? I was just thinking back to the heights of COVID and I don’t understand exactly the weirdly difficult issue with masks and public life. It was really odd that such a simple health tool was so opposed. I am not talking about the disease or vaccine but the act of wearing a mask. What was that such a point of contention?
I don’t think I ever heard a real reason why people were bugging out about them, was real just as simple as the minor inconvenience? The disruption of our already too busy lives were we all have so little power or control and this just another thing on top of that?
What do y’all think? Do you still mask up?
I think a huge number of Americans are moronically stupid. Also for a significant percentage of the population - being a proud member of Team GOP or Team Dem trumped (and trumps) science.
Early on in the pandemic the right-wing started to hate masking because in their mind it infringed on "freedom". As months passed - even seeing somebody wearing a mask triggered their anger. That made (and makes) no sense but they are crazy. Libs were happy to wear masks to show they care and to have a rare own of the GOP.
But once Biden was president and we had a "real" president again - libs started to do something they wouldn't admit to. They started to jump on the "freedom" bandwagon. Biden wanted to declare victory on covid way back on July 4th, 2021! The NYT (and similar media) continually were saying it was already time to go back to brunch.
The dislike of seeing masks had become bipartisan. The vast majority of Americans didn't want to see them in public. The GOP can say "Fuck anybody that doesn't agree with us," but libs can't do that and remain libs so lib media were extremely careful to pretend immunocompromised people don't exist.
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July 2021 was the lowest that covid infections ever got. If they had managed to stick to the procedures, they could possibly have ended it that summer.
But after a certain time, it became the common liberal frustration of "nobody is doing what's obviously the best choice" and it became politically impossible.
Covid was one of the reasons Trump lost but Biden knew that after his inauguration following the science could be risky. Maybe - very roughly - around July was when Biden decided to follow the politics instead. Libs and independents were joining the GOP in wanting covid to be "over". ~1.1m dead and countless numbers of Americans (10,000,000s?) will suffer from long covid but Biden's ghoulish pivot proved to be an electoral winner.
Nothing will fundamentally change.
While I appreciate your optimism Covid would sadly not have ended that summer even if operations to reduce it would've continued. That is while the US was a great generator for new strains there were enough other places (Bolsonaro's Brazil, UK, parts of South Korea) which did at that point due to bad handling of the situation created conditions in which other strains, too, were created and others kept afloat.
This means that while a Zero Covid policy in the US would've greatly reduced their death (like hundred thousand less dead, many more without lasting damages) and the global impact, it would not have been enough if it was just the US which would've changed their actions.
We could see that this is the case form China and that even with their better response even in mid and late pandemic they still had a marginal number of cases, till very quick infective strains arrived that were hard to test for.
Still you are absolutely right in everything you substantial say, the two main points I wanted to do were: we are living in a global world and thus need global solutions, even good handling doesn't save you in an interconnected world.
I'm operating under the assumption that whatever miracles that would have to take place to achieve this in the US would also have an effect in other parts of the world that take cues from the US.
If everyone did half of what China did by spring 2021, there probably would have been no delta variant or epsilon variant as we know them.
That is very true. Though it would expose an interesting bit cause the national capitalist and nationalist political elites of the UK for example would be in tension with the US goals.