🤷 I dont wear a mask. And not because I'm inconsiderate of other people. Because i truly believe it serves no purpose.
it's not going to change anything. Its winter time now. Flu/pneumonia/bronchitis is all active. Have we ever warn a mask for that? How many people die from that every year?

If they start requiring you to wear a patch with your religious emblem on your clothes, are you going to abide?

Our government made this political. And I'm not saying its a right or left ordeal. They as a whole, politicized it instead of joining to work together for our best interest. Last i checked, we all pay their salary. My constitutional right is to speak up if i don't like what theyre doing. And no, I dont mean going and burning down cities. But I'm not happy. 26% of my check last week went to taxes (just from one job). For what? So they can get a 3 week holiday vacation while i work 65 hour weeks? Just to pay my bills?
while a $1200 stimulus check we got how many months ago was supposed to be enough to support me until I went back to work?
I will be heard. I raise my black flag proudly.

 

DD
This is America. You are free to dissent and free to voice it.

The mask is to help the person next to the wearer, not the wearer. It is to REDUCE the spread of the sars co v 2 virus, not STOP the spread.

k95 masks have filter mesh size that is too big to keep individual virus particles from getting through in either direction. That is a fact. Less some gets through and both directions. That is a fact. Less gets through in either direction means a lower amount of virus is being transferred one direction or the other. It's not a cure it's a physical barrier nothing more.

I don't believe the 182 other countries infected by this coronavirus stopped to make this erroneously somehow a political issue . it became a political issue in this country because it certain people made it one. Some of the other countries actually did have leaders who said it was a hoax so let's knock that down to 175.

The problem is that the average person in America doesn't pay attention to most of the other 175 countries and how they are handling things. You can hand out all the masks you want but if the people don't wear them or wear them improperly then they are rendered useless.

They are a method of limiting transmission of the virus. When you sneeze, in public, do you sneeze into the croak of your elbow or into your hand or a Kleenex? Because if the answer is yes, you are limiting spread of the common cold virus when you do. Same concept, only the sticks are much higher medically if you catch this virus.

People keep comparing how many people die per year from the common flu. The problem with that is that the flu number is a fixed number while the current death toll continues to rise per unit time so any comparison between the two is a comparison between a static and a dynamic number which is not terribly useful until the amount of time has lapsed for the dynamic number to equal the length of time of the static number. Even that is not necessarily useful because the dynamic number is still growing.

I fully agree that the majority of our government officials have their own interests in mind. When you have a hundred senators and they followed a long party lines 1,715 times in a row, nothing useful will get done. When you have a hundred senators who are so out of touch with the common man's reality yet purport to be doing what's best for us my response is I call BS. The last aid package was swallowed up in politics which is disgusting on more levels than I can cover. The funny thing is that each party thinks they are looking better in the eyes of the American people than the other. They are just a bunch of child lawyers bickering while people lose their jobs, kill themselves, kill their families because they can't support them.

This virus kills the vulnerable. Genetically vulnerable and vulnerable due to other issues.
I don't know if I'm genetically vulnerable but I do not wish to find out right now.

K95 masks are made to be worn when doing things like woodworking to keep from inhaling on the crap floating around that's tiny tiny tiny particles. People are using them during the pandemic because it is the cheapest best thing available that provides some level of transmission suppressuppression. No one designed to this mask because of the pandemic. It's existed for decades. When you healthcare people in hospitals they are wearing much more then a mask if they have access to it.

Masks will not stop the transmission virus. They will slow it down. This wouldn't be such a fustrrcluck if there were not so many people transmitting it that had no symptoms. But you can't win them all.

My point was simply that the rest of the world has pretty much decided that there is more benefit than harm in wearing them. Even so, there will continue to be waves of outbreaks here and everywhere around the world. Masks can't stop it but they can slow it downi.

 

I would not wear my religious affiliation on my sleeve just because someone told me to. I like any reasonable person would consider why I was being requested to do so and for what reason. Such information can't conceivably only be used in a discriminatory matter given no other facts or supporting reasons as to why such an action is warranted.

I used to think it was one man pitting neighbor against neighbor, cutting the threads of democracy with a rusty box cutter. But all those who enable him are complicit as are all of those who do nothing to stop him. In a sad way, it's almost better that the inability or lack of the desire to think for oneself because it's easier to just repeat what you've heard has been literally quantified by the number of votes cast. More has been done to shred democracy in the last four years than probably in the last four score. However I think things have to sink this low for this country to rebuild properly. In fact they will probably get worse.

Just remember, when you are wearing a mask, you are doing it for your fellow human being, not for yourself. Nobody is asking you or forcing you to protect yourself. Simply request that you slow down the spread of something that is killing others if you are unknowingly spreading it.

Politicians cry foul about single-payer healthcare. Socialism they say . That's funny, look at Medicare and Medicaid. They are far from perfect, but they are single-payer systems, run by the government, and they do more help than harm in most cases. So the hypocrisy out both sides of these people's mouths needs to be handled by making their mouths inconsequential . Most easily done by replacing them.
Why why are people that think this is a hoax or not serious in line with me at the grocery store buying larger than normal amounts of food? Why is there no toilet paper on the shelves? I don't think it was made for one political *** or the other.

I'm not saying that you personally think it's a hoax. I'm using that for example . you never said it and I'm not implying that you did.

Simply pointing out that hypocrisy is everywhere. Not like this is a surprise. But I was unaware that the number of sheep in this country was so large.

The difference between you and the sheep is that you have stopped to think on your own and decide what you believe, not what someone told you to believe without a shred of thought behind it.

 

According to the CDC around 38K died from the flu last flu season.

FAR less than the 270+K that have died from Covid -19 this year.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

 

Derf, your comments and point about senators (and other politicians) voting party lines over and over is a good one. That's why I NEVER vote for an incumbent. I don't think career politician should be a job title. Elect them to one term, vote them out and make them get their asses back to working in the real world. Those pieces of crap don't deserve to retire on a FULL SALARY pension for those of us who worked our asses off for years have to try to scrape by on Social Security which the thieves in D.C have devastated over the years for various "projects". They depleted it and don't even contribute to it. No wonder they don't care about the common working citizen. Most of them have never done anything but sit on their butts and decide how to spend taxpayer money. Get rid of all of them. Clean house and let's start over. As for wearing masks, my family ALWAYS wear one when we're out in public. We don't wear them at home, but we don't accept visitors in our home either. And I won't allow it until there's a proven vaccine. I'm not afraid to die, I'm just not quite ready yet. God gave us all common sense and I prefer to use mine when it comes to the Covid virus.

 

If the person next to me is so concerned about me not wearing a mask (or any non mask wearer for that matter) they shouldnt be out and about. Were in a time were corporate America can pretty much hand you anything you want on a silver platter at your front door.
Sorry. I was raised to practice proper hygiene. If I have to cough or sneeze, crevice of my elbow and i wash my hands. Running nose, blow it in a napkin and wash my hands. Its not difficult.
In a first World country we should not be having to teach people these basic procedures. I am not entirely sure which generation is to blame for that stopping.

I understand the mask is to keep from spreading something I may or may not have. But again. If im sick, I dont go out. That simple. I dont just cover my mouth when i cough or sneeze in public. That would be asinine.

As far as vaccines go, I dont trust it either way. I dont trust the big pharma. Know what's in my medicine cabinet? Organic/100% natural essential oils and whiskey.
Last time I got any shots were because the school required it 17 years ago (I was 10ish)
The natural path works for me. And i know what I'm ingesting into my body.

As far as death rates go for flu vs covid. I was using that as an example. We've never had to caution ourselves for that before was my point. But since thats brought up. They have a vaccine for the flu you see advertised every year at all sorts of places. But its not 100% guarantee. So why would we think we can have a vaccine for covid in less than a year when we can't even figure out how its transmitted?

I dont trust the CDC as much as i dont trust the government.
Dont know if you saw any reports or articles on hospitals all over the country inflating numbers to get extra checks from the gov.
Im not saying its a hoax by any means. But the numbers are over inflated. The real question is by how much?

Rube. I agree. Their should be term limits. Bet it would get thrown out if we had the country try and petition that. Putting their jobs on the line, they would never sign off on it.
just like their should be age limits. Cant run for mayor in most places until your in your late to mid 20s. Can't run for president until youre 36 or 38 I believe.
but where's the cap on it? Two men in their mid to late 70s ran for.office this year. I dont care what the cognitive tests came back as. That's just way to old for them to be running a country. Average age for the current house/senate seats are 56-62. And those are the people were "trusting" to make decisions that are supposedly in our best interest.

 

Amen to 98% of that, brother.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about covid and death and the connection.

Each person that contracts covid has an immune response different from the next person. Each person that contracts covid they or may not have other health issues prior to contracting it. What becomes more or less impossible to fundamentally determine is what you DEFINE to be a covid death.

The way I understand that is the following . This may not be entirely correct but it makes sense to me and so I share it.

If I am someone that gets sick with covid, my body has been infected by a foreign whatever. Something that is not supposed to be there. Like pretty much everything else that falls into that category, my body mounts some type of immune system response. Yes is a fundamentally good thing as long as the immune response level is appropriate to whatever has invaded your body. Covid affects different people in different ways and they have different immune responses. It has been determined that there are people that are genetically predisposed to have their body overreact by a factor of 100,000 to the presence of this virus in their body.

The confusion is in the definition of whether or not someone died FROM covid or died from COMPLICATIONS FROM Covid.

So someone who has no detectable other serious medical issues is not likely to die purely from covid exposure. It happens, but not a whole lot apparently.

The hundreds of thousands of people that are quoted should be properly referenced as covid related deaths as it is the combination of previous medical conditions with the behavior of the virus that makes it so that you cannot breathe etc causing you to have even more different medical problems and then die.

So if I am diabetic and test positive for covid, if covid whacks out my blood sugar and I go into a diabetic coma and die, I did not die from literally the virus itself. I died because of how the virus interacted with my body. Hence my death is related to covid complications.

I suppose the same argument could be made for other illnesses.

Ask for trusting big pharma, I have worked in big pharma in one capacity or another since 2004. I know the regulations surrounding manufacture and testing of medications and of the trials and how that data is handled. As long as people follow the rules, it's a hell of a lot safer than it was in the seventies. That is a relative answer. We have better instrumentation to detect subtle differences in molecules that are synthesized that we did not even know existed in the past.

One of the biggest shortfalls of the entire system is that it is impossible to know what the long-term effects are of taking anything, pharmaceutical based or not. There will be side effects from this vaccine . There are side effects with every vaccine. Very few vaccines involved in checking a live virus into the person and letting the person's body kill it. The covid-19 vaccines do not use a live virus. You can't do that in a pandemic. There is no driving force to fudge trial data in a case like this because anything they shove under the rug eventually gets pulled back out. If they produce a vaccine whose main side effect is that 3 years 27 days and 3 hours after you take the second dose, you dropped dead we're not going to know that.

The insidious thing about this virus is that anyone can carry and spread it without having any symptoms. Given the number of people infected and the rate it people are being infected currently, it is clear that asymptomatic transmission is a huge part of this. And that is where everyone wearing a mask went around others at least outside of your own house protects others in case you are aN a symptomatic person with a virus and you are spreading it without knowing it and certainly not meaning to.

The mask is a tool to reduce the amount of virus getting transferred between people. Even if you feel fine, it does not mean you do not have covid or that you did not have it three weeks ago. And if you did, you may have infected who knows how many people indirectly let alone directly by not having worn a mask.

Read something today that Juliana went to Michigan a little while back and now 30 plus state legislators who were in a room with him now have covid. Does that mean they all got it from him? not necessarily. But it is the most probable explanation.

I just woke up after falling asleep writing the above to the sound of my own voice saying "she has two pills?" I was dreaming about my cat and in my dream my wife was also in the room so I was talking to her about the cat. the reason I'm pointing all this out is because I am really tired so I'm just going to stop. Good night.
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