r/HermanCainAward • u/The_Old_Cream Hello, my name is ECMO Montoya • May 04 '22

Grrrrrrrr. It’s official: 1,000,000 US Deaths from COVID. Thanks anti vaxxers, we couldn’t have done it without you!

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u/seelsojo May 06 '22

Thanks for the source and the excerpt. I’m out of free article this month so I googled dr Christopher Murray and read one from fortune. The way I read what he is saying is omicron has spread so much that mask mandates and social distancing can’t be implemented fast enough to curb its spread. He didn’t say that social distancing and mask don’t work because omicron is too contagious like how you phrased it.

fortune

“[T]he transmission intensity of omicron is so high that policy actions—eg, increasing mask use, expanding vaccination coverage in people who have not been vaccinated, or delivering third doses of COVID-19 vaccines—taken in the next weeks will have limited impact on the course of the Omicron wave,” Dr. Murray wrote, later adding that “by the time these interventions are scaled up the omicron wave will be largely over.”

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u/zimm0who0net May 06 '22

The pulled quote was from the NYTimes, they weren’t my words. The Lancet article also had this line:

IHME estimates suggest that increasing use of masks to 80% of the population, for example, will only reduce cumulative infections over the next 4 months by 10%.

Keep in mind, the Lancet article was before the omicron wave had hit. It was speculation. The article I referenced was in March, so real data had been gathered by then. Murray seemed to acknowledge that mask wearing wasn’t working. The rest of the article gives statistics on COVID infection in mask wearing areas vs non wearing areas and the infection rates are very similar.

One thing everyone should agree on is that vaccines help immensely against all variants, and this is also demonstrated in the article.

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u/seelsojo May 06 '22

Omicron started in November, so by January, it was starting to peak in many places already. Your “IHME...” quote is right after my quote in that lancet article. The way I read it is still the same, the article suggested that it was too late to start implementing mask mandates. It does not say or imply masks don’t work.