Hi all,
Well, for once I totally agree with something James said! It's terrible that we have to wear masks for teaching. Not good at all. Still better than superspreading (which is why we must do it for now), but definitely not what any of us wanted.
Which is why it's basically insane that the BC mask mandate wasn't continued in July, at minimum for public transit and in grocery stores. As many of us said at the time, when cases rise exponentially (even from a very low base) future restrictions are inevitable. The only question is when, not whether. And the sooner you do it, the less you can get away with. If we hadn't reimposed the mask mandate last week, we would be looking at a straight up lockdown in a month or two.
James asks if scientists have quantified the downside of mask wearing (so we can compare it to the upside). I'm not aware of such a study either, but there's a bunch of research on the related question of lockdowns. Obviously lockdowns hurt and we're not
doing them for fun, but we're doing them to head off disease. So how big is their cost? Economists have studied this, and the answer is that the
economic cost of a lockdown in a pandemic is zero or negative! How come? The reason is that the lockdown basically just anticipates what would happen anyway a few weeks later as people react to the deaths they're seeing in their community.
Put it like this. Let's say the economy consists of two kinds of consumers, "Lucas's" and "James's". There's a virus around, and L's refuse going to restaurants while the virus rages while J's are ok with it, given a 99% survival rate etc etc. Now the government mandates a 50% capacity limit: restaurants can only fill up to half capacity. This hurts, so the restaurant owners get together and tweet a lot with hashtags like #99percentsurvivalrate and #freedom and such. The lockdown is lifted, the virus returns, the restaurants get to serve all J's again but all the L's stay home. If the L's are 50% of the consumers, do the restaurants gain from this? What if the L's are 70% of the consumers? (Here are some more references for research quantifying the pros and cons of public health interventions.)
I would love to see a quantitative study on mask mandates like this - and a study not only on costs to the economy, but also harder to quantify things like social trust etc - but a priori I expect the results to be the same. A mask mandate now means we all can go back to maskless in-person teaching later. Absence of a mask mandate now doesn't mean maskless in-person teaching, it means virtual teaching. Social trust will return when we drive out the virus, not when we stop wearing masks.
Finally, I think the ideal analogy to masks aren't seatbelt laws, but speed limit laws. Speeding kills innocent bystanders, not just the speeder. You may say "I can drive safely at 120km/h on Hastings" and "I won't spread the virus to you in a classroom". But you understand that we can't take your word for it, right?
That doesn't mean the speed limit has to be 30km/h on every road. In the future, we may have a permanent mask mandate in hospitals and doctors' waiting rooms, a seasonal mask mandate on transit, in airports, and in grocery stores, and maybe a seasonal mask
mandate for students in a classroom (but not teachers). If that's the price to pay for Zero Covid, all considered doesn't it sound like a good bargain? If we held a vote on this today, wouldn't it win?
Hi James, I made two comparisons between seat belt mandates and masks. One is the one you point out,the other is that seatbelt mandates are more morally questionable because they are paternalistic ( the protection is only for the wearer),
whereas masks mandate that we do not hurt others (primarily others, in fact, since surgical masks do little to protect one from aerosols) Plus Covid has a far higher death rate than car accidents, both per case and per population.
So, yes, other things being equal I would say there is better reason to mandate masks than seat belts. But things are not equal. The hope,and expectation, is that masks (along with other vaccines and other measures) will bring Covid incidence to a level where masks are not needed. There is no such hope for seatbelts' effects on car accidents.
The evidence that to get Covid to manageable levels you have to hit it hard and hit it early is overwhelming. Just not followed by cautious politicians and health authorities.
If it turned out that the only way to prevent thousands of deaths is to mandate masks permanently, I would not be a happy camper. I hate them, but can imagine circumstances where we would have no choice. It would be a much bigger deal
than seatbelts, but it would not be an assault on our freedoms and our constitution but a really unfortunate forced choice we'd have to make to keep ourselves safe.
M
Well Ronda it seems to me our colleague drew a pretty strong comparison between masks and seatbelts, pointing out correctly that when the latter were mandated 40 years ago, lots of people complained, but now, we're still waiting for evidence of their traumatic effects. And so, my question. JDF
From: Ronda Arab
Sent: August 29, 2021 11:40:56 PM
To: James Fleming
Cc: Martin Hahn; academic-discussion@sfu.ca; SFUFA Office
Subject: Re: Risks and benefits (re: Covid protocol update)I don’t actually see where Martin said masks are “just like” seat belts. Drawing an analogy to argue from the position of partial similarities isn’t creating an equal sign between the two.
Sent by magic
On Aug 29, 2021, at 11:30 PM, James Fleming <james_fleming@sfu.ca> wrote:
Hi Martin--you claim that masks are just like seatbelts. Now the latter were mandated permanently. No big deal. Would the same go for the former? JDF
From: Martin Hahn <mhahn@sfu.ca>
Sent: August 29, 2021 2:54:27 PM
To: James Fleming; academic-discussion@sfu.ca
Cc: SFUFA Office
Subject: Re: Risks and benefits (re: Covid protocol update)
James says there has been no science on the downside of long-term masking. I am sure he is right and, as he says, absent science, we have to resort to ordinary judgment, But then he proceeds to apply "ordinary judgment" not to that issue, but to the question of the epidemiology of Covid-19. And there we do have some science: even before it was known that asymptomatic vaccinated people can infect others because of the high virus load in their throats, epidemiologists have been saying that we need to get 90% of the population (not of the people over 12) vaccinated because of Delta. We won't get to safety through vaccines until next year at the earliest. And by safety I don't mean Covid-zero, I mean getting the disease to the point where sudden exponential growth is not a constant threat. The rosy "common sense" story simply does not fit with what we now know.
No one has studied the down-side of mask-wearing (except for the ridiculous claim that they give you CO2 poisoning) for two good reasons: we have more serious things to study , and "ordinary judgment" tells us wearing mask is no big deal (That, and all those thriving surgeons and dentists) OK, I don't like wearing masks either, but invoking the possibility of long-term trauma reminds me of the seatbelt debate decades ago: people will be trapped in their cars and burn to death (debunked like the CO2 stuff), people will have psychological damage from being tied down, people will be dissuaded from driving, or distracted by the seatbelts, or over-confident about their survival in accidents and hence reckless, and what about people with shoulder injuries... Half a century later we are still owed a serious set of studies on the horrible long term effects of wearing seatbelts. While we wait, thousands of lives have been saved. It's a no-brainer even though seatbelt laws are purely paternalistic, while masking laws tell us that our freedom ends where we put others at risk.
Dai is right, of course, about vaccine effectiveness and how to calculate the odds. What we don't know is what percentage of the SFU population is likely to be infected. It is unlikely to be 100%, but beyond that we have little idea. And, given the BC policy of not testing asymptomatic people, we will never know. We do know that, unless we take serious steps, the only upper limit is the theoretical one of 100%.
Which brings me to my favourite line of the anti-alarmists: the survival rate is 99%. Let's say 10% of SFU's population gets Covid. That would be 5000 people (if there really are 50,000 people here). Oh, now I get the argument! It's perfectly fine if 50 people die of a preventable disease. OK, surely there won't be 5000 cases! Well, let's say only 1% of SFU's population gets infected. Which five people is it alright to sacrifice on the altar of personal freedom?
I am really not sure why we get so worked up. Covid-19 has same case survival rate as localized breast cancer, the survival rate for prostate cancer at all stages averages to 98%, polio before vaccines had a survival rate of somewhere in the range of 99.85% And don't get me started on the survival rate in car accidents. Why bother trying to prevent these minor glitches?
M
On 8/28/2021 10:04 AM, James Fleming wrote:
I am disappointed by the recent statement from SFUFA.
The Provincial Health Officer has abruptly re-imposed a very strict indoor mask mandate, among other requirements. In response, the SFUFA executive has done little more than call for yet further restrictions on its own members. Driving these positions, seemingly, is a powerful risk-benefit analysis.
Benefit: movement toward Covid-zero. Risk: What risk? It's just a piece of cloth, etc. What's the down side?
It seems to me that the only honest answer to that last question is: "We don't know."
We don't have values for the downsides of this supposedly clear and decisive risk-benefit equation. Do we?
Focussing for the moment solely on the issue of mandatory, extended, and long-term social masking: Do we know its effect on public health? On mental health? On suicide rates? On relationships? On pedagogy? On cognitive, social, and moral development, especially in young people? Has any of this been measured?
If the answer is "no," then the supposedly no-brainer, "it's the science" analysis is revealed as no such thing.
Instead it's a matter for ordinary judgment. Here's mine:
Next week, we will return to campus facing a virus which, even though very scary, and even in some new ways, still seems to have an approximately 99% survival rate. Against that virus, we can expect the vast majority of the university (including me) to be fully and effectively vaccinated. Not 100% immunity, to be sure; but (as far as I understand), between 75% and 95%, iow, pretty darned good. As we get closer to full vaccination of the population, there will, perforce, be more and more cases among the vaccinated (just because that starts to approximate to almost everybody). However, it seems that we can expect these cases to be, in general, mild (if not asymptomatic). Demographically, the age of the main university population (our students) constitutes a further protection. Other minimally-disruptive measures may easily be anticipated: including vaccine boosters, continued social distancing, sanitizing, and ventilation. Finally, anybody who wants to protect themselves yet further by wearing a mask, including while teaching, is more than free to do so.
And yet we are accepting, even embracing, a picture of our future in which vaccinated professors are required to teach vaccinated students only from behind a multiplex screen of masks, panoptic documents, and other coercions.
I find that picture both irrational and disturbing.
Professor, Department of English
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby/Vancouver,
British Columbia,
Canada.
A grateful mind / By owing owes not
-- Paradise Lost