For the record: on Friday June 26 I have taken the NYC subway twice (from outside of Manhattan to Manhattan and back) in rush hours.
I have seen a total of 2 people not wearing a mask a 99.99 pct compliance. One seamed like a young tourist, the other one a local person.
I have decided to carry extra masks and hand them to people not wearing one when I visit Manhattan riding the subway again.
On the streets of Manhattan I saw very few people not wearing a mask. Some wore the mask improperly, not covering their nose,
I guess those people meant to pull it up once they were in a crowded situation.
Outside of Manhattan it is a different story. I live on the border of Brooklyn and Queens and see many people not wearing a mask.
On the weekend only about 2/3 of people I encountered wore a mask.
As I am close to 80 I am very concerned that the virus will linger on and I won't be able to attend crowded events any more.
What's happening in some of the other parts of the country seems to me like Kool-Aid/Jonestown redux, large swaths of the current population blindly
following their great leader.
Cheers,
F&D
Well said. They are going to Jonestown, but, sadly, this leaves all of us vulnerable as this virus is redistributed in potential waves of destruction.
K-Wave seemed to have just learned that the infection and deaths in NY were greater than anywhere in Europe and Wuhan, but that may be because some here and elsewhere were posting that the NY alarm was a hoax, that the numbers were inflated, that the hospital ERs were empty and the bodies piled in the freezer trucks were staged, that funeral homes weren't overwhelmed and unable to bury the bodies that were piling up while heath care workers were reusing masks and substituting garbage bags for gowns to try to protect themselves and improvising use of alternative sedation because adequate supplies of these as well as other critical supplies weren't available.
EMS workers were doing double-shifts to try to answer the alarming numbers of 911 calls. These and other helpers were the heroes who risked their lives to save lives with many dying in the process, and New Yorkers were at their windows and front doors applauding and cheering these workers for 5 minutes at 7 p.m., every day, for two months, in Manhattan and elsewhere to thank them for their service.
So, yes K-wave, pdx and others who minimize the danger, we are doomers and gloomers who are warning and hoping that the rest of the nation doesn't suffer the same fate. Italy warned us. The rest of the world warned us, but we ignored it. We had no strategy for testing and contact tracing that far poorer nations had who did, indeed, control the spread while they were dealing with this before it hit hard in the US. We wasted that advanced warning and ignored the models that were effective. And we are still minimizing it with a helter-skelter non-strategy for protecting Americans.
The expert virologists and epidemiologists knowledgeable about pandemics were accurate in warning of the consequences, but some thought they knew better and denigrated scientific information and expertise. Uninformed opinion has been equated with evidentiary evidence and scientific research.
Fauci is warning again, and once again he is being derided. It has become a political issue and a symbol of macho masculinity not to wear a mask. How insanely juvenile is that? At the moment, hospitals in Florida and Texas are struggling to manage the numbers at their doors. We are now pitied by other nations who find it unfathomable that the wealthiest nation in the world has botched this so badly.
So, yes, I am worried about all the unknowns of this pandemic and whether or not the consequences will be far from the best-case possibilities. Flyers&Divers and pdx, I'm older than each of you and am less concerned about my long life than I am for my children and grandchildren and the rest of the children in this nation, the economic and social consequences, and how we prepare for future pandemics.
Climate change is unleashing more new microbes long dormant in the permafrost which is now melting. It's happening and we need to be prepared to deal with it with major efforts directed to research. If we address future problems as we have this one, the outcome will be dire.