It wasn't science, it was science! And it was all theater:
They were elementary and homemade at first before becoming commercialized and mass-produced, but plastic dividers became as commonplace during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as the paper masks that now litter city streets.
Put up with the aim of blocking droplets from the noses and mouths of the COVID-infected among us, they became a sort of virtue signal for businesses to show that they cared about the safety of their customers and employees. Plastic dividers popped up to separate Uber drivers from their passengers, supermarket cashiers from customers, students from teachers, and virtually every place there used to be unimpeded face-to-face interactions.
Now that we've had more than a year of life peering through plastic at our fellow citizens, the science is starting to catch up with the craze and it turns out those measures may have actually increased the chances of people contracting the Wuhan coronavirus.
Here's a copy of a post I've put on all local school district FB pages:
ReplyDeleteDo not accept mandates to put masks on children. Furthermore, if your child is challenged in terms of speech, hearing, reading, writing or behavioral difficulties, it is considered a breech of the Americans with Disabilities Act's Least Restrictive Environment clause which insures that ALL students have equal access to an unrestrictive learning environment. For children who are on the spectrum it is essential they see facial expression in order to learn to interpret them. Call an ARD and demand "No masking" be put in the Individual Education Plan (IEP) which is the roadmap to how your child will receive educational information.
"...“We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says,” Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote recently. While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, “mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world,” Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a critique of the CDC’s child masking recommendation. “The CDC cannot ‘follow the science’ because there is no relevant science.”
https://on.wsj.com/2VHnf8K
Plexiglass dividers were never favored by scientists who understood that coronavirus is aerosolized. For example, Rio Americano's own Linsey Marr:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/linseymarr/status/1395016452172914688?s=20
Plexi and gallons of hand sanitizer are hygiene theater. Ventilation, cleaning the air, and masks are legitimate mitigation efforts.
People are nasty. When the plastic shields started showing up in front of cashiers, I noticed the droplets. Consider that those droplets would have been on the cashiers face. The worst seem to be convenience stores.
ReplyDeleteWe don't object to sneeze guards over salad bars, and wouldn't want those to be removed. In the same manner, I have no problem with properly sized and installed sneeze guards for cashiers.
It's unrelated to Covid, just a recognition that people can be nasty.