"Follow the science," indeed—and for once, this isn't being said with bitter sarcasm. Paul Joseph Watson, in the video below, plays a brief clip in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson says, "The government will no longer mandate the wearing of face masks anywhere" to the sound of loud cheers from Parliament. See for yourself:
I don't know how laws and mandates are crafted and implemented in the UK. I assume Boris Johnson is making a unilateral declaration that has, if not the force of law, the force of a counter-mandate. (Any English or England-savvy readers are free to educate me further in the comments.) If Johnson is saying what I think he's saying, then we ought to see the masks drop off except among the most fearful—the true mask-clutchers.
As for COVID cases once the masks are off, I'd actually expect a bit of an uptick, but that's the moment for Johnson to stay the course and see his country through the crisis. We already know the death rate from COVID is minuscule, affecting only a narrow sector of the populace, and that hospitalizations aren't nearly as bad as people had thought they would be. Let there be an uptick in cases; you won't see a concomitant uptick in deaths (which are over-counted, anyway, by wild-eyed people who conflate "dying of COVID" and "dying with COVID").
If the UK truly has the courage to follow the actual science, this move could be the harbinger of a cascade in which politicians all over the world finally decide to do the right thing and drop all mask mandates (even if only for the cynical reason that they know dropping their country's mask mandate would be a popular move). Thank you, Great Britain, for showing the world what it means to have some balls.
ADDENDUM: here in Korea, where we all receive several-times-daily text messages about "confirmed infected" people, it might be constructive to switch to announcing the daily number of deaths both as raw numbers and as a percentage of the known-infected portion of the population. In Korea, that number would always be under 1%, and people would begin to realize how ridiculous most of the government's stop-the-spread measures are. Not long after that realization, Korean citizens would agitate for the removal of all anti-COVID measures now that we know the depth and breadth of how harmful the virus actually is.
One can hope. Things seem to be going the opposite way here in the PI. Police are enforcing the occupancy limits and proof of vax requirements by shutting down businesses found to be in violation. When will this madness end?
ReplyDeleteAt long last. It is done. Let freedom ring! Or as William Wallace in Braveheart might put it if he were still alive:
ReplyDelete"Aye, go unmasked and you may die. Mask up, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our governments, the CDC and the WHO that they may force on us their masks, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!"