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Originally Posted by Matthew
Just before the pandemic, my wife (who has worn glasses since she was a kid) finally talked me into getting glasses. If you wear glasses, a mask isn't fun. Even with a mask that has a metal wire at the top, glasses still fog. You need something pushing the mask outward from the bottom, creating an opening for the hot humid breaths to escape. Then the mask is useless against COVID-19. I use the button holes in my sweaters or the space between the buttons on the shirt to hold my glasses and I'm sure Lauren wanted me to be bespectacled like her. Then you add the acne some people are reporting and that hot humid breath trapped over your face on a hot day. I can see why some people would shop at other stores, cross county lines or a state line, if your city is at a state line. If you're fully vaccinated, you can be comfortable, use your glasses, have easy-to-hear discussions, and some shopping trips can take a while. Again, we have a young son (too young to get vaccinated) and will mask for him. I don't want to force others around me to mask and I'm sure we will want to go mask free when our son is vaccinated.
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I bet you can cope. I've worn glasses for 60 years and I can. Just put the mask on first, then the glasses. Or get some anti-fog stuff from someplace:
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I like the idea of allowing businesses to set their own masking policy and I like the idea of businesses allowing customers to decide for themselves what level of risk they want to take. That is what we have in Georgia / Suburban Atlanta. This week, I've seen store and restaurant employees maskless and maybe a quarter-to-a-third of customers maskless. I think all big box hardware stores require masks? Other places don't want to lose valuable and hard-to-replace employees by requiring them to enforce it and do you risk losing customers? Here, the Governor won't allow cities or counties to pass mask mandates. While it's not allowed to be discussed in detail, in this thread, I do think this will become a big issue in 2022 and 2024 if people are still wearing masks. I'm not allowed to go into detail on that (in this thread) and I won't. This could be a strategy to attract jobs and population growth, which I think is the more interesting side of the discussion? It would be interesting to see if this impacts decisions to move down here? I'm sure the freedom to go mask free most of the time and the images of full hospitals, here in the South, impact decisions to both move here and stay away. There are a growing number of non-vaccinated people who believe if they become sick, they can just take monoclonal antibodies and be cured instantly. They often talk of the brand taken by a certain politician (won't name the person here to avoid politics). With insurance now talking about not covering COVID-19 hospital visits for the unvaccinated (I'm sure that treatment also won't be covered), we could see a big rise in people getting the vaccine.
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The point of mask mandates, as it has been for over a year, is that the best masks (KN95, N95) protect the wearer to some degree but the cloth masks most people wear primarily protect others by reducing the emission of aerosols by the wearer. Therefore, your protection depends on other people being masked and other people may not be sufficiently motivated to protect you unless the government or the proprietor tells them they have to. Other people can be uncaring sh*ts.
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Now, for what I really want to talk about:
Knowing this will be around for many years / decades and there will always be people missing boosters, not taking the vaccine, new variants, etc., at what point do we have enough data to know how to expand our hospitals? I'm expecting a hospital construction boom from this. They need to know how many beds, do you make it flexible space that can become ICU space or something else (as hospitalizations rise and fall), and do architects, tech companies, and hospitals research how to create spaces where more can be done with less hospital staff? What would that look like? Will cities with better hospitals become bigger magnets for population growth and businesses? Could we see noteworthy hospitals on the list with incentives, ready-to-go sites/spaces, educated workforce, transportation, etc., in attracting jobs? Not just a 50-bed branch or mini-hospital, but big hospitals and university research medical centers. Think of the impact on smaller metros that don't have big hospitals and research-intensive university medical centers. Think of the impact on smaller metros that do have a university research medical center. Could that decide the next round of up-and-coming cities and fast-growing cities?
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There will be no hospital building boom. None. No one--not the private owners of most hospitals, not the local governments who own others--can afford to build and especially not to staff hospital capacity way beyond what will be used under normal circumstances. Hospitals are incredibly expensive. California has been mandating the construction of new hospitals that meet earthquake codes that require them to survive and remain in operation for the maximal predicted earthquake. San Francisco has built a couple recently to comply with this and they each cost billions of $ with a B. The new acute care building at SF General with just over 400 beds was $1.02 billion and the new Pacific Medical Center with only 274 beds was $2.1 billion. Next comes the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center rebuild for an estimated $1.5 billion. None of these projects will expand the capacity of the hospitals--just make them withstand earthquakes.
That's one thing if those beds are in use. It's another if they are just going to sit empty waiting for the next pandemic in who knows how many years.
And yes, this pandemic will die away. Every pandemic in human history has. Before there were vaccines, everybody just got infected and the survivors were immune. Now some people can get vaccinated and can avoid infection. But one way or another enough people eventually become immune that the case loads decline and fade into the general background of human sickness.
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