The New Normal
In 2020, the whole world was caught unprepared by a deadly and disabling virus. At first it had many names: the Wuhan virus, the China virus, the coronavirus. While the last of those stuck too, the main one now is COVID-19, or COVID for short.
Welcome back to Futurism. I promise this article isn't all doom-and-gloom. You know that here on Futurism, we don't show a problem without showing its solution.
With the virus not yet fully understood, but obviously super infectious and super dangerous and quickly mutating, Earth went into a half-assed lockdown phase on or around March 13, 2020. After the two weeks it was supposed to take because as it turned out we still needed groceries, and then more and more time, people started getting resigned to the "new normal" of staying far away from other people and wearing masks all the time. At the same time, anti-vax and anti-science propaganda soared in popularity, feeding off of people's inconvenience, cabin fever, and our natural resistance to change, the unfamiliar, and the unknown.
In 2024, this virus is still around. Most people have had it several times, and while most people don't attribute their noticeably weakened immune systems and noticeably weakened mental acuity to COVID-19, the evidence is clear. The deadly and disabling virus is still deadly and disabling. We're all feeling the effects. And even scientists who are studying "long COVID," the colloquial name for a syndrome consisting of the damage SARS-CoV-2 did (as opposed to the symptoms of an active infection, which is the "disease" part of Coronavirus Disease of 2019, aka COVID-19), are now removing their masks in support of "returning to normal."
The old "Normal" is killing us.
But it doesn't have to. We can:
- Put HEPA air filters in schools. Honestly this would probably have the most reducing effect of everything, considering schools are super-spreaders.
- Throw out return-to-office. It's unnecessary and would save a ton of money, instead of mandating RTO and then trying to fund HEPA air filters for your office.
- Mandate masks in crowded indoor events, like concerts, sports events, and conferences. Very few places are doing this. It's a basic health thing, particularly when HEPA won't be enough to filter the breath of the 10 people within 3 feet of you.
- Offer cheap and free COVID (and other) tests. Gee fucking whiz how do you expect people to get tested if one test costs $10? How are you supposed to bring a family of 6 to an event and also pay an extra $60 plus tax on tests?!
We could go further, of course, but this should be the baseline to work from. Not the complete lack of healthcare or disease control we have now.
Now, I'm no epidemiologist or disease scientist, so please fact-check me on this, but my understanding of mask effectiveness goes something like:
- Using a cloth mask is only effective (at filtering out the virus) if it's thick enough, and then only if everyone else you're around is wearing a mask. And it's not all that effective, either, so social distancing is also necessary.
- Surgical masks (the blue ones) were made more or less to keep guts out of your mouth and bodily fluids (drool) out of a patient. They're pretty much worthless against a virus.
- KN95s are probably the baseline; it's what you want to use when an N95 bugs you too much. This is the kind I use, because I find N95s significantly more difficult to breathe in (I've legit had to gasp for air) and a lot less comfortable because of how you have to wrap them around your head. These are usually certified by China, so take from that what you will. They fold down the nose so you get a big ol' channel there, and it uses earloops to
- N95s are the best you can get, and it's what you'll wear if you are immunocompromised or at a high risk. These work great in environments where N95s or KN95s are in use by pretty much everyone you encounter, although with social distancing, you can probably talk to people in cloth masks too. The "95" is percent filtration, and I'm not completely sure what that means but I know it means it's really good. You want N95s certified by NIOSH. A highly recommended brand is 3M Aura.
As for (K)N95s, the way they work is by static electricity catching viruses and stuff. That also means that they have a limited lifetime per mask as the static electricity discharges, and of course individually-wrapped ones work best. I'm not the guy to ask about mask re-use because I'm pretty sure my method makes it less effective.
No, you don't notice the static electricity when you're wearing it, nor when you put it on. You only know about that because I told you.
It's strange and upsetting that, now that we know how bad this virus is and how easy it is to prevent it, even the scientists who found this out are forfeiting their health and safety in the name of "return to normal." The old normal was unhealthy. And look, you don't even have to wear it all the time, but the first step towards building a better world, a more solar world that's more accepting of people less privileged than you, is to wear a mask while you're out in public. That's a simple step you can take TODAY to make the world a better place. Plus, you'll be reducing your risk of contracting diseases like COVID, RSV, the common cold, or the flu. So go and do it. Let's go back to our new normal.
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