From NPR: With new guidance, CDC ends test-to-stay for schools and relaxes COVID rules
With the coronavirus continuing to spread widely throughout the country, Americans are getting new advice from federal health officials on how to live with the virus.
The revised guidance – released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday – lifts the requirement to quarantine if exposed to the virus, deemphasizes screening people with no symptoms and updates COVID-19 protocols in schools, eliminating a recommendation for test-to-stay after potential exposure.
“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” the CDC’s Greta Massetti said in a statement. “We know that COVID 19 is here to stay,” she added in comments during a briefing with reporters.
It’s not a huge overhaul of the existing guideance, they say:
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“an increasing focus on individuals making their own decisions about their level of risk”
no doubt The Science Has Received A New Information And Changed Its Mind Which Is What The Science Does, and we are obligated to just forget about the angry denunciations to the effect of “you’re a selfish, sadistic moral failure for thinking that your own personal decision about the level of risk matters more than the lives of the people around you”Report
I stand fully and rather proudly behind that sentiment, even if those were never my exact words. Had so many Americans – including our then President – not taken this track, we’d have nowhere near the million plus dead we now have. Especially since the Venn diagram of those holding these views and the people refusing vaccines and masking is a nearly perfect circle.Report
Remember when we were discussing AOC not masking at the Met Gala? I do.
You may wish to revisit the comments. You may be shocked at who communicates significantly different opinions than the one you hold above!Report
There’s nothing in that thread that is particularly shocking. You railed about the rich and important flaunting the rules; most of pointed out that yes they were doing exactly that, inside economic constructs where they had the ability to do something about it (i.e. access topflight medical care) where the required mask wearers didn’t. and then you kept trying to refocus on the rule breaking instead of engaging in the larger moral issue of protecting the masses.
I know you are trying to get me and Chip and Chris and the other liberals to do what you’d see as a back track and righteously condemn AOC for not masking. And its an elegant attempt at a trap. Problem is we liberals spent a lot of time condemning our own – including certain California governor – for that rule breaking across many threads – and we kept being told by conservative they would do no such thing for their own (like the president at the time) because each person should be free to make their own risk decisions and mask or not and vax or not as they chose, societal impacts be damned. It became the classic case of conservative insisting liberals clean up their house first, and when we did and then pointed out conservative hadn’t, we were told we needed to still clean our own house. That’s a circular firing squad we are getting tired of trying to straighten out.Report
I know you are trying to get me and Chip and Chris and the other liberals to do what you’d see as a back track and righteously condemn AOC for not masking.
No, not at all.
My comment to Kazzy below is the one I’m standing by:
I could include AOC in there without changing anything.
And, hey, good news! The CDC agrees.
Here’s something I said back in January:
(Note: I still haven’t gotten it. *knocks wood*.)Report
One of these days you need get clear that you and I are not playing the same game they are. SO what you see a defecting in the iterated game you are playing is just hem iterating in their game according to their rules.Report
Which brings us back to this particular card that gets played from time to time:
You still stand by that sentiment?Report
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Well, you will be pleased to know that there is a call to abolish the CDC.
Which, may I point out, changed its guidance to something that will kill millions.
Including gramma.Report
I was always struck by the 1984 scene where the Eastasia/Oceana switch happened.
“That’s not how it would happen”, I thought. “Seriously, that strains credibility.”
Not that allies would never change like that… but I assumed that we’d have a transitional period of “Well, you have to understand. That was then and this is now and we have received a great deal of new information in the last year and we’re now finally ready to discuss it like adults…”
Nope. Just rip down the old poster, point out how saboteurs must have put them up in the first place, then put up the new ones. Get a selfie putting up the new one. Confirm that autodelete kicks in after 3 days.
You don’t want that photo floating around out there if, you know, things change.
WHICH THEY WON’TReport
OH please. Most of us said from the get go we’d learn more as time goes on, and we have. Which means people can make different risk assessments then they did before. So can government agencies. The only people calling for us to forget those earlier postures seem to be you and Density.Report
As someone who assiduously followed those earlier postures, I have *ZERO* interest in forgetting them.
I didn’t see my friends in person for a FREAKING YEAR.
It’s the people who excuse the rich and powerful for breaking the rules but get upset about me wanting to go to the beach that have me saying “this isn’t about safety at all”.Report
Actually, its about ethics in populist postures.Report
The argument that it’s okay when good people eat together but it’s not okay when bad people eat together is an argument that I’d like to see formalized.
As it is, we instead seem to be in a place where the CDC has changed guidance to the point where you and I can both eat with friends again.Report
” The only people calling for us to forget those earlier postures seem to be you and Density.”
I assure you that the absolute last thing I’m calling for is that we “forget” the “earlier postures” regarding whether there existed such a thing as “personal assessment of risk” when it came to COVID-19.Report
What have we learned in the past few months that drove this policy change? What have we in the US learned at a different pace and sometimes different direction from what other countries have learned?Report
The US is 68% fully vaccinated. We now have two anti-virals (one pill based, one infusion based). We know masking works, though again it depends on the effectiveness of the mask, which varies). These are the same things, learned at about the same pace as other nations. Omicron as a variant is more contagious but less deadly.
And frankly, we have also learned that far too many people – to say nothing of politicians – don’t care about the million dead. They don’t care about masking up as Omicron cases rise. They don’t care to drive the vaccination rates higher. No amount of good policy will change that.
So the CDC has taken the latest science, and the latest reality, and done the best they can to merge the two in new guidelines.
Don’t like even these? Move to Germany, or any other EU country where lock downs and required masking are still very much the norm.Report
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/germany-likely-to-impose-mask-mandate-if-covid-19-spreads-in-winter-122081000138_1.html
Germany does not have required masking at this time.Report
No, but they have had it at various other times, as well as localized lockdowns. A highschool friend of mine lives and works there as an engineer for BMW. e discusses the ebb and flow regularly on his facebook page.Report
You know there are positions other than yours and “don’t care about the million dead”, right? When a Brit stands a bit more than a meter away from you, or a German doesn’t close a school, that doesn’t mean he’s in favor of death.Report
So far German’s are closing and opening schools based on case counts locally, something Americans no longer do. I trust the Germans far more then I trust my fellow Americans in this regard.Report
Only schools? What about bars and bowling alleys and luxury stores?Report
many of those too – and even beer gardens as warranted. Plus the health ministry is already warning of a return to mandatory masking in October.Report
Well it’s all the schools in an area but only some of the adult luxuries, there is something more than risk mitigation going on.Report
I was always struck by the 1984 scene where the Eastasia/Oceana switch happened.
“That’s not how it would happen”, I thought. “Seriously, that strains credibility.”
Well, that’s the thing; in 1984, the people didn’t know. They just turned on the telescreen and did as they were told.
People today? They know. They know what they did, they know what they said, they know how hard they traded on The Government’s Official Line to get good an’ angry at Those Assholes, and they know what we think about them now, and they don’t care. We’re Those Assholes. So what if we’ll never trust them again? They didn’t want our trust in the first place, all they wanted was silent compliance, which they got, and now that their tools have worn down to uselessness they’ll drop them and find new ones. Because they mostly never saw these things as useful measures; they saw them as tools to use to force Those Assholes to do as they were told for once.Report
What is it like?Report
You’re right – we don’t care about people who call us Illegitimate Americans. We don’t care about people who wanted so much to protect their own alleged freedom that they happily imperiled us and our children by their choices. We don’t care about people who looked good science, done with the haste necessary in a pandemic, and called it trickery and con jobs. And we don’t care about people who would rather trade their souls for five minutes of unbridled screaming into the void in exchange for the end of American democracy.
Frankly neither should you so long as you choose to live in a society and country.Report
Oh hey we’re not restricting kids and schools more than bars and bowling alleys? Cool beans.Report
You know the stuff the governor and mayor are doing?
You can do that too, now.Report
Funny thing is my school had chosen not to require the vaccine yet (all our students only just became eligible with the under-5 shot, some parents are hesitant, and we already had signed contracts without a mandate) but were relying on the increased restrictions on the unvaxxed to pressure folks into it. So there goes that.Report
I’m a big booster (no pun intended) of vaccination but I have been a bit vexxed on how to handle this with my son. His school isn’t requiring it, and he has already had and recovered in June from whatever strain is floating around now. If I understand correctly the vaccine is still based on the original strain which has burned itself out. My plan is to ask what his doctor thinks about it at his next appointment but I’m stuck between my inclination to do the right thing regarding vaccination and my inclination against unnecessary and ineffectual medical treatments.Report
We vaxxed on doc’s refs and because after taking 8 months off work I couldn’t deal with any more quarantines because someone sneezed near them.Report
we vaxed our kids as soon as they were age eligible, and for the most part its worked. All they have had Covid at one point since, but none were more then mild cases. Should boosters be authorized this fall, we will get those, and I fully expect to get annual or every two year shots much like the flu vaccine.Report
Our pede rec’d waiting on the booster until late fall unless the situation worsens. He said a more up-to-date vaccine and higher immunity during winter months was the best bet.Report
This week, with our County at Red under the CDC scale, we were told only the mission critical folks had to report back to the office, and then had to mask everywhere. I wonder how this will change agency guidance.Report
My classes start up next week and I have to decide whether to mask or not. I am 2x boosted (the second booster was ROUGH, I had quite a reaction) but also I really don’t want to get even “mild” covid because I don’t want to have to isolate, I have less of a “safety net” than people with lots of nearby family and the like. And I have one friend on long-term chemo but I also notice she doesn’t always mask.
And the students complain I’m hard to hear in a mask, and I can tell from their papers that they’re not always comprehending the words I use – I’m getting some malapropisms. And no, my uni won’t shell out for a microphone for me and I’m both resistant to spending money on something like that and currently broke enough that getting a good one would be hard.
What really galls me though is just the….”make up your own mind based on extremely limited information” part of it. My state is one of the worst at actually revealing how bad things might be – there’s no data collected from people who home test, and virtually no wastewater data. So I feel like I’m stumbling along in the dark, and I hate that, and my general tendency in cases like that is to be as careful as I possibly can….so maybe I do mask even though I’m literally the only one (sometimes it feels like the only one in my town) still masking, and it gives me psychic damage because I remember seventh grade and how I could never seem to conform to the “right” way of dressing in my school, and caught crap constantly for it. (Life really is just seventh grade, over and over and over again).
I don’t know. I’m just childishly angry that I strove so hard to be careful, to do everything “right,” I isolated from people for the better part of a year before vaccines, and now it’s just “yeah we’re all gonna get it, despite being vaccinated, probably many times now, just hope you don’t get long covid” Kind of angry at everything with nowhere to dump that anger.Report
Dr. Leana Wen confuses the issue more:
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On the one hand, its different because it’s COVID which was an unprecedented-in-anyone’s-living-memory pandemic AND it became highly politicized, so any seeming contradiction between expert guidance and expert behavior is going to feel like a big deal.
On the other hand, the CDC makes gazillions of recommendations that everyone –including the experts helping to inform those recommendations — makes individual decisions about whether to follow or note. They make recommendations about smoking, raw meat handling, emergency supply kits for hurricanes, etc. And then each of us and each of them make choices about whether to follow those recommendations or not.
So, do we want COVID to remain something different and unique because it is different from the other things the CDC comments on? Or do we want to treat it the same way we treat the other CDC recommendations?
Another thing that is or at least feels different is how public policy is dictated by CDC recommendations. While we may not feel like our day-to-day lives are impacted by all those recommendations, they do have ways of filtering out into public policy. And most of us like that… we put a certain faith in the quality of our food supply or the preparation techniques employed in restaurants because of the CDC and FDA and local DOHs that work off regs and recs from the former two. But I doubt any of us want our individual behavior overseen by any of those organizations… including those who work for those organizations. The question becomes… do we see what we do or don’t wear on our face when we enter a store as an “individual behavior” or do we see it as an area for public policy? We haven’t yet decided collectively on that, though more and more people are choosing the former.
So we’re in a bit of an inbetween space where we are transitioning from one hand to the other hand it seems but haven’t fully done that yet and folks are in various places along that transition continuum, including the experts.Report
If she really wanted consistency, she’d advocate for government force to be deployed. Otherwise, she and everyone else has to learn to live with it. Just as we all have.Report
It’s weird that she thinks that hypocrisy fuels distrust in public health. Why in the world does she think that it matters what leadership actually does when people otherwise have the information they need?Report
Its weird how you think continuing to harp on this is going to move anyone’s goalposts.Report
Boy: Do not try and move the goalposts. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There are no goalposts.
Neo: There are no goalposts?
Boy: Then you’ll see that it is not the goalposts that move, it is only yourself.Report
A few comments:
– That Matrix bit was beautiful.
– “If you want consistency, advocate for government force” might be the purest expression of the modern “liberal” mentality.
– I don’t think Jaybird is trying to make people change their minds or move their goalposts. He’s applying his standard critique to the situation: do the policies foster or discourage societal trust?Report
I’m not trying to make people change their minds or move goalposts or whatever.
I *DO* think that the whole “well, you have to understand why it’s not such a big deal that someone on Team Good wasn’t following the rules” being followed by “HOW DARE TEAM EVIL ENDANGER *CHILDREN*?!?!?” is something that is visible to others and I think that Team All Caps would benefit from asking “Wait… is it possible for me to see how someone would see my proclamations as coming from a place other than Absolute Moral Authority?”Report
Would it be fair to say that societal trust is the main focus of your political thought?Report
Twitter aside, don’t you think just about anyone that saw Newsom dining maskless at French Laundry (hell, dining period) was shaking his/her head?Report
The liberals here sure were.Report
I’m sure they did.
But they also seem to have saved their actual vitriol for those who were complaining about the politicians who were failing to follow their own mandates.
I have no doubt that they were shaking their heads, though. I can almost hear the frustrated exhalations they made when they first saw the story!Report
Have you ever considered it was a matter of scale? and of exhaustion? Like goin after all the people – thousands and thousands – who kept telling us to pound sand on masks and vaccinations and closing things left us little emotion to invest in over done, over ripe, over blown politicians? That perhaps, just perhaps we had so little social trust left in our fellow Americans that we really didn’t have the energy to muster against the likes of Gavin Newsome?Report
Hey, that totally makes sense to me!
But it also gives me a perspective from which I look at people asserting that they condemn those cheaters out there who are killing grandmas.
I mean, lemme tell ya:
I am double-vaxxed and boosted and was stuck in my house for a year and then did the masking thing when things opened up and when I complained about stuff like London Breed dancing in the club, you wouldn’t believe the pushback that sort of thing got! When I complained about AOC showing up maskless at the Met Gala surrounded by masked servants, you wouldn’t believe the “well, you have to understand” arguments I got in response.
I admit: I kind of expected some variant of “I can’t believe these people keep shooting our side in the foot! This sort of thing is important and this public hypocrisy GIVES AMMUNITION to the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers!”
You know. Some kind of audible version of the shaking of one’s head.Report
Are you open to the idea that your understanding of what others think isn’t actually true?
Like, your entire premise here is that The People see this or that, and as a result The People think this or that.
Is it possible that this simply isn’t true? That maybe your read of what the public thinks is inaccurate?Report
Oh, absolutely.
I love to see evidence to the contrary! Whenever people give me links to explanations of how any given take of mine is wrong, I click on it and read it excitedly!
Even if it’s a case of multiple perspectives looking at the same thing, having yet another perspective gives you yet another blind man looking at the elephant.Report
At least you are willing to admit you are blind like you believe the rest of us are.Report
Oh, yeah.
But remembering things is helpful. You don’t even need eyes.Report
Well…since you’re making the claim, isn’t it incumbent on you to document it?
But in any case, I would point to Newsom’s dining maskless at French Laundry as a good example.
At the time, you and all the Savvy pundits were very sure that The People saw this as terrible hypocrisy and were terribly offended by it and this would be why he would be recalled.
Except…that wasn’t true at all.
Newsom won easily and remains very popular and I doubt you could find one Californian in a hundred who even remembers French Laundry.Report
At the time, you and all the Savvy pundits were very sure that The People saw this as terrible hypocrisy and were terribly offended by it and this would be why he would be recalled.
Is this one of those things that you have evidence for?
I’d love to see it!
As it is, I just mostly have comments of me complaining about folks like AOC not being masked at a big public function, folks like London Breed not being masked while dancing indoors at the club, folks like Deborah Birx flying home for Thanksgiving dinner during our impromptu “lockdown”, that sort of thing.
I can provide links to them, if you’d like. So you can see that I’m not making it up.Report
And…other “internet commenter named Jaybird” who the hell even remembers London Breed and AOC going maskless?
What evidence do you have that this hypocrisy you see is meaningful to anyone else but you? Has it moved the needle on public attitudes like even a bit?Report
What evidence do I have?
I guess the only evidence that I have is stuff like Leana Wen:
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So…you and Leana Wan think its bad that people who call for masks don’t themselves alwaysmask up.
I’m not saying your wrong even, I’m just saying that the number of Americans who consider this to be a significant issue is really tiny.
I would bet that most Americans can name a dozen other, much more egregious cases of elites advising one thing and doing another, that this one doesn’t even break the top 100.Report
Sure, but it seems relevant to point this sort of thing out in a thread dedicated to mistrust of the CDC’s relaxing their guidance for how to deal with Covid going forward.
You saw that the CDC relaxed its guidance, right?Report
“a thread dedicated to mistrust”….by who?
Who is the missing subject of this sentence, who mistrusts the CDC?
You and Leana Wan of course, but who else?
If you just want to say “I, Jaybird, speaking only for myself, don’t like the CDC for reasons x y and z” well, that’s great.
I’m only objecting to the “view from nowhere objective observer” voice that is trying to persuade us that you represent a large number of people.Report
Chip, you may be interested to hear that there are people who believe that the CDC has relaxed *TOO* *MUCH* with their current guidance.
Like, the people who follow the CDC’s guidance are being selfish in the view of these people.
Did you know that?Report
No, I didn’t.
Are any of them here to speak for themselves?Report
You can see some of them in comments above.
Seriously, are you a Republican plant trying to make liberals look as bad as possible?Report
I honestly don’t have any opinion about the CDC guidelines one way or the other.
From the little I’ve read they seem perfectly harmless and reasonable.
But this whole thread sounds a lot different once we strip away the high minded “This is about public mistrust” argument, and see that it is really just “Jaybird doesn’t like the CDC, or politicians who didn’t follow mask guidelines.”
Which a reasonable argument itself. Just different from the lede.Report
Eh, my take on the CDC guidelines is this: “Now the guidelines say that I can act like the governor instead of his aides.”
I see that as mostly a good thing.
I have people regularly point out to me that this is bad, though. “People who are immunocompromised can still die!”, they tell me.Report
Chip, I will go on record as a liberal who was pretty pissed at political leaders who imposed mandates and rules and restrictions that they themselves didn’t follow in pursuit of non-essential things. Like, it boiled my blood.
However, where I differ from Jay is that I don’t reserve my frustration at politicians taking a do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do approach for liberals during Covid. I am equally bothered by rules-for-thee-not-for-me thinking by all parties at all times.Report
Eh, I don’t really mind “liberals” doing the “do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do” thing.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, after all.
And, hey, it’s one thing to say “I agree with leadership” and slip here or there. We all have moments of weakness.
I mind two things about the POLITICAL LEADERSHIP doing it:
1. If they are the ones who said “this is the rule”, then they should be expected to follow the rule. If they understand why they shouldn’t be expected to follow it, then they can understand why *I* shouldn’t be expected to follow it.
2. If I tell you “if anybody goes into the park, they’ll be blown up from the landmines!” and then you see me doing a little dance in the park the next day, is your thought “what a hypocrite?” or is it “maybe he was lying about how dangerous the park is?” (Maybe you’ll think “Oh, he has new information since he told me that last time.”) But then what happens if I keep saying “Stay out of the park!” and you keep seeing me dance in there? I submit: The problem ain’t the hypocrisy.Report
And like most adults you grasp how the hypocrisy of authority figures doesn’t really determine your own decision making or the underlying truth of the message.
Like, if a famous actor makes an earnest PSA against drug abuse and dies 6 months later of a heroin overdose, you don’t go around the internet telling people to question the idea that shooting smack is bad.Report
“… the underlying truth of the message.”
But the truthiness of the message was in question at the time. Maybe not for you but for many.
I watched the TV and saw breathless commentary on how failing to wash the mail was going to get someone killed. Then I’d look at my sons who spent 5 days with their mother while she had the virus and who never got sick. And then I’d look at politicians who were telling me to stay home not staying home. And I had no idea what “messages” were true. So inconsistent messaging definitely led me to question certain messaging about the virus.Report
There are tons of anti-vaxxer, masker, what have you, on Twitter taking victory laps, saying, “See, I told you.”, which I find very amusing. Like they were privy to some secret knowledge of Covid transmission/immunity/prevention that the CDC was aware of but wouldn’t publicize because “they” were power mad government functionaries.
Someday, some alternate history writer is going to imagine the America where DJT came out in support of CDC guidance, and I’ll bet everyone has a jetpack.
And now polio seems to be a little bit of a thing in 2022 USA.Report
Hell hath no fury like a comfortable white person being momentarily inconvenienced.
See also, NIMBY.Report
It just never made any sense to claim that the CDC, et al., were pushing the policies they were pushing for some political agenda. Any idiot could see that closing things down and masking people was bound to be seriously politically unpopular. So what possible political motive would explain making politically unpopular rules and recommendations?Report
Also the level of temper tantrums thrown over mask requirements was comical. Like every one of these people imagined themselves to be an oppressed victim of tyranny because they couldn’t walk thru Krogers without a mask.Report
When you – collectively – see you life as out of your control – because greedy capitalists closed your factory and killed your town; when “unworthy” unreal” people claiming to be Americans take political and economic power you believe you deserve; when women no longer “know their place” – when this is where you are emotionally, economically, politically – then what looked like reasonable responses to a once in a century pandemic become active government oppression. Especially when the guy who runs government keeps telling you not to listen to the people who work for him. Its not a long trip mentally or psychologically at that point.Report