As someone who worked on Covid, today’s discourse is driving me nuts so allow me to lay out a few facts: 1) Covid hardly ever spreads outdoors 🧵1/9 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33249484/
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2) if you’re somewhere you might get Covid, the virus doesn’t care why you’re there. From the perspective of preventing Covid spread, outdoor BLM protest? Fine! Packed into a holding cell afterwards by the cops? Bad! Outdoor anti-mask protest? Fine! Gathering indoors afterwards? Bad! 2/9
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Football game? Fine! Driving in a crowded car to/from the game? Bad! Outdoor church? Fine! Indoor church? Bad! You get the idea. You may feel good/bad about the meaning of this or that event, but the virus just wants to get in your lungs, which is easier outdoors than indoors 3/9
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3) it’s really hard to get an A with a new virus (since you don’t yet know how to fight it) but if you are good at learning and adjusting, you should be able to get a B. This however erodes trust (“Yesterday you told us to do X and now you say we should do Y!”) and there’s really no way around it
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4) OTOH if you choose to deny reality, lots of people will die and you get an F. Masks and vaccines saved millions of American lives; the MAGA freakout against any kind of Covid control strategies killed hundreds of thousands, mostly of their own people. 5/9 jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
sep 1, 2025, 8:55 pm • 1 0 • view
5) Covid was the deadliest thing to ever happen in American history. More deaths than the 1918 flu, more deaths than the civil war, more deaths than all the other wars America has fought put together. Erring on the side of caution was reasonable; pretending Covid wasn’t real was insane. 6/9
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And the people cashing in by monetizing conspiracy theory horseshit on Youtube, or selling ivermectin, or whipping up mistrust in order to win elections? Total scum. The worst kind of parasites. Putting them in charge of public health is something only a monster would do. 7/9
sep 1, 2025, 8:56 pm • 1 0 • view
I can see people being annoyed with this or that aspect of the Covid response. But the demand that the people who led the response and saved millions must answer for their mistakes, while the ghouls who killed hundreds of thousands get to skate, is moral idiocy 8/9
sep 1, 2025, 8:56 pm • 1 0 • view
Read every single post in this @volts.wtf thread, which says all this better than me. 9/9/end bsky.app/profile/volt...
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