Thread by @danluu

Interesting post from someone living next to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on how national media coverage is mostly missing the point:

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/620713736…

Around 2003, I was excited by how easy it'd become to get information. You could read the literature without walking to 4 different libraries, could read about local politics from experts, etc.

Today, it's even easier! But this hasn't really changed the public discourse.

Covid-19 is another example of this.

In January, anyone could've gone on pubmed, spent 3 hours, found out masks are effective without special training, 6 ft. rule insufficient indoors, air travel is risky, etc. (reading previous studies on SARS, coronaviruses).

And yet, the info most people have seems to be 4-N months behind what laypeople with 3 hours+pubmed knew in January.

The thing I wouldn't have guessed in 2003 is that informative indie bloggers would be rendered irrelevant by "social" algorithms that funnel people to clickbait.

I bought one of these in January and have been wearing when appropriate since then (when indoors with "strangers", etc.).

On thing I've observed is that people will give me a look and then move away from me, often towards somebody with no mask!

I find this to be pretty funny since somebody who wears a half-mask respirator at, e.g., the DMV, seems much less likely to have covid, not only because they're less likely to get infected under the same circumstances, they're likely to have less exposure independent of PPE.

How much less likely? Well, per the above, you can read the literature, but if you want an anecdote:

I wore a P100 in my apartment when I lived with somebody with covid and appear to have not gotten covid (no symptoms, negative antibody test after appropriate timeframe).