Green Party mask fanatic predicts that a "Covid Fall" awaits us, calls upon Germans to resume masking
They will try to bring back masking, but it’s not going to happen.
Case statistics are rising, and some experts fear a Covid Fall.1 Now the health policy spokesman for the Green Party in the Bundestag, Janosch Dahmen, recommends a return to masking …
“In order to protect yourself from acute respiratory infections, it might make sense this Fall to wear a mask in care facilities, clinics and other parts of the health care system,” Dahmen told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. “There are increasing indications that in the coming Fall/Winter season, the burden in the health care sector due to acute respiratory infections could again increase significantly” …
This anxiety about Fall viruses overburdening the healthcare system is everywhere now, and I find it very obnoxious. If the system doesn’t have the capacity to handle the winter virus season, then people like Dahmen should either figure out how to fix it, or shut up. What they shouldn’t do, is demand that Germans engage in superstitious virus rituals that won’t do anything about infections, but that will effectively shift responsibility (and more importantly: blame) for crowded clinics from the elected politicians who set policy onto the daily habits of random ordinary people.
This, by the way, is the true purpose of the lingering rhetoric around non-pharmaceutical interventions. All these charlatans told us in 2020 that some virus was about to melt down our hospitals, and in the years since, their countermeasures have not only made all of us sicker and poorer – they’ve also actually reduced general healthcare capacity, by causing a backlog of untreated health problems and driving away trained staff. The problem is definitely not their catastrophic idiocy and mismanagement though. It’s your refusal to put a diaper on your face at the doctor’s office.
I have no idea what that is.
Also open thread, this short because I'm working on a longer piece for tomorrow.
A covid fall is like a covid winter of discontent, only with pumpkin-spice candles.