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My favorite (read: most frustrating) pandemic theater example is on my TV screen every evening since the NCAA tournament started.

College basketball coaches are (seemingly) told to wear masks while they're on the sidelines coaching their teams. From what I've seen, all have dutifully complied. However! As soon as the game starts and they need to do their jobs, these coaches routinely, and almost without fail, will pull down their (mostly cloth) masks to shout loudly at their players and at the referees. It makes wearing the masks the rest of the time nearly irrelevant! Why even have them wear masks if they're going to pull them down and aerosolize every few minutes anyways? It's not protecting them OR the people around them!

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That ending is the funniest thing I've read in a while (and I've spent this whole year watching my daughter and her cousins and their occasional friend visits develop their own versions of "pandemic" involving distancing) but also I somehow had no idea you had a kid and am now not-very-usefully ruminating on the question "How does Zeynep get so much done?!"

I homeschooled my kids, so we didn't witness any of the theater in the classrooms, though I'm sure there was plenty. A doctor friend of ours did call my spouse somewhere during lockdown last spring to ask how long he though he should microwave his newspaper for. Though as in your first examples, fair enough back when when we didn't know very much.

My mother-in-law was in a rehabilitation facility in the UK for a few months this winter, where there was plenty of hygiene theater from the care staff, but a dementia resident in the home wandered around at will all the time, and came into my mother-in-law's room almost every day and sat on her bed thinking she was a relative. Which is how my mother-in-law got Covid. Luckily she'd had the AZ vaccine a few days before she got the virus, so it (we think) mitigated the effects, though she was still very sick.

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The climbing gym near me has spray bottles of disinfectant around the gym. They ask you to spray your hands after every climb. Needless to say, I forgot half the time, and I suspect most others in the gym did too. Climbing is already tough on your skin, and the disinfectant probably increases your chances of splitting a fingertip open on a small hold. So it's probably increasing your chance of getting some other non-COVID infection!

On the plus side, it's a huge space, they were only allowed 25% of normal customer capacity, and they already have air filtering because of chalk dust.

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The Irish government has _finally_ introduced mandatory hotel quarantine, nearly a full year after our National Public Health Emergency Team recommended it. BUT only for 33 countries, almost all of which are in Africa (!?) or South America. On top of that, when the plane lands, the people from these countries are escorted to hotel quarantine, while the rest of the people - who have just shared an entire flight with the quarantined passengers - are free to go.

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founding

If you think you have seen all those pandemic theatre, think again. Here in Hong Kong, vaccination got off to a troubled start with the government – which has the lowest credibility possible due to the political unrests – got off on the back foot with a Chinese vaccine offered in the beginning and the public, and even some experts, pointing out lack of phase 3 trial data. Then the BioNtech vaccine arrived a few weeks later. But the damage had been done and only 50 percent of the daily quota on offer were being taken up. But it was still limping along.

Then today, March 24, they announced all BioNtech jabs are being stopped as there is a packaging problem with the lot sent to HK. And in some centres, it was stopped and resumed after a delay till govt came out with a clear official statement saying all shots are to stop for the time being. And those who had turned up for today’s jabs were sent back.

Now waiting for a press conference. Murphy’s law well and truly is on play here.

Only with just 5% vaccinated and many people taking a wait-and-see approach, how much damage this is going to do is anybody’s guess.

The next vaccine the HK govt is looking at? AstraZeneca!

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The school where my spouse teaches is starting in-person instruction with small pods. We find it mind boggling that the pods can’t share outside space and therefore must eat their lunch together inside! The school has a huge outdoor space, plus we’re in the CA East Bay with mostly nice weather. Yet the teachers literally have to text each other before sending the kids to the bathroom lest they cross paths.

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My favorite piece of pandemic theater is yesterday's decision by the German federal government to close all stores (including grocery stores) from April 1st (no kidding) to April 5th, except for April 3rd. Note that food delivery is still not a thing in most of Germany (probably because we are missing the legal loopholes used by UberEats and Doordash to classify their workers as contractors?), at least outside of major urban areas. I'll leave the likely consequences on April 3rd as an exercise for the reader. (Arguably some of these days were already meant to be holidays, with all stores closed.)

Here in Germany, I've seen library books getting quarantined too -- albeit only for a couple days, I believe. People have been paying different levels of lip service to this; I personally have mostly been "accidentally" putting them back on the shelves myself.

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I have a chiropractor who bought a van and comes around, doing adjustments in the van. When I arrive he does the quick fever check for me. I know he doesn't wear his mask while he's driving the van; he only puts it on just before I get in. What does this help? The van is already crawling with his cooties! 8-)

I insist he open the rear door to the van before getting in via the side door, hopefully refreshing the air inside.

For "correlation does not prove causation", perhaps we could say "correlation is insufficient to prove causation". This particular one comes up a lot since correlation studies are often used to tell people how to live their lives when it comes to nutrition / fitness / wellness issues. e.g. I should always eat breakfast every day, even if I'm not hungry. Ugh!

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I’ll never forget a Tweet from some movie theater chain showing employees dramatically walking up and down the aisles with electrostatic disinfectant sprayers, dousing the seats with disinfectant, as if that would make cinema-going safe during a pandemic. I wonder at what point does marketing become propaganda? Because this video felt like it toed the line.

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I'd like to put in half of a good word for pandemic theater. I live in an upper middle class part of Brooklyn where most people take mask wearing seriously. In fact there is little more amusing than seeing folks cycling down the street fully masked. Clearly, that is theater not public health. And yet that performance can be read as "Covid is serious, protect yourselves and your neighbors". It also can be read as "I have no common sense" or "I am morally superior to you". Surely, how it is read is time and place specific. As Zeynep and others have pointed out, theater can be performed as farce, but it can also be played as tragedy.

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Just want to chime in and say that I find it ironic that a lot of rational, educated atheists in my social bubble have spent years arguing basically that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence (of god) and you're a fool to think otherwise, but for the past year they have argued that the absence of evidence that COVID transmits via fomites cannot, DARE not be taken as evidence of its absence, or you are a fool in the other direction. The same is becoming true of the absence of evidence of vaccinated transmission.

COVID was and is so incredibly politically charged that it causes normally rational people to act absolutely insanely irrational when it comes to determining appropriate behavior. This leads to a whole lot of pandemic theater, but it's worse than that because it is going to delay our return to normalcy for no good reason whatsoever.

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Re the phrase “there is no evidence to suggest...” - scientists did use that to say, for instance, there is no evidence to suggest cell phones cause cancer. In that case, they *do* mean “we really don’t think cell phones cause cancer but haven’t totally proven that yet.” Whereas with vaccines preventing transmission it was “we just don’t know yet.” So I think that makes it extra confusing for laypeople because the same phrase could mean you’re at many different places along the “enough absence of evidence means evidence of absence” continuum.

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A technician came to my house to give me an estimate. Instead of simply handing me a business card, he fanned them out as if he were a magician and asked me to pick a card (any card). When I looked perplexed, he told me it was company policy. Since he wasn’t wearing a mask I was dubious of getting close enough to choose a card or giving him the business.

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founding

I believe this experience has been quite common: a driver arrives with the food you ordered (with mask on his chin), and immediately before picking your food grabs the mask with both hands to cover his face.

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I'm a little late to this party, but I have one that's really non-sensical. I went to the dentist last month and, in an effort to prove it's safe to visit them, they employed high sanitation theater. This always makes me crazy, but they had two novel methods I had yet to see -- when I arrived, in addition to the usual temp checks, slathering of hand sanitizer, distancing and plastic partitions (that don't reach to the ceiling) they (1) had every visitor put on fabric booties, like realtors/contractors use to protect a house; and (2) extravagantly put my purse into a plastic bag (so it wouldn't touch anything)? I wanted to scream, but figured they would kick me out.

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Does the central aspect of this piece tell us anything about the safety of flying in an airplane? I haven't flown in over a year, am fully vaccinated, and am thinking about flying again. There are numerous organizations giving advice on the safety of flying, but apart from a few isolated claims, I haven't seen any cases of super-spreader flights, or even cases of merely spreader flights. With the TSA now screening 1.3 million passengers every day, does the absence of evidence of mass infections on a plane start implying evidence that it does not occur?

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