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cimoreneWe had to go to the biggest mall in the Turku area yesterday because it was the nearest place to cut copies of keys for our new tenants. As we were walking through the parking garage - which is open to the air but underground - I suddenly realized: "The worst thing about going here is going to be the rage." The rage about everybody not wearing masks, that is.
You can go to the grocery store here and see nobody wearing masks anymore - that is, almost nobody. But the grocery store is not crowded when we're there, especially as we try to go very late. Also, we're in a tiny little town of course. Turku is the third-largest metropolitan area in Finland and comparatively a hotspot for infection, one we've been avoiding for literal years now.
Well, sure enough, as we walked down the halls in the mall, we passed tons of people (though it wasn't crowded in the sense of the building being full, the mall is the size of an airport, so the total number of people we saw was twice or three times what we usually see in a week of errands here in our town) and literally none of them were wearing masks. "Maybe the infection rate has just gone really REALLY down," Wax muttered. "I feel weird... is the infection rate THAT low?"
"No, the problem is going to be the same thing it is in America: shitty public health messaging," I said.
But then I experienced another moment of doubt. Not ONE mask? We both were overcome with curiosity and stopped to look up the statistics simultaneously.
But no, our region still had a rate of around 200 infections per 100k residents in the last two weeks.
Most of those won't have required hospitalization now, because vaccination mostly prevents that, but there's, what, a 20% chance of long covid and some (%?) risk of permanent damage to the heart, lungs, and brain even in asymptomatic infection?! The infection rate has fallen sharply in our region in the last month or so after a high spike, and of course in the hottest part of summer that helps too, but still... I'm putting my money on poor public health messaging, ie, vast failure of nearly everyone to understand the amount of risk to the fully-vaccinated. Probably here, just like everywhere in the western world apparently, the current popular (incorrect) understanding is that the risk to a fully-vaccinated person is merely a risk of getting a bad flu.
Also I like to think that public health messaging is to blame for the complete lack of concern for the immunocompromised and disabled. Probably most of these people who stopped wearing masks did so under the mistaken impression that the immunocompromised can just put on a high-filtration mask themselves without being put at further risk by exposure to unmasked vaccinated adults? Again, an incorrect impression, but more or less in line with the other misinformation. There's some evidence to indicate an uncomfortably large portion of people are just callous about it, though. I get blank looks when mentioning the risk to them to people like... my own family, even though my dad is actually a high-risk immunocompromised person who has already got covid twice. (I'd bet that even though this fact has demonstrated that prior infection doesn't protect, they've all probably assumed there's no point in trying to avoid further infection for him.)
We went to the pharmacy to get my meds refilled, and saw the only two people in the whole mall wearing masks: two pharmacists behind the pharmacist desks, one in a regular surgical mask and one a high-filtration mask, positioned behind those plexiglass partitions that have been shown over a year ago to do more harm than good. But the cashier at the same pharmacy wasn't wearing a mask. So.
Anyway... I'm mad.
You can go to the grocery store here and see nobody wearing masks anymore - that is, almost nobody. But the grocery store is not crowded when we're there, especially as we try to go very late. Also, we're in a tiny little town of course. Turku is the third-largest metropolitan area in Finland and comparatively a hotspot for infection, one we've been avoiding for literal years now.
Well, sure enough, as we walked down the halls in the mall, we passed tons of people (though it wasn't crowded in the sense of the building being full, the mall is the size of an airport, so the total number of people we saw was twice or three times what we usually see in a week of errands here in our town) and literally none of them were wearing masks. "Maybe the infection rate has just gone really REALLY down," Wax muttered. "I feel weird... is the infection rate THAT low?"
"No, the problem is going to be the same thing it is in America: shitty public health messaging," I said.
But then I experienced another moment of doubt. Not ONE mask? We both were overcome with curiosity and stopped to look up the statistics simultaneously.
But no, our region still had a rate of around 200 infections per 100k residents in the last two weeks.
Most of those won't have required hospitalization now, because vaccination mostly prevents that, but there's, what, a 20% chance of long covid and some (%?) risk of permanent damage to the heart, lungs, and brain even in asymptomatic infection?! The infection rate has fallen sharply in our region in the last month or so after a high spike, and of course in the hottest part of summer that helps too, but still... I'm putting my money on poor public health messaging, ie, vast failure of nearly everyone to understand the amount of risk to the fully-vaccinated. Probably here, just like everywhere in the western world apparently, the current popular (incorrect) understanding is that the risk to a fully-vaccinated person is merely a risk of getting a bad flu.
Also I like to think that public health messaging is to blame for the complete lack of concern for the immunocompromised and disabled. Probably most of these people who stopped wearing masks did so under the mistaken impression that the immunocompromised can just put on a high-filtration mask themselves without being put at further risk by exposure to unmasked vaccinated adults? Again, an incorrect impression, but more or less in line with the other misinformation. There's some evidence to indicate an uncomfortably large portion of people are just callous about it, though. I get blank looks when mentioning the risk to them to people like... my own family, even though my dad is actually a high-risk immunocompromised person who has already got covid twice. (I'd bet that even though this fact has demonstrated that prior infection doesn't protect, they've all probably assumed there's no point in trying to avoid further infection for him.)
We went to the pharmacy to get my meds refilled, and saw the only two people in the whole mall wearing masks: two pharmacists behind the pharmacist desks, one in a regular surgical mask and one a high-filtration mask, positioned behind those plexiglass partitions that have been shown over a year ago to do more harm than good. But the cashier at the same pharmacy wasn't wearing a mask. So.
Anyway... I'm mad.
(no subject)
Date: 29 Jun 2022 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29 Jun 2022 07:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 05:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 11:17 am (UTC)It does REALLY feel like people just decided they were tired. But it's such a little thing - like imagine if everyone just decided they were tired of seatbelts, or condoms, or safety goggles when using power tools.
(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 04:01 pm (UTC)yeah this had to sit with me for a while b/c like. I'd actually accepted that I'd just always lived like this and been happy about it and that's why I'm still wearing a mask and not really socialising outside of home and the internet a lot and maybe I just missed it when the Finnish government went "good work everybody! Pandemic contained! You can go back to your lives now!" because I never really. Had one. Like that.
But that's selling myself short and buying into the idea that the problem is me. The nature of humanity is that we are myopic about our own circumstances to the detriment of everyone around us.
(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 04:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 05:01 pm (UTC)And they only stopped paying attention because Yle no longer has the big infection statistics banner up on their site, lbr.
(no subject)
Date: 30 Jun 2022 06:18 pm (UTC)...Yikes
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jul 2022 01:48 am (UTC)Yep. People have stopped perceiving themselves as under threat, if they did so in the first place. AFAIK covid denialism was pretty low over here, Finnish people can be pretty aggressively trusting towards the news media, they think that if they were still in danger, surely they would still be getting told they were in danger.