Three

Do you prefer to be an educated opinionated person, or just an opinionated person? 

I’m really not sure how to deal with this one. Wouldn’t education preclude firmly-entrenched opinion in most cases?

It does kind of speak to part of what I’ve been struggling with recently, however.

Everybody knows that wearing a mask reduces infection.

I’ll accept that stipulation. The question is by how much? Quantify it.

With the pandemic response, too, I’m seeing eerie similarities to climate change.

We have to do X. We think it’ll prevent A, B, and C.

Okay. How are you measuring the effectiveness of whatever measures you’ve put in place?

With the climate measures, the quantification of cost are a lot simpler

How much does it cost to put everybody in a mask? For the masks, themselves, not a ton. But how much will it cost for young people who never learn to identify facial expressions?

What of any other negative medical effects?

My family’s partial-origin city of New Orleans is below sea level. So, too, is a good chunk of the Netherlands.

Those places aerated having issues with sea levels long before THE SCIENCE said the problems are due to human-caused climate change. So we need to attempt reversion to the climate when those places were initially-settled?

Humans have this nasty ability to figure out how to adapt to changes. Bad us.

But I’d imagine it’ll be the same with COVID. We’ll develop treatments, and people will die in far fewer numbers from it.

So, maybe, stop trying to roll back to a time before it? Maybe?