Universal Studios Hollywood reinstates mask requirement for indoor areas

To be clear, this is happening strictly because the unvaccinated can't be trusted to wear a mask in public. There's no significant risk for the vaccinated, but since you can't differentiate, here we are.

I fully expect going into fall that more and more states/attractions/etc... will require masks indoor again.

I don't mind this, personally. Less chance for people to spread other stuff going into normal cold/flu season. Masks are hardly an inconvenience. But yeah, it does suck people can't be honest about their vaccination status with wearing a mask if they have not been.

Curious if this will trickle to Orlando as well, in time for HHN... I can see Universal requiring masks while in the indoor houses... I expect that won't be fun to enforce for people who are 'above' the rules and want to be difficult. Oh well, if anything, hopefully the anti-mask people will stay home and complain instead.

Thanks, jerks!

Thanks, Obama?

In all seriousness, we're headed to DL next week and are starting to get really nervous about the increase in cases (given our three unvaccinated kids). I'm actually optimizing a lot of my rope drop plans to minimize indoor queuing rather than minimize wait times overall. It will be a huge relief if Disneyland does the same, though they're in Orange county and not in LA county.

So this article from my neck of the woods says that in neighboring Marin county, 1 in 4 positive infections is a breakthrough on a vaccinated person. That initially had me freaking out about the rate of breakthrough, etc. etc.

But since I've been geeking out on statistics YouTube videos this summer, this reminded me of the classic Bayesian test which goes: "If I say a man is quiet and meek, is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?" The answer is farmer because there are something like 20x more farmers in the country, so even if librarians are 5x more likely to be quiet and meek, there are still, nonetheless, 4x more quiet and meek farmers than there are quiet and meek librarians.

Marin county has 85% first shot and 92% second shot, so of 100 people, ~90 have some vaccination and 1 of them got sick whereas 10 are not vaccinated and 3 got sick. So vaccination results in an 1.1% case rate and lack of vaccination results in a 30% case rate. Turns out it's not that breakthrough is likely, it's that there are SO many more vaccinated people that the total number of breakthroughs is significant.

"Class dismissed, I'll see you next week."

To be clear, this is happening because of a change in requirements for Los Angeles County.

It's starting to look like everybody is going to get COVID-19 antibodies. Your choice: you can get them the easy way, or the hard way.

All the mask-wearing, hand-washing and social distancing in the world is not nearly as effective as a shot or two in the arm.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

ApolloAndy said:

But since I've been geeking out on statistics YouTube videos this summer, this reminded me of the classic Bayesian test which goes: "If I say a man is quiet and meek, is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?" The answer is farmer because there are something like 20x more farmers in the country, so even if librarians are 5x more likely to be quiet and meek, there are still, nonetheless, 4x more quiet and meek farmers than there are quiet and meek librarians.

I am not a statistician but something does not seem right about that "test". Change it to if someone owns a Prius are they more likely to be a librarian or a farmer and I don't think it works. I guess if you have no preconceived notion of which group trends towards the variable then you would play the odds, but if you have some basis of the variable trend then you may not want to play the odds.

Marin county has 85% first shot and 92% second shot, so of 100 people, ~90 have some vaccination and 1 of them got sick whereas 10 are not vaccinated and 3 got sick. So vaccination results in an 1.1% case rate and lack of vaccination results in a 30% case rate. Turns out it's not that breakthrough is likely, it's that there are SO many more vaccinated people that the total number of breakthroughs is significant.

Those are great numbers for Marin county. Are things being skewed by the media in terms of breakthrough cases? Lots of headlines about more and more breakthroughs. Is it just a case of the spotlight being put on them or do you think the same statistical analysis holds for other places that are not up to par with the Marin vaccinated numbers?

The misunderstanding about the frequency of breakthrough cases is definitely causing some unnecessary hysteria. On the surface, this seems bad, but either that encourages people to reduce the risk by getting vaccinated, or it prepares us in the event of the very real possibility that it mutates in a way that reduces vaccine efficacy. And that's not even on the US population, because the way it's spreading still in Africa and parts of Asia, where vaccination is insignificant, that possibility is very real, and then we all get potentially set back to zero. Remember, Covid mutates at almost twice the rate of the flu, which is bad news because it's transmitted more efficiently, especially the delta variant. That's cheerful!

Shades said:

I am not a statistician but something does not seem right about that "test".

That's sort of the whole point. Even if you account for the fact that librarians are (allegedly) way more likely to fit the description, there are so many more farmers that they would have to be 1/20th as likely to be quiet and meek in order to be equally likely.

Those are great numbers for Marin county. Are things being skewed by the media in terms of breakthrough cases? Lots of headlines about more and more breakthroughs. Is it just a case of the spotlight being put on them or do you think the same statistical analysis holds for other places that are not up to par with the Marin vaccinated numbers?

I think breakthrough cases are real and it's important to point out that they exist, but I haven't actually seen too much sensationalism. Just anecdotes and incomplete statistics. I mean, in a neighborhood in Palo Alto (near Stanford) they have 100% vaccination, so you could easily write a headline "Every case in neighborhood, a breakthrough case!" It's not wrong and I wouldn't even say it's misleading. It's just...not very helpful without the information that everyone is vaccinated in which case it's not even news. The relevant number we care about and have known for months is that you're somewhere in the ballpark of 20 times less likely to have a positive diagnosis if you're vaccinated. All the other stuff is just ways of restating that.

Jeff said:

To be clear, this is happening strictly because the unvaccinated can't be trusted to wear a mask in public. There's no significant risk for the vaccinated, but since you can't differentiate, here we are.

There was no doubt this was going to be a problem from the minute they started dropping mask mandates. The same people that won’t get vaccinated are the same people that refuse to wear a mask.

Vaccines have been freely available for months. Public officials and businesses will eventually have to concede that there is a limit to controlling the behavior of fellow human beings. There are millions of cigarette smokers after decades of warnings, taxes, ostracism, etc.

Forcing those who’ve complied with societal norms to endure the same restrictive punishment as those who’ve thrown caution to the wind seems destined to failure.

“Johnny threw a spitball Class! Now you ALL get detention!”

Two things:

Not everyone is eligible or able to get the vaccine (and there are also people for whom the vaccine is ineffective.)

Mask mandates aren’t particularly limiting and I’m pretty sure they could exist indefinitely in some parts of the country. People keep framing mask mandates like their this huge oppressive overreach instead of being like not littering. Why is it so objectionable to be asked to care about other people?

Andy said:

People keep framing mask mandates like their this huge oppressive overreach instead of being like not littering. Why is it so objectionable to be asked to care about other people?

Well, it's not. Playing devil's advocate, it can be objectionable to be forced to care for other people (a mandate is not a request). Not saying I disagree with mask mandates, necessarily, but since this is Coasterbuzz, I felt the need to point out the contradiction.

True, but it seems like there is past precedent for being forced to care for other people's health.

I'm not allowed to smoke in Target, or on a plane, etc. What are the actual chances someone's going to get cancer from me having a smoke outdoors at a baseball game? Pretty much nil. But pretty much everyone's ok with that because smoke is yucky smelling and you can see it. A virus is invisible which makes it much easier to ignore.

Aamilj said:

Vaccines have been freely available for months.

Only in some countries.

In this country those under 40 will have had one shot at most, and those under 30 won't have had it at all.

I'm fully vaccinated as of the weekend. I took the first date the health service here offered me.

Sure, but we are talking about California where you can walk into any drug store and get vaccinated if you're age 12 or older.

Sure, but the United States is not isolated, and what happens in the rest of the world affects it. We should be freaking out about the non-vaccination in Africa, because we're setting up a situation where so much community spread sets up the scenario where mutations happen faster, and it only takes one vaccine resistant variant to set us back to zero.

I wrote about how individualism against cooperation is a false choice, and I believe that. We share the same world, and however small it might be, what one person does affects other people. So you can't really have "liberty" without potentially reducing someone else's. I mostly distill this down to, "Don't be an inconsiderate dick."

How do you get to "there are starving kids in Africa" from "Universal Studios Hollywood reinstates mask requirement for indoor areas?"

Who said anything about starving kids?