Face masks will become mandatory in shops across England, ministers are to announce on Tuesday, following mixed messages, a cabinet split and mounting pressure on Boris Johnson to change public advice.
New legislation will not come into force until Friday 24 July, however, raising concerns over the risk of coronavirus spreading over the next 10 days as lockdown is eased.
We could see this insanity coming, of course. Right from when Covid started spreading worldwide and the media went into a hysterical, hyperbolic overdrive. Governments across the world resorted to their most basic authoritarian instincts and cowed populations responded with their own base instincts driven by fear and ignorance. Facts, reason and logic – not to mention biology – were thrown under the bus.
I despise this government for caving to the press and the cowardice of the panicked population. But I will not be wearing a mask.
From now on, I simply will not go into any shops. I will not comply with this lunacy. I will not enable it.
Fifteen years ago, we were fighting an authoritarian Labour government when it tried to introduce identity cards and a draconian identity register. That pales into insignificance with what is now happening. We have a supposedly Conservative government crushing our liberties for no good reason because it has been panicked by a bad flu season, over a disease that has a kill rate of so close to zero as makes no difference, a disease that the majority will survive with few ill effects, that kills those who are already dying, yet the scary figures quoted out of context have been used to trample across our liberties with a jackboot that the Soviets and the Fascists alike would have envied. We are not being governed by the government here, we are being governed by the media and the hard of thinking.
At this point, I’m really struggling to see how things would have been worse if Corbyn had won…
Likewise.
Since the number of new cases keeps going inexorably down week on week, this is going to look even more ridiculous in ten day’s time. We are surely in the position now where we are in far less danger than we would be during a normal winter.
I used to argue with a work mate that Boris was a smart man acting as a buffoon.
I was wrong.
There was a grim inevitability about this. It’s absolute lunacy. So, looking at the area around the corner here, everyone will have to wear a face mask to go into the corner shop, but will then be able to come out, remove it and go into the crowded beer garden of the pub next door? That’s the logic of Lewis Carroll.
Agree there. It’s absolute lunacy. Wearing masks that are so full of holes that a virus can pass through them is not a sensible policy. It is on the other hand a policy that has been demanded by the mainstream media and as I say over at my place today, a Government that is led by the media is a government unfit to govern. https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2020/07/14/a-government-led-by-the-media-is-a-government-unfit-to-govern/
It’s not just that a virus can pass through the mask, it’s that it instils a false sense of security, so people will behave in a more risky manner. Also, anyone who does have the virus will increase the viral load around their face and hands as a consequence. Stupidity doesn’t come close to describing the practice.
You are also permitted to remove your mask to visit the in-store cafe and lavs.
I have the material ready for my mask. Just got to get a couple of elastic bands
I don’t want to wear one, and won’t if I can help it, but if I have to I think I’ll indulge in a bit of malicious compliance. Make a mask out of mesh material. No problem breathing through it, but no-one can complain, as no one has said what material a ‘mask’ must be made of…….
As you say there’s no standard as to the material that the mask should be made of, therefore I suspect that some of us will be indulging in malicious compliance by wearing the gussets of new (not used) ladies mesh bikini bottoms on our faces.
As seen on Leggies site:
It would be good if a text version was available?
Pretty sure I saw that somewhere else.
I’ve seen it several times, at least a couple of times on Going Postal, but It’s always been as an image, not text.
Here you go – I’ve OCR’d the image for you:
Doc Graham
Yesterday at 7:36 PM –
MASKS! Folks, let a surgeon of 30 years [a.k.a. me}
teach you about MASKS. COVID 19 virus particle size
averages 125 nanometers (0.125microns); the range is
0.06 microns to .14 microns; one needs an electron
microscope to see a COVID 19 virus particle. The
hoarded N 95 mask filters down to 0.3 microns. So, N95
masks block few, if any, virions (virus particles). This is a
simple fact, so you just cannot argue against it. Other
surgical masks, home-made masks and kerchiefs do the
following: 1) they allow free passage both ways (in and
out) of COVID 19 virions. 2) they become a warm, damp
or moist reservoir of COVID 19 particles in asymptomatic
“carriers” [estimated to be 85% of all people tested]. For
surgeons, years of training, intimidation, and humiliation
teach us to touch NOTHING but our surgical field. Lay
people constantly touch, re-arrange, and manipulate
their “masks”, wonderfully inoculating thousands of
virus particles onto their bare or (even worse, gloved)
hands. So, these absurd masks ENCOURAGE the fomite
transmission (“infected” articles-to-hand-to face
transmission of the virus). So, go ahead and allow idiots
to delude and mislead you to the false sense of
security–and danger–of masks!
2 for the price of one, cut a wonderbra in half, elasticated fasteners bonus !
This article might be of interest, showing the number of tests and the positive test results. Who’d a thunk it. Do more tests, detect more results.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states
Note that this refers to America but it will be exactly the same for the UK.
Which is how they got the Spike in Leicester, went from 1 testing station early June to 8 by July.
LR, I couldn’t agree more.
There’s a timely and (quite long) detailed exposition by a solicitor of the legal aspects of some of these measures over at Hector Drummond’s place:
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/07/14/stephen-jackson-time-for-action-in-the-battle-for-hearts-and-minds/
His summary:
Fiction:
Health and safety obligations require social distancing measures to be imposed in the workplace and businesses generally.
Law:
Guidance is generally unenforceable but, as a matter of legal obligation, employers and controllers of premises are required to undertake evidence-based health and safety risk assessments. If there is no evidence of a significant danger, no mitigation is required.
Insurers don’t appear to care what the law says. If a company doesn’t take every measure possible to ‘eradicate’ risk, they won’t insure or won’t pay out.
And this (via Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics):
https://principia-scientific.org/neurosurgeon-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-healthy-individuals/