Vaccines or masks, slave. Your choice.
According to new research, if you’re wearing an N95 face mask, social distancing and vaccines may be unnecessary. But then again, according to research, all of the things done in the name of the pandemic are unnecessary.
In December, hundreds of people packed into a Barcelona arena to dance and sing along to five hours of live music and D.J. sets, gleefully abandoning social distancing guidelines for the night.
The show was a large-scale science experiment, designed to see if large indoor concerts could take place safely amid the coronavirus pandemic. But such scenes could soon become far more common: Researchers found that not one of the concertgoers tested positive for the coronavirus after the event, according to results published Wednesday on the website of the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
The safety protocols put in place for the concert could offer a preview of what live music events might look like for the foreseeable future, in some places with relatively low community transmission attempting to balance safety with the drive for a full return to normalcy.
While social distancing wasn’t required, attendees were required to wear N95 face masks throughout the event. The only exceptions were at a designated outdoor smoking area where only 20 people could gather at a time and distancing was mandatory, and an indoor bar area where masks could be briefly removed while drinking.
To make wearing masks more comfortable, temperatures inside the venue were kept under 70 degrees. While the building lacked windows, doors were left open to allow additional ventilation.
The concert took place before coronavirus vaccines were available in Spain, but at a time when the number of infections was relatively low, with roughly 221 cases being reported for every 100,000 people in the Catalonia region. All participants were required to take rapid antigen tests ahead of the concert – a method of testing for the coronavirus that is less accurate than others but delivers results within minutes.
More than 1,000 people passed the test and became part of the experiment, with half ushered into the concert and the other half sent home as a control group. Two members of the control group tested positive for the coronavirus eight days later, the researchers found, but none of the concert attendees did.
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In March, researchers experimented by hosting an even larger concert in Barcelona with similar safety measures in place. Roughly 5,000 people attended, and six people tested positive for the coronavirus within 14 days of attending the event, the BBC reported. Scientists determined that four had been infected elsewhere, and noted that the incidence rate among attendees was lower than in Barcelona as a whole. Those results have not yet been peer-reviewed.
If the virus was real and they really cared about people’s well-being, one would have to wonder why they didn’t do this research before introducing the social distancing and mask mandates. People could have been working normally, meeting up and being social while wearing these masks. The economy could have been saved.
But none of this pandemic stuff was ever about a virus. It was always about increasing the power of the elite.