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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

The surgeon general of Louisiana was formerly a U.S. House Representative. Luke Letlow was his campaign chairman and his chief of staff, almost certainly one of the Surgeon General's closest and most trusted colleagues. Luke Letlow died of COVID when he was 41 years old leaving behind a widow and two children.

From Luke Letlow's wikipedia page:

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Letlow wore a mask only sporadically during his campaign, and was photographed speaking indoors to constituents when masks were not being worn by him or those gathered.[14] In October, he had encouraged Louisiana officials to relax pandemic restrictions, warning, "We're now at a place if we do not open our economy, we're in real danger."

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Reminds me of the Herman Cain award.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award

Here is a tweet from Herman Cains Twitter posted on 30 August 2020:

> It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.

Note that he had already died of COVID one month prior to this tweet on 30 July 2020

The problem with this is that he had been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2006. It is rare for a person with stage IV cancer to survive for another 14 years. He received treatment but most likely eventually he would have died anyway. Covid may have fastened his demise but his odds of dying were quite high even without covid.

Thank you for the context.

A person at high risk of dying from a respiratory virus ignored public health warnings then got a respiratory virus and died. I think the surgeon general should consider this as a terrible object lesson in the value of protecting vulnerable populations.

I was actually commenting for Herman Cain. Sorry, for this mistake.

Yes, they made announcements without clearly thinking how they will be perceived. I agree that it was unnecessary and then dying suddenly didn't look good.

Nevertheless, if I had a situation like where I know for sure that my odds are not great, I would do the same. I would live full life today because tomorrow I could be dead. Herman Cain most likely knew that he is not going to last long. It didn't make sense for him to be afraid of death and isolate for indefinite period of time. His bravery is an example to follow.

I don’t see how not wearing a mask in crowded places is “brave.”

Bravery is when you put others at risk.

We now know that masks were barely effective or not effective at all. They could even be net negative by causing people to take more risks.

Isolating was the only way. A lot of elderly in the UK did this successfully and never got covid. Lockdowns, masks and schools closures did not affect the spread significantly. We know this because Sweden did not mandate these things and had about the same amount of people getting covid until vaccines arrived. The benefits were that Sweden had less mortality from other causes.

A well-fitted N95 mask is almost perfectly effective. I have been in a number of situations where my maskless companions got COVID but I (wearing a 3M Aura) did not.

That applies only to lab conditions. No RCTs have found much effectiveness so far in real life.

I'm sorry, but that is some absurd nonsense if we're talking about N95 masks and not surgical masks. You have been misinformed.

The RTCs didn't find significant difference between N95 and surgical masks in hospital settings.

How can a request for evidence be absurd?

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