A lot of this product hype is very reminiscent of the 2021 relax and unmask marketing.
There’s a lot of product hype around certain brands of covid testing equipment. A lot of the marketing and personal testimonials online, and really nobody knows how many are inauthentic. Often a lot of it winds up sounding anti-mask. The product hype sounds a lot like vax and relax propaganda circa summer 2021. It’s strange how people aren’t picking up on this. Some people seem to push the idea of unmasking with surety with certain super special expensive tests that are actually embargoed in the U.S. But many are shelling out large sums because of the level of hype around them. And when cautioned to be realistic, some lash out with hostility. Perhaps out of sunk cost fallacy bias. On reddit there’s obvious signs of inauthentic farming of downvotes onto anyone suggesting that certain products maybe might not be panacea. Some people seem to think that the swiss cheese meme is an à la carte menu, and some even add Qanon 2020 era covid prophylactics and inappropriately refer to them as “layers”.
I saw a post criticizing elastomerics or PAPRs as a solution because they said that those were even more alienating than masks. They don’t always let it slip so openly that they’re anti-mask, but even in a subreddit that’s ostensibly pro-mitigation, the undermining of masks always seems to subtly show up in a lot of these discussions around the “other layers” which they always seem to be floated eventually as alternatives. And of course these alternatives are always niche product lines for sale now! It’s tragic because if some people are just continually repeating how they believe masking is awkward or unfriendly, this is the exact opposite direction from normalizing masking. It’s just another example of people embracing the risky shift effect.
I realize a lot of people want it both ways. Almost everyone wants to avoid covid, after all — there are few people who want to get sick. But people also want to be able to gather, or meet with someone unmasked. There are ways to orchestrate safer gatherings, and reduce the chances of a superspreader event. (The keywords there being safer and reduce the chances.) But even a meeting of two people is a risk if both involved aren’t on the same page. There’s just no way to make it very safe to unmask around someone who is taking little to no precautions elsewhere, or worse who you can’t trust to tell you if they’ve been sick or exposed. I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, when promoting the use of prophylactics, they used to say “when you go to bed with someone, you’re going to bed with everyone else they’ve been to bed with” prior to you. That’s pretty much how infectious diseases just work. And with aerosol transmitted viruses, you don’t have to go to bed, you just have to be in a room together unmasked or in some level of proximity.
Obviously in spinning the wheel, some may get lucky repeatedly, maybe because it just so happens nobody at the parties they’ve attended happened to have had covid. Some people acknowledge the risk and decide it’s worth maybe getting or spreading covid, and there is no broad taboo against taking risks, so that’s what many people do. But some people seem to want assurances that whatever they’re doing is ok, and unfortunately a lot of clever marketing people know exactly how to play to that. The marketing around vax and relax did just that, people relaxed, they went back out engaging in the economy, and then we had that huge omicron wave. Not everyone got sick of course, not everyone died. But many people did.
Testing is very useful, and part of an overall strategy. There should be more people testing more often, and more access to more tests. But there is no test, nor any product on the market, that is “foolproof” or that can guarantee anything. That’s marketing hype. And there’s plenty of industry interests with incentives to push everyone to get back out there, even when it’s risky. And there are people who have reasons to tell you what you want to hear.