When measures, including mask mandates, are enforced or even ended isn’t decided based on gut feelings. You are painting a picture by using this phrasing, and it is not a kind one.
This pandemic is a developing situation which needs constant re-evaluation. Remember, WDKS, even after all the time.
The constant re-evaluation specifically includes other fields than epidemiology, and informes policies which are decided on by political bodies.
Those policies are negotiated in different spaces, including the scientific, but definitely also the political space. Some of the arguments in the negotiations are virological, epidemiological, and vaccinological. There are more from medical and scientific disciplines, but many of the factors and possibly derived “metrics” are not measurable, and not even clearly definable. They shift, depending on the parts we do learn shit about.
In my opinion, scientific arguments, and especially medically relevant scientific arguments are to be weighed more strongly than others, because human lifes depend on it. This is an ethical argument. If we can agree that every life has value, inherently, and inalienable rights, then why are we even having the discussion about likewise negotiated, derived, arbitrary and dumbed down measurable criteria in relation to the example of mask mandates on public transport?
If we, as a society, decide on the question of wearing a mask on public transport during a high incidence phase of a developing and ongoing pandemic while far to many people are susceptible to a highly contagious virus which kills vulnerable human beings and has proven to have long-term effects to a relevant proportion of those which it does not kill —
now, what exactly would you think how this sentence should end?
TL;DR: defining fixed clear and measurable criteria to end measures is very dangerous in a developing and highly chaotic global health crisis situation. Just keep your mask on. And accept that it is complicated, and dynamic.
