Those covid "controls" such as a green pass and vax card do nothing to stop the spread of covid. The masks are more affective than a shot at slowing the spread. That is why so many are against such asinine lipstick measures. The shot has been proven time and time again to NOT prevent carrying and spreading covid. By showing the right documents to enter an establishment only to remove the only effective (understandably minimal) measure to not spread is a fools dream for safety. Once you sit down at your table or the bar your mask is off and you're expelling potential covid breath (asymptomatically of course) to everyone around you. I would love for the shots to be as effective against these new variants as they were for alpha which they were designed for. That isn't the case. The entire white house staff with all of their boosters have now had covid. They are likely the biggest stickler to the mandates and yet they got this dreaded world killer. This is an endemic. It is no longer an emergency pandemic since it had been 2.5 years. Emergency measures need to stop and we as a world society need to shift gears and look at the long haul. Get the shot or don't. Wear a mask or don't. Those that do can take solace in their own actions to prevent their own infection. Those that don't can take solace that those who want to get the shot or wear a mask have that opportunity.
The Green Pass is obtained by most people by a stab test in the previous 48h. It did prove to be very effective forcing a lot of people to test often and to detect infections, and to quarantine people avoiding that they go around spreading the virus.
It was also very effective "gently forcing" people to be vaccinated, this helped to reduce significantly the morbility and mortality, to the point that now, with more than 90% of people being vaccinated, and the other 10% having mostly be infected at least twice, these quantities are down by a factor of 20 of what was happening prior of mass vaccination.
The fact that the vaccine is not preventing the virus spreading is true, but it is preventing hospitalization and deaths.
If you get the virus, but it behaves just as a cold, being infected is not a big issue anymore...
So globally all these measures were effective for saving lifes and avoiding the collapse of hospitals.
Masks were probably the least-effective measure, and this is due to a number of factors:
1) They were not made mandatory immediately, instead at the beginning their efficacy was not accepted by many people, including virologists and other doctors.
2) Even when made mandatory, it was accepted to use fabric masks, surgical masks, or other DIY masks which are really a very bad protective devices. Hence people was getting the virus despite the usage of these crap masks, and people started to doubt of them. If instead FFP2 or, better, FFP3 masks were the only allowed, and selling and using less-effective masks, or wearing them improperly had been sanctioned, also masks could have been a very good barrier against spreading of the virus
3) Masks are uncomfortable (particularly the bad ones, which irritate the skin, have bad elastic bands running behind the ears instead of around the head, and to no have a soft anti-allergenic closed-cell foam seal all around their border, as only the best FFP3 masks have).
4) Masks provide that false sense of protection, so people wearing a mask did think to be allowed to enter safely in highly crowded spaces, where unmasked people were gathering.
5) Even people purchasing high quality masks and wearing them properly ofter lack the discipline to avoid temporary interruptions of their usage, to the point that I have seen some of my colleagues removing them shortly for drinking, or for clearing the nose in a napkin, which are actions which make the barrier against the virus to fall entirely.
Due to my training, I was well aware that a good mask can be a very effective personal protection device, but that this protection can be very easily be disrupted.
Hence, I gave very little priority to making the usage of masks mandatory for the general population, exactly because it is impossible to avoid that "normal" people use them with the discipline that only a firefighter or a special-corps military has.
So now Covid is almost under control, but this result was obtained mostly thanks to vaccines and to a lot of swab tests (which were done for getting the Green Pass by unvaccinated people). The usage of masks contributed only marginally to the result, and the data now available proof this.
On the other hand, I always used highly protective FFP3 masks, wearing them very carefully. I have heard of no professional working in COVID hospitals being infected when wearing properly high-quality protection devices. Instead they were infected whenever they made some error, disrupting the barrier that the PPD provides.
