I absolutely have the chops to write about the perceived personal risk COVID represents based on the available data. I don’t have to be an epidemiologist to make that determination for myself, as apparently 650,000 others who did go to AirVenture made for themselves.
We are at the point in the evolution of this disease that people are not being significantly cowed by scare headlines, of which there are actually very few now anyway. They have the available information to make this decision and not you or anyone else can make it for them, regardless of expertise. Earlier in the pandemic, the risk was much higher because prevalence was much higher, hence we all had a responsibility to share in what mitigations were available. We did this to protect ourselves and to ease the strain on the medical community. We were right to do it.
As I said above, I always believed masking was a weak mitigation but a mitigation nonetheless and was thus worth doing. I’m not doing it now and wouldn’t have at AirVenture because I believe it’s effective only if everyone masks and very few did. Anyone who thinks they are owed masking by others shouldn’t attend those events. I felt differently in the fall of 2020.
I follow two epidemiologists, Michael Osterholm of CIDRAP and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford. They are absolute polar opposites. Osterholm is a traditionalist, Bhattacharya a libertarian who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. I am perfectly capable of listening to both, looking at the data and deciding the proper course of action based on my own risk framework.
I suspect you are, too.