Will you Please Wear A Mask Now

Really?
Australia total deaths from COVID 472
US total deaths 175,000
Sure, locking down does jack sh1t

 

I'm not team red but thanks anyway. I simply look to results of masking up and the false sense of security that it gives most folk.

mask ordinances, yet we hear statists complain because positives increase more than when there were no mask ordinances

how can that be?

mask up= numbers grow

no mask numbers decreased

I look to Australia with masking up, locking down, economy killed; all the things desired by leftists, yet positives increase

Here's a news flash: let the immune system handle it. Your masks aren't helping

 

ummm australia is back to locking down and masking up.......................why? That was rhetorical by the way

 

I'm going to answer anyway.
BECAUSE THEY ARE TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY.
That's what you do if you want to control a highly contagious disease.
Test, trace and react.
This is how you keep deaths below 500 instead of letting them get to over 175,000.

 

if it worked so well the first time.............................

leftists= repeat the same failed methods

 

It did work, that's why they have some of the best numbers out there.
Ps. The Australian coalition is centre-right, not leftists.

I'm starting to think you have no idea what you are talking about.

 

Masks aren't helping? https://apnews.com/f218e1a38cce6b2af63c1cd23f1d234e - Every county is Kansas with a mask ordinance saw a drop in new cases, while those counties without any ordinance saw no drop. Totally a coincidence, right?

Here is a very, incredibly simple experiment you can try at home. Set a water sprayer on mist. Spray into the air. Notice where all those small droplets go. Now, do that same procedure, but put a paper towel very close to the nozzle. Did the paper towel contain some of the spray?

That's a very good way to prove to yourself that a mask reduces the number of water droplets flying out of your mouth. Another good way is to wear a mask for 15 minutes, and then take it off. Is the mask moist? There ya go - more proof that not every piece of spittle flying out of your mouth went flying through the air.

 

I would say that more than an I.Q. test it's a test of ignorance. And ;ignorance about Covid 19 runs rampant on the right.

Herd immunity is only achievable with a vaccine. There is no vaccine. Therefore it is not possible.

Australia shut down because shut down WORKS. It reduces the number of cases and the number of dead. Just look at the U.S. as the sorriest of examples on how not to deal with a crisis. Where the first shut down was only for a few weeks, and despite us being in much worse shape than any other country in the world, our President has still to take any action, propose any plan, or provide any guidance as to how we're going to get out of this.

So... yes... I would change "I.Q. test" for "ignorance test". Even intelligent people can be ignorant. But it can be come a "stupidity" test. Which is when people, some of whom may be of normal intelligence. refuse to educate themselves.

As I said, the U.S. is the example of how not to deal with a pandemic.

You do not deal with a pandemic by lying about it.
You do not deal with a pandemic by denying scientific fact.
You do not deal with a pandemic by politicizing it.
You do not deal with a pandemic by listening to a President* who is known for peddling pseudoscience and conspiracy theorites.

 

It also reduces the number of people who end up with lifelong heart or lung issues, or permanent brain damage. While we don't yet know how many will be impacted, we know it will be more than the number that die. To me, this is a very serious cause for concern.

 

Exactly! And to many of us, becoming a life-long burden to our family is a fate that is worse than dying.

 

The scientific process is not in play with our Crisis Covid. The political process is in play.

Mad scientists can and are bought and sold. Mad scientists drive this nonsense.

The good doctors and scientists, for example the Frontline Doctors, are censored and called dirty names. The charlatans like Fauci are held up as heroes, and the masses fall in line to genuflect. Human nature at its worst.

 

Masks are of variable efficacy depending on what kind, and how people wear them (not efficacious when people allow big gaps on the sides and under the eyes, keep pulling them down from the nose, and only wear flimsy cloth masks; masks on the other hand are highly efficacious when they are the right kind (ASTM level 3 masks), and are worn properly with the seal enhanced by simple devices such as the 3-rubber-band technique. Still even the poorly made and poorly worn masks have *some* impact, and to see it you need to compare with a similar situation without masks. That's what 29 studies I posted have shown, with all of them concluding for masks lowering the relative risk of catching the illness (all 29 made with viruses of the same size of the SARS-CoV-2, all with coronavirus - MERS, SARS-1, and SARS-CoV-2). Another comparison is when you look at the 15 counties in Kansas with mask mandates versus the 90 Kansas counties without such mandates. The rate of contagion dropped sharply in ALL 15 with masks, no exception, and remained the same or worse in ALL 90 counties without mask mandates. That's not a randomized controlled trial so it's not excluded that it is a correlation rather than causality, but it is highly suggestive since the 15 counties with mandates were the ones more densely populated and with bigger outbreaks, so they had all the conditions to be in bigger trouble as compared to the other 90 counties, but still, once they implemented masks, their rate dropped sharply. And the 29 studies I quoted before *did* look at intervening factors so those are more clearly causation than correlation. What you need to realize is that Australia would be probably in even worse shape without the masks.

Herd immunity: I'm not sure if it's your case but a lot of people run with this concept without fully understanding how it is achieved and what are the difficulties and consequences of going for this approach. The Herd Immunity Threshold of a virus is calculated as 1 minus 1 divided by the R naught number (reproduction number) for the virus, multiplied by 100 for the percentage of the population that needs to be immune for herd immunity to occur. For the SARS-CoV-2 this threshold sits anywhere between 50% and 82.5% of the population being infected by it (given various R naught estimates between 2.0 and 5.7). So, let's use the mid-point: 66.25% or two-thirds of the population. Now, that's where the issue gets really iffy, in terms of public health. If what you want to do is to allow two thirds of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity, do realize that with the infectious-fatality rate being estimated at least at 0.65%, more likely 1%, this would result in a lot of dead people. Again, let's go for the mid-point of 0.825%, and let's see how many Americans would need to die to achieve herd immunity through the natural infection rather than through the vaccine.

66.25% of 331,000,000 Americans is 219,287,500 Americans. Now, apply to these the mid-point infection-fatality rate of 0.825%. This gives us 1,809,121 Americans.

Now consider that it's becoming clearer and clearer that some 5% of people who survive the infection don't die but come out of it with very serious health consequences: permanent lung fibrosis, strokes, heart muscle weakening (78% of survivors according to a recent German study, including 67% of these being mild and moderate cases; not just severe/critical cases), cognitive impairment, kidney failure, and just this week another consequence was spotted, new cases of myasthenia gravis. So, 5 times more people who don't die come out of it in serious trouble. Five times 1,809,121 Americans is 9,045,609 Americans.

Now, think of it. This is the price to pay for "herd immunity":

1,809,121 Americans dead.
9,045,609 Americans maimed for life.

The economic impact of this would be HUGE, in burden of treatment costs, burden for the healthcare system, lost productivity, and curtailed life span. Most likely the economic impact would be WAY worse than the impact we've seen from lockdowns.

Add to this the issue that herd immunity is not simply achieved by getting the infection; it needs lasting IgG neutralizing antibodies, something that is not warranted for the SARS-CoV-2, according to studies showing these IgG neutralizing antibodies being rather short-lived. This doesn't mean people won't be immune through cell-mediated immunity (T-cells helper and cytotoxic, and B-cells) but it does mean that they'd still be spreading the infection and not contributing to herd immunity.

See now why going for herd immunity is a bad, bad, bad idea? That's precisely why 214 governments on Earth didn't go for this concept, except one, Sweden, and their results have been extremely poor (only 7% of Swedes with antibodies, far short of herd immunity threshold, a much higher death toll than neighboring countries, and an economic downturn, by the way, just as bad as neighboring countries', in a loss-loss rather than win-win situation). The very Trump Administration did consider the idea of letting the virus run rampant in the hope of achieving herd immunity, but fortunately, after consulting with his experts, Trump realized that it would be a very bad idea.

So, if herd immunity is a bad idea, what should we do?

Simple. We should continue to invest heavily in vaccines, like we're already doing through the very clever Warp Speed initiative by the Trump administration, and meanwhile, we should do our best to preserve epidemiological controls that hurt minimally the economy, such as masks, hand hygiene, and social distancing with avoidance of crowded indoor situations (rather than the more economically-damaging lockdowns, which could have worked better but didn't because we went about them very incompletely, very chaotically, and for too short a time - this ship has sailed; we got the economic downturn without the benefit of epidemiological control; again a loss-loss instead of a win-win which we *could* have achieved if we did it better - too late to redo it, as it probably would be even less observed than the first time).

If we continue to control things as best as possible then engage in a large vaccination campaign, we will certainly NOT get to the numbers above, fortunately. But it could happen if we were to toss all precautions off the window and go out partying, in the hope of achieving the elusive Herd Immunity Threshold.

 

` Take this mask ! We don't need no dang mask ! ´

 

An interesting event in South Korea:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/56-people-got-coronavirus-starbucks-160600585.html

 

~ Soon we likely will be instructed to wear "respirators" as masks are not effective. That may actually make a difference.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/n95-ma...ction-to-meet-u-s-covid-19-demand-11594987201

 

Correction - they are not 100% effective.

Quit making perfect the enemy of good.

 

from the story that you posted

The virus also could have spread as people touched contaminated surfaces such as tables and door handles, they said.

in other words, they've no clue if it's due to masking up, or due to not touching the contaminated surfaces and then touching your eyes and face.

but, if you are one with the mask, you would fail to note that

 

they are better than all of the silly, useless, home-made masks you see everywhere

 

Yes, I'm fully aware of the surface route (and I never touch my face without first sanitizing my hands; I carry an 8-oz bottle of hand sanitizer gel in my breast pocket) but newer studies have shown a prevalence of 2% in transmission by fomites (inanimated objects and surfaces) and 98% by aerosol and droplets, so chances are 1 in 50 that what you are saying is what happened, and 49 in 50 that the airborne route was responsible for it.

 

Behind a paywall, but judging by the title and the first paragraph, I'm glad. It's about time. Since January I've been saying that we need to beef up the domestic production of PPE.