[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
I know 0, and my self-isolation prevents me from being near anyone who is asymptomatic.
By wearing a n95 mask you are giving doctors the middle finger.
People need to dig around in their garage and get these things out, and then start wearing them. Even the disposable ones can be reused many times, particularly for someone that is just at the grocery store and not intubating COVID patients or something.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that healthcare workers need them, but healthcare workers also need people to wear them so that they don't get sick and show up at the hospital!
how is this true?
By the way, we learned that a century ago during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic - wearing masks help, even with non-N95 masks. Influenza could also caused by corona viruses, also transmitted via droplets primarily, just like the SARS-CoV-2
By the time more mask factories are up, the capacity will no longer be needed. Same goes for ventilators. Too little too late; shouldn’t have outsourced manufacturing to China a generation ago.
The better solution is diversification of global supply chains which benefits all countries long-term.
If we just tell (or force with fine) everyone to wear a mask and have their mouth covered whenever in close proximity with some other person, we can go back to usual life. What's so hard about this?
However we didnt, so stop promoting ordinary people wearing masks.
[1] Masks protect other people from you spreading the disease if _you_ are sick. This is true, unless you spend your day around covid-19 infected individuals all day long for your job. [2] Doctors and nurses need that mask. They are the ones who spend their day, risking their lives and their families health to treat these people.
Even now the risk of contracting the virus, if you are following isolation protocols, is extremely low.
Masks reduce risk.
> [2] Doctors and nurses need that mask.
Here's the reason, right here.
Seems like we didn't prepare. There should be enough masks for healthcare professionals and ordinary citizens.
Wearing a mask, if the entire population is infected, provides a benefit because you are surrounded by infection. Guess which person spends 8 hours a day in a highly infected population? Doctors, especially in the intensive care unit.
If you were worth as much to humanity as a doctor, as an ordinary person, your logic would save fewer lives. However it would increase your chance of being saved.
Stop lying to people that masks aren't effective. Not only does that put people in immediate danger, it makes it more difficult to walk back that advice in a few months, when we're definitely going to want everyone to wear masks when in public.
Doctors and nurses need that mask
So make your own. Even half of a t-shirt is much better than nothing.
I don't think they'll earn back respect for at least a generation. People won't forget this.
Thought experiment: Take a small sip of beet juice and then simulate a sneeze or a cough while standing several feet in front of your clean white wall. Next, take another sip, wrap a handkerchief around your face and then sneeze / cough / spit. See how far that "virus juice" flies when you wear a mask?
If everyone wore a mask, then all the people who are sick are effectively increasing their social distance from the healthy people. Even if the sick person walks within 6 feet of you, their effective social distance might be greater than 6 feet if they are wearing a bandana, t-shirt, surgical mask, etc.
Wearing a face mask works on a population scale. Everyone should be wearing a mask.
I thought the expert advice from the WHO is to not wear a mask?
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.
Do you know better than the WHO?
Shouldn’t we be going with data rather than ‘common sense’?
Other times that hasn't happened yet and you still need to make a decision about what to do today, not after six months of further study.
IIRC the CDC recommended against early on, I don't know about WHO or where CDC stands on it now. But interviews like:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-pr...
from other experts give reasons why it is effective:
Q: What mistakes are other countries making?
A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others."
// end of interview comment.
Could it be that CDC knew knew masks worked, but didn't want people to stockpile them? Or could it be that most people won't wear them effectively? No idea which, or both.
I believe the right thing to do is to ramp up mask production and try to get a very small number per capita (after healthcare workers have sufficient) to the sick and general population, especially around areas like NYC. Then educate people on how to wear them.
Apparently.
The one thing I learned from this pandemic is to distrust scientists at the WHO and the CDC and to read the primary literature directly. These folks are far too involved in politics.
Obviously there's a need that's not being met, but it's nearly two months since masks became hard to acquire.[0] Can we not change the official recommendation to "make a cotton mask and wear it if you go out for groceries; here's a template. Don't use N95 masks, instead donate them"? It would be great to have numbers on this.
[0] anecdotal, Bay Area.
Looks like mask production has been ramping up since January, at least. But numbers of the big picture would be neat to see. https://www.wired.com/story/surreal-frenzy-inside-us-biggest...
Doing this really seem like a much better way to handle the situation than giving a really really dangerous false advice like this.
Better "trick" the public then.
Seems to me that the biggest problem we have is lay people thinking they know better from reading random isolated papers without context and doing their own thing against advice designed to make everyone safer.
It's bewildering the US and European guidance on this.
Edit: read this carefully: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843947/ It will apply to SARS-CoV-2
Frankly, you don't need to be 'qualified' to read review articles in this area--I encourage any logical citizen to do so. Specialist articles?...sure, it's unlikely you will gain much from reading those.
There is ample scientific evidence that masks work both to prevent being infected and to prevent infecting others.
The argument seems to be "there is sufficiently low risk from normal daily activities that it's not worth wearing a mask." If that's the case, why can't I leave my house except for groceries? How did all of those people catch this thing if the risk is so low? The reality is that the risk for everyone, given the severity of COVID is high. The risk for healthcare workers is beyond extreme.
From what I gathered from their guidance the basically say masks are not effective enough to protect you & people do not know how to use them.
Well, the problem is that how well the mask protects you is at this point int time actually a secondary concern. The biggest issue is protecting others from you when you are infected and do not know that yet, which is a very big problem for covid-19 due to many asymptomatic carriers.
Even a piece of cloth covering your mount and nose can reduce the amount of infected droplets you generate be sneezing and breathing significantly if not totally stop transmission barring really close physical contact, so there is really no good reason for everyone not to wear a mask.
That WHO is totally neglecting this aspect of the mask protecting others is almost criminal negligence.
Why give them to nurses and doctors then? It would suffice for the patients to wear them. If they do work at protecting you, then let's say a patient can't wear one, should you wear one? The answer is yes. Therefore the only logical conclusion is that an N95 mask protects you.
As far as I can tell, they are not saying anything about the other much more important aspect of masks protecting others when everyone wears them.
And that's in my opinion very very wrong and is most likely already costing many lives...
They say there is not enough evidence to back up the idea that the general population wearing masks has a benefit to everyone.
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
> Some people with swine flu travelled on a plane from New York to China, and many fellow passengers got infected. Some researchers looked at whether passengers who wore masks throughout the flight stayed healthier. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 people who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick passengers wore masks, compared to 47% of the healthy passengers. Another way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wearers got sick, but 35% of non-wearers did.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
> ...the vice president of Taiwan, a prominent epidemiologist, gave regular public service announcements... These announcements included when and where to wear a mask, the importance of handwashing, and the danger of hoarding masks to prevent them from becoming unavailable to frontline health workers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...
I'm not convinced masks help either way.
This is how it happened here in Czech Republic - one day as part of the emergency measure face masks (including home made ones) have been made mandatory in public, fullstop. Don't wear one & the police will request you to put on one or face a fine.
This we we went from you in public getting weird looks if you have a mask to anyone not wearing a mask getting weird looks in about two days.
Since then the neighboring country of Slovakia to the east adapted the same rules for mask wearing in public and most recently Austria to the south adapted mandatory mask wearing in shops.
* University of Washington, in Seattle.
http://www.virology.ws/2018/03/01/influenza-virus-in-the-eye...
1m27s video -- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preventing-coronavirus-facemask...
Do you think they were ready to stop airplanes and require people to wear mask back then?
The two runs we've done were to the super market & pharmacy (about a week and a half ago) and to my wife's office building since she needed records of employment to let folks start collecting unemployment. At this point a mask is a good idea - but simply not going out is a better one.
A full bio-hazard suit is too expensive and quite impractical, less than that is not safe.
Mandating everyone in airports, on planes, etc.. must be wearing a mask is 100% possible and would have slowed the spread. Don't have a mask? Here's some scissors, cut up a shirt in your luggage and make one.
In Seattle, I'd say around half of the people I've seen in public are wearing masks this week.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...
I'm only partially joking. For example, McDonald's doesn't allow Halloween masks inside the store to discourage robbery.
The OP posited that China's practice of selling animals in open air meat markets as being a cultural distinction that makes the US entirely different. There are plenty of open air meat markets in the United States, and we've had plenty of issues over time with this.
Maybe it would've been simpler to say "Making jokes and insinuations about bat soup (or whatever other Wuhan memes are currently popular) is to intentionally downplay what actually happened in this scenario. Congrats on the reductive racism, you've established that you're superior to others and your culture is surely blameless in the spread of this GLOBAL pandemic."
I disagree that it’s reductively racist to observe that bringing, selling, and butchering live, wild animals in wet markets is a bad hygienic practice. It is just a bad idea for the world we live in. That’s true regardless of the country or culture, though it is especially prevalent in Asia for historical reasons. I think that’s a reasonable statement in the interest of public health, just like I would argue against anti-vax cultures. Calling out behaviors that are not conducive to public health should not be shamed or called racist. My post was meant to be silly but in good faith, as you described yours was also meant to be.
Lastly, if you are aware of regular occurrences of comparable practices (butchering of live, wild animals) in markets in non-Asian geographies other than Mexico, then you should go add whole paragraphs to the geography section of the Wet Market Wikipedia page and enlighten us all here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market
Cheers.
Even now the risk of contracting the virus, if you are following isolation protocols, is extremely low.
People who interact with individuals who are sick and need treatment are putting themselves and their families at risk because of you.
This false sense of security erodes basic isolation and sanitary measures which are more protective.
I understand people want to feel safe, its better for them to be safe.
Step 1. Avoid old people and just do normal life, build an immunity.
Step 2. Now enough people are immune we can hang out with old people again.
But we are at Step 0 and are making a big delay for steps 1 and 2 which will still need to happen. There’s a big risk the second wave will be more tragic than the first if people don’t realize it.
It's not just old people who are at risk, BTW. With medical treatment the death rate of under-40s is about 0.2%, 30x less than the ~6% of over-65s. However, young people are still hospitalized at roughly half the rate of old people; if the hospital system is overwhelmed we can expect a death rate of ~5% of young people. That's about a 10 million young people in America alone. That's why it's so important to delay the epidemic long enough to build enough hospitals and ventilators to treat everyone.
This is extremely unlikely unfortunately, most flattened curves end up overtaking the populace at large - the more crucial element to control is the proportion of the population that's sick at any given time to avoid overwhelming healthcare or logistic resources.