slaps forehead
Really?
Yes really.
It prepares your body to fight infection, so you should get much reduced symptoms (if any).
It is not known yet whether you will not pass on infection, but the chances are you may.
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What that means is, it’s sad when people die but they’re ultimately expendable. The sacred economy, on the other hand, must be preserved at all costs. Bush Jr. would not have had a lockdown or anything that affected the economy. It’s possible – I’m really squinting here to see this – but it’s possible that he might have had more positive messaging about social distance and masking. In service to the economy, of course, because masks and social distancing still allow people to shop to their heart’s content.
Yeah, I know what you mean. They were a bunch of evil fucks, too. But, and I don’t mean this as an excuse at all, his cabinet seemed to have some basic level of intelligence. I think they would’ve seen how harmful to the economy the total ineptitude has been. I think they would’ve avoided the “reality tv form of governance” or at least dialed it back a little.
It’s all just hypothesis at this point. But it would take a lot to convince me any American government in my lifetime would’ve fucked this up as badly as T and Co did.
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Trump seemed to relish fucking over the American public, with the bleach drinking, and the UV lightbulbs in the body, and the drugs that don’t work, and the LIBERATE MICHIGAN! and everything else. Genuinely not bashing our friends in the UK, because we’re clearly not in a position to do so, but I think a Bush administration in charge of this would have been more like how the UK’s conservative government handled it: better optics, but not necessarily better results.
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I may be way off, but I imagine Bush and Co. would’ve at least gotten behind the masks early on. That alone would’ve saved at least 10’s of thousands of lives.
Remember how close we were to getting masks shipped to everyone? Only to have it tanked due to Ts feud with Bezos? I just can’t imagine anything like it under any previous admin.
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While I completely agree, that’s partly because I think they also would have been pushing masks and handwashing as an alternative to social distancing and stay-at-home orders as much as they could. Probably promote work-from-home for office workers. But never doing anything that would directly harm the economy until they were forced to by the indirect harm to it their inaction caused.
Actually, by ‘priming’ your immune system, vaccines prevent the colonization of your body by a pathogen. Because the pathogen can’t get a foothold, it can’t reproduce in sufficient numbers to then infect other people. You don’t just become an asymptomatic carrier. If that was the case, the 11,000 people in the vaccine arm of the pfizerBioNtech study & the 15,000 people vaccinated in the Moderna study would have all tested positive. People aren’t walking around filled with measles, or tetanus, or mumps, infecting everyone whose vaccine did not give them immunity.
Masks don’t prevent every droplet. But they decrease the amount that someone exhales by enough that it makes it very unlikely you will get infected. They are imperfect, and that’s partly why they need to be universal. If you and I have masks, and you have covid, I am unlikely to get infected if we interact. The virus must be on a droplet that you exhale, which must make it through your mask - which is unlikely if you have a well fitting mask. Then it must traverse the air between us without falling to the ground. Then I must inhale it through my mask - also unlikely. These three unlikely events are possible. But if masks did nothing, masked people at the grocery store would catch the virus at the same rate as unmasked people in bars and restaurants catch the virus, which is NOT what is happening.
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That is the intention, hope and a reasonable conclusion. It is not supported by data yet. Until it is – mask, space, wash and ventilate is going to be essential (and sensible).
But none has demonstrated that it prevents infection altogether, or reduces the spread of the virus in a population. This leaves open the chance that those who are vaccinated could remain susceptible to asymptomatic infection — and could transmit that infection to others who remain vulnerable. “In the worst-case scenario, you have people walking around feeling fine, but shedding virus everywhere,” says virologist Stephen Griffin at the University of Leeds, UK.
It is not yet clear whether or not the vaccine could protect against coronavirus infection or simply against developing symptoms once you are infected.
“If it’s stopping infection then, by definition, it should be stopping transmission from one person to another,” said Hunter.
“If you don’t get the infection because you’ve been immunised you’re not going to infect me anyway. But, if what you’re getting is an asymptomatic infection, there is still the risk potential that you could infect me, although it will almost certainly be a lot lower than if you are actually clinically ill.”
That is not a reasonable comparison since the store interactions would normally be shorter and less direct – exposure duration increases the likelihood of infection.
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many times worth
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I’m pro universal mask wearing, but I will quibble with your description. I don’t think you should aver that “masks” make it “very unlikely you will get infected” because the likelihood depends highly on the quality of the mask and the mask fit. “Less likely” yes, “very unlikely”…you can’t really generalize about that because of the variables such as distance, exposure time, filtration level and mask fit. You need to define “masks” because they vary so widely in effectiveness. Also, you are describing only ballistic droplets and it is now believed that aerosol droplets are a prime vector for transmission.
I’m going to use an example I’ve posted before to illustrate the issue.
If you are in an environment where you’d get infected after 10 minutes of exposure without a mask, it would take longer to get the same exposure wearing a mask as personal protection. The amount time to get the equivalent exposure over varies depending on the quality of the mask filtration, assuming good fit. Here are some approximations based of the 10 minute arbitrary example and some filtration levels that do happen:
No mask: 10 minutes
10% effective “surgical” mask with lots of air going around the filter: 11 minutes
50% effective cloth mask: 20 minutes.
95% KF94, KN95, N95 mask that only meets minimum 95% standard: 200 minutes
99% KF94, KN95, N95 that exceeds minimum standards: 1,000 minutes†
So, as personal protection, a mask can make it less likely you’ll get infected. But how much less likely will vary by orders of magnitude depending on the quality of the mask, and also on other variables.
Pleated “surgical” masks vary widely in effectiveness depending on how well they fit (they aren’t respirators so they aren’t designed to fit tightly or seal well), how good the filter is, how easily the air moves through it (the harder it is to breathe through it the more likely the air is to go around it).
Surgical masks really can be as useless at PPE as being about 10% effective. (Collins fit tested a FLTR brand surgical mask at 11.10% on his face when worn normally, but tested at 91% when sealed tightly to his face with his hands.)
Cloth masks vary a lot, but they are never in the same league as respirator grade masks like N95s. They are a crap shoot that you always know will be less effective than you should be wearing for best efficacy.
†In Arron Collins quantitative fit testing he does get 99% on face test results for some KF94 and N95 masks - their performance exceeds the minimum standard but you can see from the numbers that the difference in exposure between a 95% effective mask and a 99% effective one is huge.
yeth, you thaid it.
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