I hope this is a take home from this shitstorm. You never have complete information in a timely manner. You either react conservatively (in the traditional sense of the word) to the partial information you do have, or you wait until you have complete information, by which time it is too late to react at all. I do not expect the right wingnuts to absorb that info, but hopefully the next admin will?
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Globe and Mail is pro big business with mostly conservative leanings, so they have been pushing for “opening the economy” since the shut down started. Of course they will spin the opening as positively as possible. I don’t have a graph, but from eyeballing the numbers cases have flattened but not gone down while the cases in the rest of the country are decreasing. So if one measures success but not becoming a complete shitshow, yeah we are doing fine. If the goal is to beat this bug, we suck.
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Maybe everyone in the country should be shipped a framed, full size, autographed poster of Trump to alert them to this problem. At tax payer expense, of course.
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Back in April THL head Markku Tervahauta recommended the use of masks in public, however the ministry’s Varhila later contradicted his advice.
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Well, that’s unhelpful and counter to everything I’ve read. How were these studies done? It sounds like they weren’t epidemiological, but then in a properly shut down country it would be nearly impossible to get much data that way.
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Abstract
The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health has drawn up a report on the use of community face coverings to prevent the
spread of COVID-19. In the report, face coverings refer to all types of protection covering the face. The systematic literature
review was prepared for the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health by Summaryx Oy, a non-profit corporation, based on a
commission agreement.In other respects, the report was prepared as part of official duties at the Ministry of Social Affairs
and Health.
According to the systematic literature review, there is very little research data available on the effectiveness of community
face coverings in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in society. Based on evidence from research, the effect of the use of
face coverings on the spread of respiratory infections among the population is minor or non-existent. In the studies, it is
difficult to distinguish the potential effect of face coverings from the effects of other protective measures.
Over the course of the pandemic, several countries have made decisions to either recommend or require the use of face
coverings. The decisions vary in terms of their content. In addition, there are countries that have not made decisions on the
use of face coverings so far. The COVID-19 situation in other countries, their population density and the attitudes of the
public towards face coverings may be very different from those in Finland.
The primary means of preventing the spread of COVID-19 are avoiding close contact with others, washing one’s hands
according to the guidelines and practicing good hygiene when coughing and sneezing.
Their sources can be in the PDF search for lähteet
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-00-5421-2
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This strikes me as an example of being a very bad consumer of incomplete evidence.
I still find this much more convincing:
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More on outdoor transmission:
This is similar to what the FHI in Norway concluded, and for similar reasons. (Apparently the health ministers of all the countries hereabouts meet regularly, so it is not surprising that these reports are similar.)
The problem with the advice is that it doesn’t transfer well. There is apparently very little infection in the Nordic countries apart from Sweden, and people are pretty good about respecting social distancing. The odds of transmission here are therefore pretty low…even indoors in ephemeral situations like shopping (though grocery stores still the hell out of me). In a dense Covid hotspot like NYC or even San Francisco, the safe advice would have to be different.
This Science VS podcast, which I linked in a different thread, gives a balanced science-based look at the issue (with over 90 links to sources in the transcript).
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I wonder how much Dominic Cummings paid for that story.
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Were there 12 monkeys?
This reality needs new writers. We’re beyond silly, at this point.
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Half an hour ago, the current US president declared the US would be ending terminating it’s relationship with the WHO.
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To be clear, the like is only to thank you for the information. This is of course, a very bad thing.
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Restaurants and bars are now allowed to use outdoor seating. The bar across the street from me now has a cordoned-off area with picnic tables, and the electric beer sign is lit for the first time since mid-March. Looks like a lot of the regulars have already showed up, and not a one that I could see was wearing a mask.
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“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe
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