How is taking the “no masks for most medical professionals” approach the most sensible approach in these circumstances?
Because we don’t have enough of them. So much so that people are proposing making home made masks for hospitals. We need to only use them for the thing they are actually necessary and very important for. Also the original post was about normal people wearing them around town which is an even worse idea for the same reasons and is what I was actual caring about. That most med professionals don’t need to wear them was just being used as a way to accentuate how much average people should not be using them.
Huh, that’s interesting. The implication being that since SARS is also a corona virus that it would have similar enough transmission methods to Covid 19 that the study on effective ways to prevent transmission would apply to Covid as well? I am curious where that line of research ends up going.
There were two things that I was concerned about in your post and I mistakenly quoted the wrong one. One was on the effectiveness of masks vs focusing on surface contamination and the other is that authorities intentionally suppressed the idea that masks might be more effective in combating covid 19 in an effort to keep consumers from buying them. The latter is what I’m more concerned about when I said it sounded like a conspiracy theory.
I don’t understand how he can be so sure that proper hand sanitizing == you will not get COVID-19.
Clearly hand sanitization is very important, but is transmission via droplets through sneezing and coughing proven to not be a mode of infection now? That would be pretty big news, wouldn’t it?
As I understand it, and I might not have grasped the entire reasoning, the masks worn by medical professionals are not only to protect them but to reduce the chances of them unintentionally passing on the virus to other patients and public, so if they are treating people (and necessarily coming into close contact with them), even those displaying no symptoms, the masks are necessary and important.
It’s insulting to dismiss the concerns of medical professionals who quite reasonably want PPE including face masks when dealing with patients during a pandemic by saying “you don’t need them.”
If you’re a doctor or a nurse who comes into regular contact with sick people it’s only a matter of time before one of them coughs in the direction of your face whether you personally are on intubation duty or not.
Awesome good information here but he kept putting off talking about alternatives to hand sanitizer until the video ended without him actually talking about it.
Well, I don’t know about “conspiracy theory,” but the only way that advice-givers weren’t misleading people to some degree is if they didn’t actually know that wearing masks provided protection. Which they obviously knew. But essentially there was an unspoken trade-off going on: they knew those masks were necessary for providers of medical care, far more than for the general population (assuming distancing), and so downplayed how useful they would be when giving advice.
Also, the evidence on the ground is absolutely convincing that the virus is airborne in ways beyond close-range droplets from coughs, e.g.:
A choir of 60 people met, didn’t touch, kept a six foot distance despite no one apparently being ill, and…
Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms.
On the other hand, this was a room full of people all singing - but still, it’s scary, and since I sing in a similar group, I’d have to say we postponed our own season none too soon. Even at our last rehearsal when I raised the concern, there were plenty who pooh-poohed me. I agitated further on our email list, and I’m more glad than ever that good sense finally prevailed.
Yeah, but it was potentially a single asymptomatic person who managed to infect 75% of the group despite maintaining some distance, in a few hours. Now imagine you’re out in public, at varying distances from people, coming into contact with multiple carriers, on a regular basis - for the next year (or more). Or at work with them. Every day. (Some of whom feel well enough to be in public but are actually coughing on you, no less.)
It’s a great argument for wearing masks every time when leaving the house, in addition to hand-washing, etc.
Months ago, a coworker was relaying the story of asking his doctor, “When you use the stethoscope to listen to my heart, and tell me turn my head and cough, is there something special about turning my head?”
“Yes,” says the doctor, “It’s so you don’t cough on me.”
