Widespread mask-wearing could prevent Covid-19 second waves, study shows
reuters.com
reuters.com
They help against flyby droplet infections, help a bit against the aerosol load, and they prevent touching your eyes a bit. Removing caughers and washing your hand is still much more effective though.
And btw. the "second wave" will come for certain in the fall, but it will be another uncertain mix of influenza viri. Vaccination is always a gamble, because you never know what will come. 2018 it didn't work out, with the same numbers or worldwide much higher numbers as 2020.
Where did this number come from? It seems quite at odds with other sources.
The paper first assumes that facial mask prevents individuals from spreading covid-19, then tries to estimate how it is effective at lowering the mass reproduction number.
So this paper proves nothing about whether wearing mask is really meaningful or not in the first place. It is just assumed so.
Are there any hard data on this, or just predictions? Or are you talking about influenza, as you mention later?
The paper itself.
The article says, "He [Richard Stutt, who co-led the study] said the findings showed that if widespread mask use were combined with social distancing and some lockdown measures, this could be 'an acceptable way of managing the pandemic and re-opening economic activity' long before the development and public availability of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus." (emphasis mine)
Anecdotally, in Japan (where I live) there seems to be a much higher than 50% use rate and there is still need for lockdowns. However, as the article suggests, it appears that the severity and length of the lockdowns might be reduced.
The question I have, though, is if the sheer number of people with the disease in the US and UK may be an issue. In South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, the total number of active cases never really got above 10K -- so the chances of meeting someone with the disease is really quite small. Potentially (as seems to be the case in Japan) you can get away with just dealing with cluster cases and let the stragglers go -- as long as the masks are effective enough to keep transmission rates low in those situations. But if you have millions of people with the disease, many of them in large cities, I wonder if it will be as effective.
My impression in the US is that people continue not to take this seriously, which causes us to be lax in the basic measures that could get this under control. Very frustrating.
On the positive side, looks like the R1 for most US states is below 1 - https://rt.live/
If I wear a mask, it's because I want to. Doing so "for others" is a direct route to supporting forced medical procedures. They can put one on if they want to.
Silent protest is free speech; clearly facial experssions are too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333873
Did Reuters post a story/retraction on the sourceless HCQ paper? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222 If so, what metrics are available to the reader to gauge how prominently they posted each?
This is silly. Wearing a cloth over your face is no more a forced medical procedure than wearing one over your genitals.
Now adults are going to discuss weather the costs of getting a high uptake of people in society wearing a cloth over their face are worth the benefit that accrues, if any. You may decide you've made your point and leave it at that.
COVID-19 has killed 114,148 people to date. The number of hospitalisations are only reported up to the end of May 30 and appears to be 82 people per 100,000 people in the populations (thank you CDC for such an epically terrible statistic!) That works out to about 270,000 people. I'm going to use PCR tests as a proxy for "medical visits" for the flu, but in reality they aren't comparible. There are 22 million tests that have been carried out to date. The reason I use that as a proxy is I assume that there is reason to suspect that someone may have COVID-19 if they get a PCR test, just like there is reason to suspect that you have the flu if you have a "medical visit". The last piece of information would be the number of confirmed cases which is 2,045,549. So just under 10% of the cases that were tested were confirmed to have the disease.
Of the people who were hospitalised in the worst flu year in 40 years, about 10% died. Of the people who were hospitalised for COVID-19, about 42% died (well a little higher because I'm using June 10th data for deaths and May 30th for hospitalisations). The number of medical visits for the flu was 21 million in the worst year and the number of PCR tests for COVID-19 so far is 22 million (about the same). It may be a bad assumption,
Just to sum up (and sorry for those on mobile):
Tested/Visits Confirmed Hospitalised Died
21,000,000 *1,900,000 800,000 61,000
22,000,000 2,000,000 270,000 114,000
But any way you slice it, I don't think the numbers work out the way you are portraying it. Corrections to the above are very much welcomed!
Nit: There is no accoring to wikipedia. It's a perception management platform. Use it to find a source, nothing more.
Here's the data I was quoting: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
Here is 2017 from 2016 (which I believe is basically the 2016-2017 calendar year) national vital statistic report: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
If you scroll down to Table B you can see that ~2,800,000 people died, influenza and pneumonia account for 55,000 deaths. This is more than that 33,000 cases of reported influenza because not all pneumonia is caused by the flu.
The data in your link is very strange in that it implies a rate of 10% of all deaths is by pneumonia, rather than the ~2% in roughly everything else I can find on the topic. I wonder if we are losing some context here?
Here is another mortality report. Just search for pneumonia: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09_tables-5...
Literally nothing I can find on the CDC's website matches up with the data on that report so I'm at a loss what's going on with it. It's too bad there is no text because I think we're missing something.
Bottom of page:
NOTES: Data presented in this table are based on all complete death records received and processed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) as of March 17, 2016. Data for 2008 through 2014 are final data, while 2015 data are provisional. Due to the nature of provisional data, numbers are subject to change as additional death records are received. Influenza season is defined as early October through mid-May. Influenza and pneumonia deaths are defined as deaths with codes J09–J11 (any listed cause) and J12–18 (listed anywhere without influenza also listed), respectively, in the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision. SOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System, 2008–2015.
It's not one year. The document covers 7 years. The pneumonia range is 126k to 138k. It's explicitely listed as "death records" and the source is given.