Prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2
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It set back a really important protocol in western countries that asian countries had already adopted and clearly had success with. By the time they switched on the masks-everywhere messaging we were well into the mass spread of COVID.
This sort of "protecting people" through deception or indirection is the sort of thing I despise from governments.
The side-effects of not immediately stating their usefulness to the public - while no doctor would go near a COVID-19 patient without a full face + eye mask - is still being felt today.
We are not. But we are being told it's better than no face covering, which is true.
You are, personally, wearing a mask though, right?
They were wrong about basic masks, which is what we're all using now.
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
I get wanting the best interpretation, but there's a difference between that and just outright mischaracterizing what the message was from public health officials around Feb.
https://twitter.com/surgeon_general/status/12337257852839321...
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...
He may not have known that regular cloth coverings would help but by discouraging the use of any masks he undercut his argument later.
Maybe - He was saying, they knew 95 masks would help but didn't know other masks would. Either way, it feels very dishonest.
What would you have done, what would you have said? What would have not been dishonest?
Also, what are you going to say so you aren't accused of: fear-mongering, overreacting, or being wishy-washy and providing useless guidance?
The idea that, in a situation encountering a SARS, that you wouldn't call the guys who beat a SARS is so fundamentally silly. Especially when they're ridiculously friendly to you. That's part of what I love about startups - every successful entrepreneur tries his best at learning from everyone else's successes and failures. It's not enough to learn by yourself, you won't get there in time.
So, no, I'm not surprised they couldn't do it because they have institutional cultural failure. I don't think I could do it at the CDC either because of the cultural failure (NIH, Perfectionism, etc.). It's hard to say, we'd have to see the nuances of power in CDC vs NIAID, whether it would be politically viable even for Anthony Fauci to call Chou Jih-Haw, let alone Tsai Ing-Wen etc., and governments aren't like companies where the CEO can just set up a team of people to bypass the normal structures and collaborate with Taiwan. The CDC and gang may be broken beyond repair. I think that's the best defence you can give them.
paucity - Scarcity; dearth.
I time stamped it to where he makes the statement after the political posturing.
I could be wrong on that, if someone is better-informed please correct me, but that's what I read somewhere.
EDIT: Just to clarify before I'm downvoted, I do actually agree they were a bit too hasty to tell people not to buy masks. Having the surgeon general tweet out saying "Seriously people, DO NOT BUY MASKS" was definitely premature and obviously led to a lot of the problems we're having here now. I just wanted to point out that it wasn't a completely unfounded take, just premature to make huge decisions like that.
Which, by the way, they do not if it's only the healthy who are wearing them or if people are wearing them with their nose sticking out above. And even if they did, C19 is now endemic, and without a vaccine (which might not ever materialize), everyone will get it eventually, if not now then 6 months from now. So lose that weight, deal with that blood pressure problem, manage your diabetes, while you still have the time.
As an aside, I find the response to C19 to be tragically (or comically, depending on your perspective) bad on the ground in almost all countries. Get this - one of the most reliable, easy to instantaneously test markers for whether you are _definitely_ infectious or not is _fever_. Contactless, accurate IR thermometers exist and could be deployed in arbitrary quantities. FLIR cameras also exist, and object detection algorithms can be run on-device in 2020 to identify the potentially sick people. And yet we do not measure people's body temperature when they enter public places such as a grocery store. It is well understood that we need to protect the elderly, yet instead of making it possible for the elderly to stay home indefinitely (by e.g. offering government sponsored groceries, or at least grocery delivery) we make them go to the grocery store. Several states went as far to thin the herd as to put C19 patients _into nursing homes_, which is absolutely insane. Medical personnel in some of those nursing homes is still not sufficiently isolated from the general population. Close to a half of US deaths are from those nursing homes - the statistic has been known for a couple of months now, but you won't find it in the press, for obvious reasons.
Why is this? Remember cringing when you had to vote for local candidates? People with little to no qualifications, some of whom (at least where I live) tell you in their candidate disclosure they're mentally ill? Those same people, after they are elected, go up the ladder, and some of them end up in the higher level positions in local and state governments. It's similar to Gell-Mann amnesia, in a way. They're still inept and insane. They're only there because other candidates were even worse. Yet people imbue them with some magical leadership and intellectual qualities they do not possess and rely on them with their lives.
There should really be "against all" option on the ballot.
Cheap general purpose IR thermomenters from Melexis claim greater than +-0.1C accuracy in the common "body temperature" range: https://www.mouser.com/new/melexis/melexis-MLX90615-infrared...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/covid-face-mask-s...
However it did suck as that helped cement some anti-masker excuses early on.
Hard to tell if there is any winning in that situation. :(
Many governments of the world created an anti vaxxer like movement around masks just to protect supplies. They had to do so because they failed to act early enough and to follow their own recommendations for stockpiles of protective equipment. The consequences of those lies will be here for a long time.
We had studies about similar airborne illnesses that showed mask's effectiveness, and while I am sympathetic to protecting key medical supply lines, they have done long term harm to public trust and mask adoption.
The anti-maskers we're seeing today are directly their fault.
Even now, we're still seeing misinformation about the difference between cloth and N95 effectiveness, particularly as the US has failed to ramp up N95 production after months of seeming inaction. Even healthcare providers are still struggling with PPE, let alone the general public or educators with the upcoming school re-openings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...
That's what I'm saying. Non-Trump people took a move out of Trump's playbook. That's vicious.
> The anti-maskers we're seeing today are directly their fault.
I wouldn't go that far. Anybody who is still anti-mask at this point is just an anti-reality nihilist.
Ah downvoted without rebuttal, how cowardly.
This (the quote is from the Swedish health authority) was proven wrong yesterday. People touch their face less with a masks. Based on cctv studies in England.
"a face mask which is itchy and falls below the nose contributes to your hands often touching the mouth, eyes and nose which can increase the risk of infection"
There are many ways to deal with this pandemic, and it’s getting more and more “with us or against us”. This censoring that Twitter et al now engage in is very, very troubling.
It was weeks, not months. By mid-march, conventional wisdom had shifted, as had most of the official rhetoric. This was before or simultaneous with most of the early lockdowns.
And it was wrong. But the real harm was caused much later when political actors started arguing not based on this early advice that masks were ineffective/harmful/tyrannical, or (even worse) that the expert advice now was not to be trusted because the experts then got it wrong.
Basically: the people who refuse to wear a mask aren't the ones slavishly honoring the whims of the WHO or Fauci, so I don't understand your point.
"For the general public, evidence shows that physical distancing of more than 1 m is highly effective and that face masks are associated with protection, even in non-health-care settings, with either disposable surgical masks or reusable 12–16-layer cotton ones, although much of this evidence was on mask use within households and among contacts of cases."
In another part, they compare 12-16 layer/surgical masks to single-layered masks, ranking the single-layered as less effective.
"Interpretation The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis support physical distancing of 1 m or more and provide quantitative estimates for models and contact tracing to inform policy. Optimum use of face masks, respirators, and eye protection in public and health-care settings should be informed by these findings and contextual factors. Robust randomised trials are needed to better inform the evidence for these interventions, but this systematic appraisal of currently best available evidence might inform interim guidance."
I've not seen any recommendations for public use of eye protection, is that being done anywhere? Are some places recommending wearing some type of goggles or something?
A review introduces no new information - it summarizes the existing literature.
This is the meta-review commissioned by the WHO to investigate the value of PPE, and it is notable because it aggregates a number of low-quality studies and attempts to statistically re-weight their data to arrive at a broader conclusion.
It’s notable for face masks, in particular, because it mixes data from hospital settings with community settings, along with respirators and surgical masks, source control and PPE, and attempts to draw a conclusion about “protectiveness” overall.
On that note I don't see anyone left wearing surgical or latex gloves outside now (Western Europe).
They use soap and water? Handwipes?
That must be killing any skin they have left. Gloves make so much sense for them. They make sense for everyone.
Gloves are scientifically proven not to work unless you replace them after every transaction, additionally most people do not know how to properly remove surgical gloves without contamination.
Taking off gloves shouldn't be an issue. I would think after a 4 hour shift you would take them off and wash hands because they would be sweaty anyhow and you would smell of rubber.
Unfortunately, they haven't been studied much, and I've seen a couple reports that face shields alone are not enough and they are best combined with masks.
Still, a face shield alone would probably be better than nothing.
Alone, face shields do little to nothing to protect people from the wearer.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12737864/
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v...
These studies all are focused on the protective aspect of masks: does a mask prevent you from getting various coronaviruses? Also, they are all focused on health care workers who interact with sick patients. The studies find that wearing masks and taking other protective steps reduces the danger to health care workers.
There is big a leap though, from the conclusions of these studies to global mask mandates. Some reasons:
(1) If masks protect the individual, then individuals can make their own decisions about mask use. If you are more concerned about getting covid, you wear a mask to protect yourself.
(2) Health care workers interact with a lot more sick patients than the typical person. If interact zero or just a handful of sick patients a day, your risk calculation is a lot different than if you interact with a dozen sick people each day.
(3) I haven't seen any studies that look at the benefit of wearing a mask all the time as oppose to wearing a mask when you have symptoms. This would be very interesting and relevant, since it's likely that the most contagious period is when you are sick (coughing, sneezing, sinus congestion)
In all, digging into the data doesn't really support global, 100% mask mandates. It does support masks to protect yourself, and mask wearing in certain situations (hospitals, for example).
"Outcomes of interest were risk of transmission (ie, WHOdefined confirmed or probable COVID-19, SARS, or MERS) to people in health-care or non-health-care settings by those infected; hospitalisation; intensive care unit admission; death; time to recovery; adverse effects of interventions; and contextual factors such as acceptability, feasibility, effect on equity, and resource considerations related to the interventions of interest. However, data were only available to analyse intervention effects for transmission and contextual factors. Consistent with WHO, studies generally defined confirmed cases with laboratory confirmation (with or without symptoms) and probable cases with clinical evidence of the respective infection (ie, suspected to be infected) but for whom confirmatory testing either had not yet been done for any reason or was inconclusive."
"Our search identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents, with no randomised controlled trials"
Don't have a chance to read the full article until later. Does anyone know if they are controlling for confounding factors (e.g. urban/rural, public/private settings)?
For example, the “mask” section mixes data for respirators and surgical masks, and does not differentiate between hospital or community use, source control or PPE, when they make their top-line conclusions.
If you look at the breakouts, you’ll note that most of the data showing effectiveness for masks is for respirator use in hospitals.
I talked to a biologist friend about the possibility of those being eradicated as an unintended positive side effect of our anti-COVID efforts, and he suggested that the animal kingdom unfortunately can serve as a zoological reservoir of some of these viruses and could potentially retransmit them back to humans, so it probably wouldn't entirely eradicate them, but it might certainly drastically hamper them for years.
I for one will be happy to take "will not experience a cold or flu for the next... who knows how many years" as a 2020 consolation prize.
Things I did not know while researching this comment:
The common cold costs the US economy $40 billion a year, and Amazon is secretly working on a cure: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/amazon-is-secretly-working-o...
The 2018 flu season cost businesses an estimated $15.4 billion https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/02/news/flu-season-business-co... and sufferers $10.4 billion in hospitalizations and outpatient expenses https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pdf/business/Toolkit_Seasonal_Flu_fo...
That seems to imply that the combined economic benefit of nearly eradicating both could result in an economic boon of $65 BILLION a year, and that's just in the United States! Not to mention all the people who won't die of the flu, etc...
The term "reservoir" is used in this context.
It's an exponential factor, so small differences in the value make a big difference.
On the other hand, R0 for SARS-Cov-2 has been estimated as high as 6 by some groups.
median R0 for COVID: 5.7
Flu: 1.3
Cold: 1.5
Of course, R0 is a context-sensitive value, so all this is debatable. But I think claiming COVID is 3x as contagious as the other 2 is not that far off the mark.
'As SARS-CoV-2 has a novel receptor binding interface (compared to SARS) & circles the globe, opportunities for new animal reservoirs become available. We could suddenly see some common animal in the US being a reservoir for this virus for the future'
"South Africa also has reported startling declines, with doctors saying there haven't been a sufficient number of flu cases to even report that the seasonal epidemic happened. And in Australia, the country's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System recorded only 85 new laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza in the last two weeks of June—a stark difference from the 22,047 confirmed cases recorded during the same time last year."
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/24/coronavir...
If that was the case then flu or colds wouldn’t spread the way they do.
Since I've been exposed over the last few months to roughly a million people claiming that COVID19 is no worse than the flu, it prompted me to look up just how many people die or are hospitalized from the flu every year.
US avg annual deaths (prev 9 years): 37,000
US avg annual hospitalizations (prev 9 years): 446,000
Clearly COVID19 is worse than this already (160k deaths, 317k hospitalizations, and more every day).
But put aside the COVID19 comparison, and that is still a lot of people who suffer or die from something that we have tools to prevent. How much of that could be avoided with better flu vaccine uptake, policies that support staying at home when you're sick, and the normalization of wearing masks in public?
Why weren't we already doing all of those things? I only did one of those things, and that feels kind of dumb now.