Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
nature.com
nature.com
I have both changed doctors and jobs for this reason. Treat me like a child and you're out of my life.
1. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099...
last summer target was making you wait in line longer (dangerous) while they carefully wiped down self checkout stations between users (minimally helpful).
i don’t know what they’re doing now, because i didn’t care to subject myself to that any further.
Does it address dead zones? Does it actually make matters worse by creating hot zones which coincide with areas where people concentrate? Does the exhaled air create risks to workers outside?
It requires a lot of study, planning and execution and lots more money than some cleaning supplies.
lots more money than 12+ months of cleaning supplies, labor, delayed purchases, and increased transmission risk amongst your staff and customers?
i suspect it is close enough that we can't hand wave it away as you want to do.
in some facilities it may have been nearly free, with some reprogramming done to the existing HVAC system, to run the fans more, or more frequently pull in outside air.
> Does the exhaled air create risks to workers outside?
this is just FUD.
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/fact-covid-19-is-not-airb...
1. Our early guidance that masks don’t help (because we needed to save the real masks for healthcare workers); and
2. Our collective obsession around Mar-Apr 2020 with surface disinfecting. The shortage on Clorox wipes, the obsessive cleaning of hands and packages and groceries. The wiping down of airplane seats. Hand sanitizer everywhere.
In the end we’re going to realize it was all about close proximity airborne transmission.
2. It still makes sense to wash hands, use gloves, and wipe down anything coming into your house that was recently touched by strangers. There's no good reason to allow a known vector, even if it's lower risk than airborne.
Recall the proclamations from last summer that massive street protests were either magically not going to spread COVID, or that it was somehow acceptable because "racism is a public health issue".
Looks like subsequently things went off the rails there. Wonder what happened.
At least to me, that was pretty dismissive about them. That set the tone for a very large set of people.
Edit: This was US based. I do not know what other countries were saying.
Fauci in March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-need...).
Both continued with detail about saving masks for health professionals and added more context. However, both Adams and Fauci made statements in the early pandemic clearly stated that one shouldn't be wearing masks.
masks for viral protection isn't a new topic, and plenty of research is available[0] -- unless you're talking about only viral research pertaining to covid-19, which is fairly over-specific to legislate against/towards.
in other words: it was understood in the general scientific and medical public that masks help to reduce or prevent spread of airborne virus, to claim that the government should have waited for specific research to a singular strain is both excusing a willfully in-active government and portraying that government as scientifically credible for doing the so.
These actions, given the evidence that already existed that masks provide a net benefit against viral pathogens, were scientifically unsound. If I had the complete picture that was available to the U.S. government then maybe I could justify the actions by knowing that a call to use masks would cause a profound shortage of PPE for those that needed it -- and I think that's exactly what happened: the government saw that a call to use masks would cause a lack of goods, so instead of looking entirely ignorant to the problem it was decided to latch onto the logic that covid-19 was somehow totally unlike any virus and that novel research would need to be undertaken in order to justify the need for masks.
It's my opinion that masks were already well-enough researched, and that the surrogate viruses that were used in this research prior to covid-19 were a 'good-enough' approximate to understand that masks would be a net social benefit, if available. It's my opinion that other co-factors that the government was privvy to influenced their decision to push against mask use temporarily in the beginning.
[0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mask+efficacy+virus&hl=...
Imagine if Trump handed plutonium yielding power plants to Iran on a usb device to win political concessions. That is what has happened in South Korea and there is a massive "USBgate" scandal that implicates the Korean president.
So anything out of South Korea right now under the current admin, we should take a grain of salt. The new Biden administration labelled South Korea as an "illiberal democracy".
- No/limited air circulation
- Mask-less
All 3 combined, put a COVID-19 carrier there, trouble.
I see this mentioned a lot, is this really a big factor? Did a ton of people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? That just doesn't make sense to me. I mostly see this issue used as a bad faith cudgel to justify not wearing a mask now, but someone acting in bad faith would have picked another excuse if it wasn't this one.
(Anecdote)
At the start of the pandemic, I took it all very seriously. We were in the fog of war and didn't know how serious it was, so we assumed it was very dangerous. We did our best to avoid people and do our part to "stop the spread" or "flatten the curve".
At the beginning of June, I started to get more bold with things. Wife and kids still avoided stores, but I would go for more than just the weekly groceries.
Sometime in July / August we started seeing some of our friends again.
September / October we started going to stores as a family again. Also started going to church again.
At this point, our habits are changed to the point that we just don't really go anywhere, but we don't avoid anything for "safety" reasons. We wear our masks in stores, etc. because most have signs on the doors asking us to and we try to be polite about it.
At this point I think I can count 20+ people of all ages that I know personally who have had Coronavirus. I don't have a terribly big social circle. In the words of my best friend, whose family had it over Christmas, "I wouldn't recommend going out and catching it on purpose, but you get through it just fine"
Which is to say, I think we know much more about the virus now than we did then, and the risk profile is very low for people without serious pre-existing health conditions or the very old.
And hell, my grandma's nursing home had an outbreak. I think they had maybe 6 or 7 people die out of the 60 or so people who caught it. That's a tragedy, but the bigger tragedy is that they were prevented from seeing family for ten months now and had to suffer alone, many of them degrading significantly from the lack of interaction. Thankfully they are getting the vaccine and should be allowed to open up soon.
We have more data now. If you're under 70 the chances of you dying, if you don't already have a massively serious disease are statistically almost irrelevant. It's a standard coronavirus like the common cold, that's 2-3 times deadlier than the flu, and predominately only deadly to the very elderly. People are wise now that their claims of how scary it is is provably wrong and are now turning to the much more ambiguous claim about "don't you know that X% have long lasting problems afterwards?". Hogwash. The only thing they have to back that up is that they heard someone else say it. They'll never link to data that says that, because there isn't any.
We have the data now. What I gave is the data. It comes straight from the CDC, not your emotional facebook friend. Any rational human being, who proports to "follow the science", should act in accordance to the data. The data doesn't care about your feelings. The data doesn't care what people on Twitter tell you you should think. We have the data now.
It's to the point where the parent comment and my comment will be downvoted to oblivion because we encourage people to follow the data. Downvoted and censored by people claiming they "follow the science". For pointing out the science. This is not a good situation for us to find ourselves in.
Yeah, we have the data that 447,000 Americans have been killed by Covid. That is data.
The main thing I've concluded based on people's reaction to the death tolls is that much of our population has not come to terms with their mortality and hate being reminded of it.
So i guess we don't need drunk driving laws... only about 10,000 people a year die in the US from drunk drivers, they were going to die anyway. The world keeps on moving.
No reason to work on curing cancer. Dead someday anyway.
Yes, death comes to us all. That has no bearing on whether we should work to prevent death.
So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal.
That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.
Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.
Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...
Also, we did not ‘lose’ a year of life.
Your friend who recommended “not to go out and get it, but it isn’t that bad” doesn’t know if they gave it to a vulnerable person.
It’s never been just about you or how you and your circle will handle it.
Yes, I'm sure the 20 days they were collectively quarantined was completely reckless and putting people in danger.
Edit:
Also, his wife caught it at work. Where she was being, you know, essential.
You will likely never see the consequences of that, but you could have transmitted the virus to someone who died.
It’s not a lot to ask for people to refrain from social gatherings and unnecessary activities in order to protect their fellow humans. Do no harm and all that you know...
I personally couldn't find a single English article that said mask were anything besides a placebo for the person wearing them if they wanted protection from others. That instinctively made no sense that a barrier in front of your mouth and nose provided zero protection and I'm glad I didn't trust the lack of study in the west as evidence of ineffectiveness and kept trying to secure masks for myself and my family before the lock downs hit.
Evidence against was at most due to low adherence. Which means so much as masks don't work if you don't wear them, and they're annoying enough for general public. Quite obvious.
Face shields are somewhat less tested, and likely much less effective based on theoretical data, as they don't form an effective barrier.
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted in February 2020, "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!"
https://www.axios.com/surgeon-general-reversal-face-mask-d38...
A point is what about next time? Who knows what works for Covid19 might be worthless for the next pandemic.
It’s easy to point at the result(eg people making stupid decisions) and ignore the root causes (eg lack of critical thinking skills training, filter bubbles, and more), but to see real systemic changes, the root causes are what will need attention.
I live in a city so I can buy from local, brick-and-mortar retail almost exclusively and I prefer to support specialist stores over general, e.g., buy vegetables from the local fruit-and-veg shop rather than the supermarket. However, I’ve been very frustrated by the fact that pharmacies I’ve gone to don’t have any better a selection of masks than other shops. I’ve also yet to come across any masks that have some sort of quality mark or certified to some standard. I find it crazy that the majority of masks for sale to the public are “fashion masks” which offer no guarantees of effectiveness.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent...
// The downside of clean: Scientists fear pandemic's 'hyper hygiene' could have long-term health impacts
A paper published in January raised the possibility that the pandemic could make some people more susceptible to chronic conditions and diseases, including asthma and obesity. //
IIRC the intial evidence was COVID transmission between apartments in Hong Kong via the ventilation system
are you sure you're not misremembering? I just checkend and both subreddits were created in late janurary 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect
Also, it's been spread via poorly maintained drainage systems.
There have been a few cases from New Zealand that have been attributed to fomites, but then when you go look at it, it's "they were infected by touching the same elevator button." It's certainly curious that fomite transmission happens in a very small enclosed space with relatively little air circulation.
What I've never seen is a case such as "they were infected by picking up a package dropped off outside their door", or "they were infected by using the same playground equipment a few minutes later." All of the cases have some element of people sharing the same air.
This is precisely what people were worried about with everyone washing their groceries back in March/April, and I don't believe there is a single case that's been shown to have resulted from something like this.
> What I've never seen is a case such as "they were infected by picking up a package dropped off outside their door", or "they were infected by using the same playground equipment a few minutes later." All of the cases have some element of people sharing the same air.
By the logic of "Yes, they say it's from the button, but it's logical to assume that it was actually the air", if there was a report of exactly one of the scenarios you described, would you say "Ok, it's definitely fomites", or would you automatically start thinking "They say they picked up the package after it was dropped off, but did they open the door just as the delivery person left and it was actually transmission by breathing the same air?"
If fomites were a thing, you should see contact tracing coming up with things like "the delivery driver dropped off 30 packages and 6 people got sick" or "the chef at a takeout restaurant packed up 30 orders and 5 people got sick." I've never seen anything like this though.
At this point, a year and 100 million cases in, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Articles that I read indicated that a simple cloth reduced transmission by infected person by about 50%. Humble fiber dense cotton cleaning cloth, by 70%. Multiple layers were even more effective.
My research indicated that salt would disintegrate the virus. I made my own masks and spread very fine salt made in coffee grinder on them and my gloves to improve the effectiveness.
So far so good.
It seemed like a strange practice to combat a virus to me but when I raised the question I was told various things that I found pretty unconvincing.
I'm glad to see some actual work identifying risks is out there now.
I suspect surfaces, like other practices are focused on, because we can easily deal with them. Anyone can disinfect a surface. The air, not as easy unfortunately.
It's why I've turned off most of the WWW now. Even an "enlightened" place like HN is mostly a bag of predictable tropes. The WWW (not the internet in general) has proven to be a trap, it's almost real enough to seem authentic. To a careful reader, there's little difference in value between the typical "top comment" and the weird rant of an off-kilter Waffle House patron. And there's no point in analyzing an endless stream of ephemeral rants from randos. That's the WWW now!
I can't wait to log back in next week and see this guy at -1.
"Currently there is no evidence that people can get COVID-19 by eating or handling food."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
Edit: That wasn't meant to be snarky. It really does seem to be a contradictory bit of evidence.
It's basically sanitation theater.
> The woman's husband, in her 70s, joined her in quarantine on January 16 and she decided to stay in the hotel with him for his 14-day quarantine period. During that time, a family of five arrived in Melbourne from Nigeria on January 20, and were placed on the same floor. The family tested positive on January 24, then the woman in the room opposite tested positive on January 28. Her partner has returned negative tests during his stay in the hotel - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-03/victoria-investigatin....
The main goal is to soothe the public. People aren't told to wipe surfaces because it reduces the spread, people are told to wipe surfaces because this is all people can do. People are told to wear surgical masks, which say on the side of the box that they do not protect against viruses, because it is something they can do. People don't like to feel powerless. People cannot disinfect the air. But they can wipe surfaces and cover their faces with a piece of cloth, and keep busy with something to feel like they're doing something to protect themselves and others.
Public messaging exist to manage people, nothing more.
It likely has some protection, and it inhibits the onward spread of the virus. If enough people wear them, it has a protective effect on the entire population:
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.”
Masks help lower droplets and aerosol in the air from your breath. So they slow the contagion. But they do not stop it, if the average person were likely to contract a contagion within 6 months with normal behavior and a mask reduces transmissibility by 50%, this just means the average person is now likely to contract it within a year. It slows the spread. It does not reduce your risk of contracting the virus over your lifetime. And if you have comorbidities and are at risk, you are just as likely to die when you get it 1 year from now or 6 months from now.
Masks did give us more time to develop a vaccine. So in the end they helped society. But they do not protect you. The only ways to protect yourself are a vaccine, social isolation until the contagion is eradicated, or hermetically sealing yourself in a plastic bodysuit every time you are in close proximity to other people.
A lot of people confuse these two concepts (managing a population vs managing individuals) and think that they apply to and correlate directly with one another. They do not. It is the same counterintuitive mistake as misunderstanding test accuracy and false positive rate. This is the only point I was trying to make. CDC guidelines are not designed to protect you in a pandemic, they're designed to manage a population.
FFPs are known highly effective in protecting people both ways against virus this large, more or less indefinitely, assuming there's no operational error. Trouble being that apparently USA cannot make enough of them.
Mind you, operational error is likely over longer timespans.
As has been stated repeatedly by the CDC and others, the mask guidelines aren't meant to protect you from the virus, they are meant to protect others from you by reducing the viral laden droplets that you spread while breathing and talking.
There's a reason why they are called "surgical masks", because those are the masks that surgeons wear to protect you from them.
And I know the CDC can't be directly blamed for this, but how many people do you know that wear masks because they don't want to get sick? Probably all of them, besides the ones that wear it so they don't get hassled in public. This is the subtle thing in the marketing (yes, marketing, they're not selling anything but it is the same process) encouraging you to wear masks. People might consciously know if you asked them that masks don't protect themselves, but in their lizard brain they're protecting themselves. People jogging alone or driving on their car alone wearing a mask aren't doing it to protect other people. If every advertisement telling people to wear masks explicitly reminded them that it does not protect them, a lot of people wouldn't bother to wear them.
hours? A random hepa filter I searched up costs $215, has an airflow rate of 246CFM , and is rated for coverage of 361 sq. ft. Assuming a room with that area and a ceiling height of 9ft, that works out to 3249 cubic feet. Dividing that by the airflow gets you 13.2 minutes, which is the time it takes to cycle the same amount of air as the room's volume.
More filters in the room, and different sized filters both exist.
Can we please have a global standard on masks already?
In other words, we do have great technology here in America - probably the best respirators on the planet. I'm not sure why 1 year later we still can't produce enough and I see all medical stuff outside of COVID-19 units wearing plain surgical mask!
BTW, I did manage to buy FFP3 on eBay recently for less than N95s (most people don't search form them, I guess) - they are almost the equivalent of N99, i.e. they offer even greater protection than N95. So, try that, too.
[0]: https://soomlab-korea.com/
[1]: https://www.moldex.com/product/4800-n95-airwave-pleated-easy...
this is india btw, where magically cases have dropped even when there is no lockdown and people are not willing to get vaccinated because homegrown vaccine hasnt even completed clinical trials yet...
When I last got the subway an older guy did it on the platform, just before the train doors opened and the passengers walked out - presumably straight through the fine droplets hanging in the air.
No-one here seems to think this habit is strange, and those times I’ve said anything to the people doing it they are genuinely mystified by my complaint. Maybe this article should be more widely disseminated...
Honestly, I genuinely don’t understand why no-one has even thought about this really common habit, and warned people not to do it.
Every nation on earth has agrarian origins. And our habits and behaviors shape our culture and continue beyond their utility even when our surroundings and lifestyles change. There's a lot of inertia and habits like these don't change without concerted and deliberate effort.
btw, i don't really smell anything. probably always have only smekt like really strong odors or "hot" ones but no subtle smells. i dont ever remember smelling a flower or cilantro on food
How busy are the streets? If they're not that busy, it's probably a non-issue from a viral load point of view. Both the exposure time (less than 10 seconds if you're just walking past) and the concentration (open air, easy to disperse) likely makes it less dangerous to a passer-by than a 5 minute bus/subway ride.
I’m therefore genuinely interested why all the subsequent downvotes?
This kind of çomment is unhelpful and uncharitable. It's an ad hominem attack.
That's an ad hominem attack.
We’ve seen what happens when the virus is allowed to run unchecked in populations. New variants start popping up that are resistant to the previous version. Further, this whole isolate those most likely to die doesn’t work. Due to things like... multigenerational households. Or people that don’t know they’re at risk etc.
There is no evidence that new variants have escaped natural immunity in any population. To date, all of the known variants are neutralized by existing antibodies and immune sera. This is a fact -- we've seen effects on titers in a few papers, but nothing has yet to escape immunity.
That said, immune escape is probably inevitable -- this virus mutates far too quickly and has too many zoonotic reservoirs to prevent that from happening. To the extent that this occurs, a mix of natural and vaccine-induced immunity is likely the fastest and most robust way to suppress the virus.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...
> An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
A 0.01% mortality rate as asserted would mean 34k deaths in the USA. We're well over 10x that, and we're hardly finished yet.
> This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.
> If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.
> A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.
They're very clearly making point estimates to contrast with the prevalent IFR estimates of the time (~2%), which we now know were entirely wrong.
0.01% (their estimate according to the post above) is far more "entirely wrong" than 2%. For instance, https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html mentions an estimate of 0.94% for Italy (in fact I have a hard time of viewing an early estimate 2% as significantly wrong when a later one with a lot more time and data is around 1%).
But IFR is so tied to age that it's unhelpful to compare it from country to country. One of the reasons Italy's observed fatality rate is higher than average is because of the higher average age of is population. The CDC's current best estimates are:
<20yo: .003%
<50yo: .02%
<70yo: .5%
>70yo: 5.4%
Even a small increase in the elderly population can dramatically influence the observed IFR for a given nation.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
I can't believe people are still confusing these. Dividing fatalities by known cases is completely wrong, and is not the definition of IFR.
0.01% is likely not a plausible IFR estimate for the entire US. 0.1% is consistent with your back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Whether you know it or not, your calculation has error bars on it. Those error bars do not exclude 0.1%.
That's 0.1-1.1%, not 0.1-0.5%. And the initial context was the USA, whose age distribution is more like (though noticeably different) Italy's than it's like Kenya's.
Gupta said 500k deaths worst case in uk was bollocks (bc according to her everyone already got it). They are already at 100k with aggressive lockdowns. Does that sound like crackpottery to you?
They certainly have been wrong -- wildly so -- in most of the world. He also projected 2.2M deaths in the United States, and that hospitals would be over-run in the UK even with interventions. The predictions from the original paper do not hold up well in retrospect:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
Gupta was saying that the Ferguson models were wrong. The models have...not been right. Objectively.
The Barrington folks were among those pushing for that premature reopening. It's their whole thing.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...
BTW: Who pays this self-proclaimed "fact checker"?
> He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Half the country has hypertension. Half the country has obesity. These fall in the 94% category, but chances are they weren't imminently dying of these things before getting COVID.
As for funding: https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/
BTW: Seems like those self-proclaimed "fact checkers" are funded by the Annenberg Foundation which has close ties to big pharma...
Also he's inconsistent because within a few months Fauci went from “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” to double masking “makes common sense“...
https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/coronakrise...
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and a long-time researcher into public health policy: https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya
Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, with a long history of research into epidemiological models: https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...
All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology.
> She is one of the primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-discredited paper[15] which advocated a focused response to the COVID-19 pandemic based on levels of individual risk.[16][17] The World Health Organization, as well as other numerous academic and public-health bodies, have stated that the strategy proposed by the Declaration is dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis.
Cool!
It’s not deductively valid in the same way that modus tollens is, but it is a often a good heuristic: the authority wouldn’t be recognized as such if they weren’t often correct in their area of expertise.
Thus, it’s fine to find an appeal “rationally compelling” as long as you bear in mind that the authority is also not infallible.
In this particular case, you brought up Bhattacharya‘s credentials. If another plausible expert disagrees with him, we’re at worst back to where we started; the fact that there’s a consensus he’s wrong, rather than just two dueling authorities, pushes back even harder.
That was true as of January 2020, it is no longer true now. I don't know about Gupta, but both Bhattacharya and Kulldorff (and Ioannidis) are being hated by most of their colleagues at the moment.
I would even conjecture - in 10 years, if you are a recent PhD/fellow from one of those labs, you will have a very tough time in the job market.