Masks are effective at stopping the spread of COVID-19.
It’s not very often that a physics problem becomes a politicized issue, but that’s exactly what’s happened when it comes to the science of wearing a mask during the current coronavirus pandemic.
Forbes
Ask Ethan: What Is The Science Behind Wearing A Mask?
6 comments:
Two really well done studies examining cloth face masks, measured while on a face with a fit-tester (so it's taking leakage around the mask into account). One also grew cultures from stuff expelled from coughs. Results from both studies was homemade cloth masks reduce your exposure to virus sized particles by half.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_the_Efficacy_of_Homemade_Masks_Would_They_Protect_in_an_Influenza_Pandemic
And that's just testing against virus sized particles. Real viruses travel in drops of water which are much bigger, so a simple homemade mask might even reduce your exposure by more than half. And if other people are also wearing masks, these compound (although filtering ability isn't exactly symmetrical). So there's every reason to believe, that if used consistently, simple cloth masks can significantly stop the spread of respiratory disease. Of course the problem is that it is a pain in the ass to wear a mask and it's difficult to wear them enough of the time. (it's a tough proposition to say a school full of kids should wear masks all day long, it's basically impossible...)
I read that Vietnamese study that people cite to say masks increase infection. But as this article points out, the control group wasn't no masks, the control group was "standard of care", which as the study explains, in Vietnam meant a mixture of surgical masks and cloth masks. So the study had 3 groups, cloth masks, mixture of cloth and surgical masks, and surgical masks.
Is anyone at all surprised the result was cloth masks < cloth & surgical masks < surgical masks?
And the whole "the-death-count-is-inflated-so-hospitals-can-get-federal-money-and-to-make-Trump-look-bad" is pretty much definitively proven false. A new compilation of excess mortality data nationwide. About a 170k to 250k more deaths this year than there were in any of the previous 8 or so years. Official covid count is at 136k. Coincidence?
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1281649019177975809
"Masks are effective at stopping the spread of COVID-19."
Masks are effective at stopping most particulates. That's why surgeons wear them.
But to obsess about that is to completely misunderstand the counterpoint. The evidence is that the majority of the population will recover from the virus - given that there are no excess deaths in the population that is aged under 40.
There is also increasing evidence that the base susceptibility is far, far lower than the people clinging to their faulty computer models like to admit. When why the death rate predictions are out by an order of magnitude and countries like Sweden haven't been laid waste by death.
In a virus that affects older people rather than younger people, why do you want people to be older when they catch it?
There is no end goal here. Just a bunch of people running around trying to keep the population frightened so they can tell them what they can and can't do. It's deeply authoritarian in nature.
The entire virus impact appears to be following a seasonal standard respiratory illness curve for the latitude of the area you are living in.
Amen Neil!
"The entire virus impact appears to be following a seasonal standard respiratory illness curve for the latitude of the area you are living in. "
Cities in Texas and Arizona fill up their ICU's from respiratory illnesses in the middle of summer? Although I could see people spending more time inside there in summer since it's too hot to go outside and the virus spreads indoors.
"There is no end goal here. Just a bunch of people running around trying to keep the population frightened so they can tell them what they can and can't do. It's deeply authoritarian in nature."
Indeed there is no end goal, but the latter half is fiction, in the US anyways. That's sort of the problem, we don't really have anyone setting out rules of what to do and not do in order to reach an end goal. Just a patchwork of various guidance, with tepid mandates in a few states. Nothing even remotely close to how strict places in Europe were.
The scientists have been fairly correct all along. It's less deadly than first thought but more contagious, hardly any surface spread, rather mostly through the air, and it's a bit broader in how it attacks the body than originally thought (not just lungs, but also stroke and kidney failure). I don't think any serious scientist ever said masks don't work, that was just a piss-poor logistical decision to tell people that, as has been admitted, one of the largest govt fuck-ups of the last 20 years. They've been consistent from the start that it kills mostly older people. The official death toll is likely to reach ~200k, total all-cause excess death will easily blow past that.
"Cities in Texas and Arizona fill up their ICU's from respiratory illnesses in the middle of summer?"
Correct. The nearer the tropics you are the more it is summer focussed. This is all stuff we've know for ages.
See https://youtu.be/cSKjcltDkng
"otal all-cause excess death will easily blow past that."
US deaths per million of population is under half that of Belgium, and 2/3rds of the UK.
UK excess deaths are now back under the normal level. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-florence-nightingales-daigrams-for-deaths/
The scientists have been out by an order of magnitude on deaths, because their models assume a level of susceptibility that doesn't appear to be there.
The median age of death is over 80.
Excess US excess mortality is already in the 170k to 250k range. So we're basically already there to what I said. The US death data is similar to the UK, deaths were almost back to normal. But now covid deaths are going back up in the US so that red line will rise again.
I'm not sure what projection you're thinking of, but those wild, total-lack-of-mitigation figures from way back in the early days haven't been mentioned for 3 or 4 months now.
The Imperial college one way back in the day predicted 1,1 million in the US with mitigation. U.K. was 250K. So probably not too great of a guess, let's hope it remains off by a factor of 5 for the UK. But I haven't seen any numbers like that since 4 months ago. At the end of March 200k was a figure bandied about in the US, which might end up being in the ballpark. So things have evolved, but the basic picture wasn't too bad, all things considered (new virus, limited data etc).
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