Tuesday, August 4, 2020

DrcMonica Gandhi - Mask wearing may decrease severity of COVID-19

It's bizarre how the people who complained the most about the Lockdowns harming our economy are the very same people who are the most resistant to wearing masks, which could reduce further lockdowns. Mask wearing could mean we never need a lockdown again, according to Dr Monica Gandhi.

Covid-19 is different to the flu virus in that most people who get it will have mild symptoms or be asymptomatic. But in those people that are badly affected their immune system overreacts going into a cytokine storm.

Wearing a mask reduces the viral load which means the body is better prepared and doesn't go into this cytokine storm. The result is that masks wearers who get C19 are more likely to have mild symptoms or even none at all.


One More Reason to Wear a Mask: You’ll Get Less Sick From COVID-19

As more and more states promote face masks as a way to control the spread of COVID-19, the top-line message has been: wear a mask to protect others. While it’s true that most face masks are more effective in preventing you from launching droplets into the air than breathing in already dispersed droplets – that doesn’t mean masks offer no protection to the wearer.

It’s likely that face masks, by blocking even some of the virus-carrying droplets you inhale, can reduce your risk of falling seriously ill from COVID-19, according to Monica Gandhi, MD, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco.

“The more virus you get into your body, the more sick you are likely to get,” she said.

In the latest wave of infections in the U.S., the wider use of masks may be one factor for the lower death rates – along with more testing, younger patients and better treatments – said Gandhi. A greater proportion of these new cases have been mild or asymptomatic, though more data is needed to see if they track geographically with higher rates of mask-wearing.

Worldwide, epidemiological patterns seem to provide a clue. In countries where mask wearing was already commonplace, such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, and in countries where mask wearing was quickly embraced, such as the Czech Republic, rates of severe illness and death have remained low, even with new cases. Countries with uneven rates of mask-wearing, like the United States, have fared more poorly.

These epidemiological observations are among the evidence that Gandhi and colleagues cite in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, in which they propose that masks can lead to milder or asymptomatic infections by cutting down on the dose of virus people take in.

“Masks can prevent infection altogether, as was seen in healthcare workers when we moved to universal masking. We are also saying that masks, which filter out a majority of viral particles, can lead to a less severe infection if you do get one,” said Gandhi. “If you get infected, but have no symptoms – that’s the best way you can ever get a virus.”

NOT A NEW IDEA

COVID-19 is caused by an RNA virus dubbed SARS-CoV-2. The idea that viral dose, also known as viral inoculum, determines the degree of illness is not new, said Gandhi. Descriptions of a dose-mortality curve – how much of a virus is needed to cause death in an animal – were first published in 1938. And after all, the earliest vaccines, which were documented in 16th century China, involved exposing someone to a small amount of smallpox virus to induce mild illness and subsequent immunity.

Researchers have studied dose dependency experimentally with other viral infections, like the flu. In a study with healthy human volunteers, those who received a higher dose of the influenza A virus developed more severe symptoms.

Because the new coronavirus is potentially lethal, experiments on masking and disease severity have been necessarily limited to animals. In a hamster study, a surgical mask partition between the cages of infected and uninfected hamsters significantly cut COVID-19 transmission. Fewer hamsters caught the virus and those that did showed milder symptoms. 




15 comments:

NeilW said...

Epidemiological data from the China Study demonstrated that eating fat made you fat an unhealthy.

A conclusion that led to the lipid hypothesis that took 30 years to be debunked.

It's not the silver bullet you are looking for is it.

Again you have a set of people curve fitting to a belief. Primarily that there is a massive amount of virus in the air everywhere and everybody is a poison pill.

Where's the evidence that the viral load in a shop where people are keeping apart is sufficient to reduce symptoms because everybody is wearing mask?

On the basis you put forward everybody should be required to wear masks in bed and not when they are out and about. What's the plan for introducing and enforcing that?

There is a desperation in some quarters to try and explain South East Asia in terms of some sort of intervention - rather than simply that they have been exposed to some other agent or are naturally less susceptible because they are healthier.

All of it is pushed by the underlying belief that top down imposition of interventions *has* to be doing something - because we're all so much cleverer than everybody else.

When Occams Razor is that they are all just the pigeon pecking at the bell and believing that is what is dispensing the food.


NeilW said...

If the hypothesis put forward by Dr Gandhi is correct, why did this happen?

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00386/japan-gripped-by-major-flu-outbreak.html

Matt Franko said...

“ Again you have a set of people curve fitting to a belief.”

That’s what a liberal education trains them to do... Platonist methodology starts with the Theoy first... then looks for data to support their theory which is cited then in their dialogues back and forth... eventually the result is some sort of synthesis of the opposing Theses...

So they come up with “wear a mask some of the time”...

Youd have to euthanize the Platonists to be rid of this ... never going to happen...

Matt Franko said...

“ Covid-19 is different to the flu virus in that most people who get it will have mild symptoms or be asymptomatic. But in those people that are badly affected their immune system overreacts going into a cytokine storm.”

If this is true then logically it’s is not the virus that is causing the cytokines storm... because some people contract the virus and don’t produce a cytokines storm...

Peter Pan said...

I never thought I'd see human beings lose rational thought over a virus.

Hamsters wearing gas masks - get used to our future, folks.

Matt Franko said...

LOL they didn’t put masks on the hamsters... they divided the air supply between the hamsters with mask type materials...

Matt Franko said...

Seems to a large extent an HVAC problem... or iow a biochemistry problem that HVAC systems can be made to work to mitigate...

NeilW said...

"Seems to a large extent an HVAC problem."

We call that "opening a window" over here. Not that many buildings have AC.

NeilW said...

What was that Japan miracle again?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/japan-acted-like-the-virus-had-gone-now-it-s-spread-everywhere

Matt Franko said...

Neil all buildings are sealed up over here.. windows don’t open in most commercial buildings... air is just recirculated thru dust filters... filters typically are not anti microbial...

Making an anti microbial filter standard issue might go a long way towards reducing viral loads in HVAC controlled areas...

Peter Pan said...

There is little private home air conditioning in Nova Scotia, although our summers are getting hotter. The situation is different in southern Ontario.

Matt Franko said...

I think Florida Texas and Arizona positives ramped up in May when it starts to get hot there... people retreat inside for the A/C...

We were in AZ in March when all hell was breaking loose here back East and there were like 18 cases in whole state of AZ at that time ... daytime highs of maybe 75 no humidity everyone was outside...

Matt Franko said...

Then they imposed shutdowns as we were leaving and numbers shot way up...

Peter Pan said...

Arizona Devastated In Wake of Franko Family Visit - The Onion

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