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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#811

Post by 0xy »

joegahona wrote: post #582
metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

> This letter is signed by 1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders. Would love a breakdown of this. "Community stakeholders" is meaningless. The letter reads like something you'd see on change.org.

That's a good idea, so they can be utterly discredited and assigned the proportional blame for the ensuing deaths.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#812

Post by 0xy »

jpindar wrote: post #208
metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

They're taking that position because if they don't, people will call them racist.

In other words, they're putting politics above science and should be discredited in kind.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#813

Post by blub »

entee wrote: post #758
javagram wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I don’t think the majority of the officials intended to lie about this. It wasn’t anything that started this year or anything - they’ve had the same message about masks since as far back as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... > But the CDC has recommended against mask use. I hypothesized that the CDC was intentionally lying to us, trying to trick us into not b…

I think you’re right. I don’t understand the general tendency of assuming malice when a combination of uncertainty about the virus, poor supply chains, and not-very-good underlying data would do just as well. It’s also unclear what “masks” meant in the initial phases. An N95 respirator? A surgical mask? A homemade cloth mask? Each of these has different uses and effects. I seriously doubt most people knew the differe…

This isn't complicated at all, it's only been made to look so by governments and organizations caught with their pants down.

Not wearing a mask offers zero protection from an illness which is mainly transmitted through droplets and aerosols.

Wearing a mask offers some protection, ranging from little to very good depending on the type of mask. In the mean time we know that surgical masks offer pretty good protection in particular, but there were studies about SARS, MERS and influenza going back years showing that both FFP2/N95+ and surgical masks do help. We even have studies comparing incorrect, partly incorrect vs correct usage.

The conclusion is inescapable: even if people on average wear masks incorrectly and even if the masks they wear aren't even close to 95% effective, they reduce the rate of transmission. Why on Earth would you not want to reduce the rate of transmission even if by a few percent?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#814

Post by Rapzid »

robocat wrote: post #239
bjourne wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, don't forget to wash your hands. We don't yet know how effective masks are but we have mountains of evidence showing that hand washing works.

My prediction is that hand washing turns out to be unimportant. I believe the vast majority of cases are transmitted by respiration, and the recent news that super-spreaders dominate transmission will eventually find that they spread the disease by air, not by contact or fomites. I have yet to see any evidence that washing hands reduces transmission by any significant amount (say 5%).

The CDC has been saying for months they don't believe surface transmission to be much of a factor in the overall spread of the virus.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#815

Post by zingar »

rayiner wrote: post #498
smsm42 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky. Which most people would take as implying it's not actually risky - even though they are not saying that. They…

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

There seems a fairly trivial explanation: they were talking about the effectiveness of a mask in protecting you from what you breathe in, not the communal action of everyone wearing a mask to protect other people from what you breathe out.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#816

Post by blub »

apatters wrote: post #807
hindsightbias wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We indeed live in an era where all things are binary. But what is a thinking person supposed to think when the Surgeon General is saying don’t wear masks in a pandemic caused by airborne viri? In urban (educated) zones likely to be hotbeds for outbreaks, could the state not do a little nuance and say “hospitals need the N95s and you need a bandana” Everybody has got a bandana, but if I were to start walking into stor…

Hopefully this doesn't come across as pedantic but airborne transmission of COVID-19 is rare. Not ruled out completely but not the main way it is spread. In the initial Chinese study of 75K they said there was zero airborne transmission, I think they've found some exceptions since but it's not a common thing. The WHO actually has a definition for this, when the droplets carrying the disease are It's still good to wea…

If your source that airborne transmission is rare is the WHO, then all you have is a worthless source.

Recently I've read an interview with Drosten (the German virologist which came up with one of the Coronavirus tests) say that they're starting to see airborne transmission as an important transmission factor, maybe not a strong as droplets but comparable. This is especially the case in poorly ventilated spaces.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#817

Post by Rapzid »

SPQT wrote: post #16

Not a surprise, COVID19 is pretty soft compared to the historic pandemics. I'm actually suprised that this continued for so long, I gave the lockdowns 4 week, but I guess the media propaganda blessed it with longer life. Just to clarify about Covid: -The highest deathrate from it is around 1%, CDC reports 0.30 lately. -Hits predominantly the old parts of the population -The death comes in a normal way - pneumonia ->…

> I gave the lockdowns 4 week

Interesting because the CDC and NIAID were signalling well in advance of that they wanted at least 8 weeks of shut-down.. Anyone with their ear to the ground(actually reading articles from and watching interviews of epidemiologists and health officials) would have known everything was going to be shutdown well into May and that school was out for the summer. Marriott furloughed employees until end of June BEFORE the major March shutdowns.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#818

Post by philwelch »

vore wrote: post #369
twblalock wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just seem to think protesting America's rampant institutionalized police brutality is more worthy than protesting the lockdowns themselves That can’t possibly be a valid scientific opinion on the basis of public health data — until recently the virus was killing more people per day than the police kill in an entire year. It’s a political opinion and this was a political letter. From now on, when public health…

It is important to keep in mind that this is not about protesting just police brutality: police brutality is just one part of systemic inequality affecting POCs, especially black people, in the US. With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.

For instance, black Americans are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Protesting that “Black Lives Matter” during a pandemic that takes black lives seems self-defeating to me.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#819

Post by blub »

zingar wrote: post #815
rayiner wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

There seems a fairly trivial explanation: they were talking about the effectiveness of a mask in protecting you from what you breathe in, not the communal action of everyone wearing a mask to protect other people from what you breathe out.

Surgical masks offer some limited protection for the wearer (20-80 AFAIK according to some study). Respirators offer good to very good protection for the wearer.

For a long time I was under the impression that surgical masks don't really help the wearer. There are some studies showing comparable effects to an N95, but I was assuming incorrect N95 usage and I was incorrectly dismissing the benefit of even low double-digit protection.

The thing that convinced me to take a closer look was an interview with the German infection specialist Peter Walger, which said that:

* all masks protect the wearer to a certain degree

* medical grade surgical masks clearly offer partial protection. This was a grave error, which made personnel also in clinical practice not trust the masks and wear them for protection.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#820

Post by sfj »

ken wrote: post #568
jpxw wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I see these calculations please?

Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short. (There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.) COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly tha…

A lot of is to do with black on black homicide. Murder is the leading cause of death for Black men, ages 15 to 34. Their murderers are other Black men 93 percent of the time. Is this also caused by racism?
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