Why can't we put HEPA purifiers in every room?
I would imagine money primarily. On top of that, the larger the room gets the more costly and ineffective this becomes.
Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
71–80 of 196 posts
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#72This has been on the CDC website for quite a while now: "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/...
Wasn't the original source some folks in Wuhan eating bats? Has that been debunked?
Edit: That wasn't meant to be snarky. It really does seem to be a contradictory bit of evidence.
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#73I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your health!” ads from the 1950s: 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 obsessiv…
It’s not even necessarily close proximity: “Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’ spread indoors” https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-m...
one word of caution is the current South Korean administration has been dangerously leaning towards pro-CCP. President Moon has repeatedly praised the communist party and President Xi and they have effectively weaponized the pandemic to suppress protests.
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".
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Our early guidance that masks don’t help (because we needed to save the real masks for healthcare workers) 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…
> people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? (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…
This is the rational approach to take. At the beginning it was an unknown, and I was more cautious than anyone I knew. I was gathering supplies and locking down in January. There were videos of people in China having seizures in the middle of the road (whatever happened to those videos, by the way?). The correct response was to be overly cautious until we had more data.
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.
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#75I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your health!” ads from the 1950s: 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 obsessiv…
It’s not even necessarily close proximity: “Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’ spread indoors” https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-m...
Thanks for sharing this. I finally have unequivocal data to support my argument that we should not eat indoors at restaurants.
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#76I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your health!” ads from the 1950s: 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 obsessiv…
I would add the 6ft rule, but it's unclear to me that people even now realize that's it's based on assumptions about transmission which were proven wrong pretty early on.
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's Bhattacharya in the WSJ: 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%, assum…
You are unfairly mis-representing the piece. They make a number of different calculations to estimate the IFR, based on observations available at the time. They then say the following: > 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…
Can you provide a citation that an IFR estimate for the early days of the pandemic at ~2%, prior to the development of current treatment protocols, was "entirely wrong"?
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's Bhattacharya in the WSJ: 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%, assum…
You are unfairly mis-representing the piece. They make a number of different calculations to estimate the IFR, based on observations available at the time. They then say the following: > 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…
> 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%).
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Was just a flat out lie by various public health officials that they justified for the greater good. It was probably the biggest and easiest-to-prevent mistake of the pandemic, and it certainly cost many lives. 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 ri…
Was #1 a flat-out lie? I though the CDC said that "masks work" was a statement with insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time, especially as they were cognizant that a run on masks could deny HCWs access to the tools of their trade. In other words, they were irresponsibly careful.
Tweet from Surgeon General, Feb 19th: "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus..."; in a March 2nd interview he went further: "You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a healthcare provider." (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-general-against-ma...)
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.
Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
#80I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your health!” ads from the 1950s: 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 obsessiv…
1. Was just a flat out lie by various public health officials that they justified for the greater good. It was probably the biggest and easiest-to-prevent mistake of the pandemic, and it certainly cost many lives. 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 ri…
The CDC and the WHO were staunchly conservative about masks early in the pandemic. Much of the studies we had at the time lacked rigor to show that masks were effective for coronavirus and various parameters. As more and more data came out, they shifted their position.