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Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

nature.com

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Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#101

Post by GizmoSwan »

I recall reading a thread by healthcare professionals, expert in viral diseases during the onset, not sure where exactly. They were basically saying that the virus can only linger on surfaces for max 3 days. Knowing that fact stopped some of my paranoia about packages.

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.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#102

Post by loyukfai »

faitswulff wrote: post #15
nlh wrote: post #9

I 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...

- Indoor environment

- No/limited air circulation

- Mask-less

All 3 combined, put a COVID-19 carrier there, trouble.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#103

Post by timr »

mattkrause wrote: post #100
timr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

More like “defeasible”. 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.

The reputation of an authority is not a rebuttal to an argument. It's simply a lazy way of of avoiding the argument by substituting the burden of proof to the identity of the authority.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#104

Post by cortesoft »

TheGrim-999 wrote: post #74
war1025 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> We have the data now

Yeah, we have the data that 447,000 Americans have been killed by Covid. That is data.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#105

Post by pbourke »

betwixthewires wrote: post #93

The problem with this article is that it takes at face value the stated goals of the pandemic response: to slow the spread of coronavirus. And while that is a goal, it is not the top goal. If it could be, it probably would be. 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…

> 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.

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.”

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#106

Post by war1025 »

cortesoft wrote: post #104
TheGrim-999 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> We have the data now Yeah, we have the data that 447,000 Americans have been killed by Covid. That is data.

Honestly, death comes to us all. My dad died five years ago this week. Death is tragic, but the world keeps moving.

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.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#107

Post by dilyevsky »

timr wrote: post #86
dilyevsky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I googled that for you - https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-professor-reopen-11591... 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?

She's saying that Ferguson's projections were wrong. 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...

That piece of report doesn’t have us numbers. Gb looks totally in line with what had actually happened. 2.2M doesn’t sound unreasonable either since we are already almost at a quarter of that (assuming you even trust florida numbers). So she was wildly wrong, more so than other researchers, still clearly wrong but doubled down. So what’s your point exactly?

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#108

Post by lambda_obrien »

fsckboy wrote: post #61
lambda_obrien wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just amazed he got doffing correct but donning incorrect, most people don't know the word doffing in my experience.

i just googled "don and doff" to see if I could find any shared etymology with "on and off" or if that was a coincidence... and discovered that "donning and doffing PPE" is a thing, hence, not so surprising that somebody would learn it or know it.

I'm not surprised someone used them together, but in my experience most people don't deal with PPE a daily basis, so a lot of folks seem to use don (a common word I guess) but I've rarely seen doff used.

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#109

Post by loyukfai »

gxqoz wrote: post #40

One thing I'm curious about is whether all this extra "deep cleaning" is going to have other negative health consequences. i.e. from increased indoor concentrations of the chemicals used to do the cleaning.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-downside-of-cl...

// 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. //

Re: Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces

#110

Post by evan_ »

timr wrote: post #42
evan_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Wikipedia link you posted: > 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, a…

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

...but that’s what you’re doing?
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