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

nature.com

171–180 of 196 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reducin…

Wearing a grocery bag instead of a condom will likely also reduce your risk of unwanted pregnancy, that doesn't translate into being effectively protective. Masks help lower droplets and aerosol in the air from your breath. So they slow the contagion. But they do not stop it, if the average person were likely to contract a contagion within 6 months with normal behavior and a mask reduces transmissibility by 50%, this…

By masks, I presume you mean surgical or cloth masks.

FFPs are known highly effective in protecting people both ways against virus this large, more or less indefinitely, assuming there's no operational error. Trouble being that apparently USA cannot make enough of them.

Mind you, operational error is likely over longer timespans.

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

#172
post #142

This seems to be especially true with the UK variant, just today Australia had another transmission in hotel quarantine between people that shared the same floor and only opened the door to get food. > The woman's husband, in her 70s, joined her in quarantine on January 16 and she decided to stay in the hotel with him for his 14-day quarantine period. During that time, a family of five arrived in Melbourne from Niger…

Opened door = air exchange... Not to mention the virus can skip through HVAC installation.

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

#173
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So one way people lose my trust is to tell me to do useless things for my perceived psychological benefit. I have both changed doctors and jobs for this reason. Treat me like a child and you're out of my life.

I’ve got to be honest, that does sound rather childish on your part.

[deleted]

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but you're missing the point is that the advice right now is that a 6ft distance (indoor and outdoor) is sufficient for people to take off their masks.

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

#175
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Indoor environment - No/limited air circulation - Mask-less All 3 combined, put a COVID-19 carrier there, trouble.

Yes but you're missing the point is that the advice right now is that a 6ft distance (indoor and outdoor) is sufficient for people to take off their masks.

Where is that the advice? In the UK it's very much saying that you must wear a mask indoors and maintain as much distance as you can.

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

#176
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the CDC, the total number of deaths caused by Covid is about 6% of the people who died with a positive test result.

That’s long debunked misinformation. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...

CDC states officially: "For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned." And the median age was above 80. A German professor performed about 100 autopsies and came to the same conclusion.

BTW: Who pays this self-proclaimed "fact checker"?

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

#177
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s long debunked misinformation. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...

CDC states officially: "For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned." And the median age was above 80. A German professor performed about 100 autopsies and came to the same conclusion. BTW: Who pays this self-proclaimed "fact checker"?

Yes. 6% have COVID as the only cause. That doesn't mean the other 94% weren't COVID deaths, just that their medical histories involved other conditions as well.

> He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Half the country has hypertension. Half the country has obesity. These fall in the 94% category, but chances are they weren't imminently dying of these things before getting COVID.

As for funding: https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/

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

#178
post #175
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but you're missing the point is that the advice right now is that a 6ft distance (indoor and outdoor) is sufficient for people to take off their masks.

Where is that the advice? In the UK it's very much saying that you must wear a mask indoors and maintain as much distance as you can.

My part of the US apparently. The local restaurant regulations is 6ft apart and if people are sitting you don't need a mask. Same with stadiums/theaters/etc..

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But telling people to do something that's not known to reduce risk distracts people from doing the things that help the most. Instead of a store spending thousands of dollars on cleaning supplies and labor to disinfect floors and shelves 3 times a day, they could spend that money improving ventilation.

"Improving ventilation" isn't something you just order from the hardware website. You can't just fit a fan to a window to extract air and call it job done job done without studying how that changes internal airflows. Does it address dead zones? Does it actually make matters worse by creating hot zones which coincide with areas where people concentrate? Does the exhaled air create risks to workers outside? It requires…

> lots more money than some cleaning supplies

lots more money than 12+ months of cleaning supplies, labor, delayed purchases, and increased transmission risk amongst your staff and customers?

i suspect it is close enough that we can't hand wave it away as you want to do.

in some facilities it may have been nearly free, with some reprogramming done to the existing HVAC system, to run the fans more, or more frequently pull in outside air.

> Does the exhaled air create risks to workers outside?

this is just FUD.

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

#180
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up the CDC data and it says ~0.7% of the US population dies each year. Out of ~330 million people, that's 2.4 million people each year. So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal. That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.

>That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more. Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

> Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...

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