> Why do they mask then? Disposable/cloth masks that do absolutely nothing to prevent the spread of an airborne disease like Covid do still work with diseases (like the Flu) with a droplet based spread. > CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona... The problem was the cult of people claiming that a disposable/cloth mask could be effectiv…
Not "absolutely nothing", according to research I've seen. Just not very much.
A disposable mask with open sides cannot possibly filter particles that small out of the air you breathe.
However, it can catch the comparatively large droplets you produce when someone with the Flu coughs or sneezes.
Which explains why global Flu cases (with a droplet based spread) fell to all time lows while Covid (fully airborne) continued to spread like wildfire.
> Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know. We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol. In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to p…
Had this pandemic turned out to kill 10% of the global population then it would definitely have been the right move. Turns out, that didn't happen. Because we were lucky regarding lethality, regarding contageousness, regardin speed of vaccine development. In hindsight, no biggy, how dare they made everybody sanitize their hands all the time. I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start aga…
COVID-19 was nature giving us an astoundingly generous "dry run," and humanity utterly failed at nearly every step. I doubt we collectively learned anything, either. When the real thing hits, with, say, a 10+% death rate and cutting uniformly across age demographics, we're going to blow it again. We're going to politicize, downplay and ignore it again. We're going to have idiots out protesting it again. We'll eventually acknowledge it and to try an ineffective and haphazard country-by-country, state-by-state approach again. We'll do the same half-assed "Stay At Home Suggestions" and "Voluntary Travel Restrictions" with no enforcement again. But this time it will be a catastrophe.
Maybe a problem less controversial was the absence of trusted public health figures making concerted efforts to calm fears. And those that did try were belittled, minimized and castigated. They were the ones labeled as dangerous. Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.
I remember it differently. The medical community was crying out that we needed to take action, and the administration downplayed it and delayed. It was opposite, those that spoke up to do something were squashed in favor of those saying 'its just a cold, suck it up'. The government didn't do anything until private companies started realizing something had to be done, namely the NBA. Nothing was moving until the NBA c…
Exactly. The reason the medical professionals weren't calming people down was because the general consensus was that we should have been panicking more. I was raised by a doctor and all I can remember is them being so tired. No one was following the recommendations, people were dying, and they were at an increased risk.
No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was
> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)" There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even…
The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a re…
> The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too.
So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!
A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1].
It was clear by March 2020 when the passengers on the Diamond Princess were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air; if transmission were droplet or surface based that would have ended the outbreak immediately. Please don't cite the CDC for anything, they're…
> were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates. > This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarter…
They weren't allowed out of their cabins iirc, so public bathrooms and elevators were not really relevant. It was almost certainly spreading through the ventilation system and possibly drainage systems.
> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)" There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even…
I know of people who still won't go to church because of all of the above and are, for all intents and purposes, still deathly afraid to leave their homes. Regardless of what some might say in argument against your point(s), I absolutely do think that part of the public health emergency was the abject panic that ensued following COVID. I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation…
To be fair, not going to church was about the most impactful thing somebody could to if going to church was a normal activity. And this is probably still saving those people some cases of flu and influenza.
This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.
The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a re…
> The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling! A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/c…
Yeah, all the people saying this was a 'cold', what about all the dead? What do you mean we overreacted, or it was fake, or a conspiracy? Look at all the dead, how do you ignore that.
I think a lot of people knew how to respond, its just they were fired. :: Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation. Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way…
I would like them to go on the record on if they weren't fired what they would've done differently. In hindsight, we had vaccines created and in testing 5 days [1] after the WHO called that virus a pandemic [2]. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 [2]: https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments...
I understand nobody rushed the vaccine tests any more because nobody could produce it on the amount necessary. The tests were run faster than normal, and "coincidentally" all finished at about the same time the manufacturers could supply it.