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Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

publichealth.verily.com

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Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#121

Post by ABCLAW »

gernb wrote: post #114
rayiner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For vaccinated individuals, being sick for two weeks is unusual. When I got covid the first time, before vaccines were available, I was sick less than a week. I had a few weeks of brain fog after that but it cleared up. I got it again last week and I was sick for only a day. Not any worse than any cold I’ve had before. Indeed I’ve had fewer sick days the last couple of years than I did the year my daughter started da…

Quoted post unavailable.

While I understand the sentiment of saying that a purely individual perspective is egregious, selfish, myopic and inappropriate for a situation in which individual selfishness can cause extensive social harm, it's not a good look to tell people that you hope their loved ones die.

I don't hope their loved ones die, I hope they become better.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#122

Post by 8note »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #104
kjksf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being killed by a falling brick is a very clear cost. How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public? Talking about cost without normalizing for probability of prevention is meaningless yet you want to frame the discussion to be purely about (low) cost of wearing masks. We had a year of a pretty tough lockdown, most people wearing masks, distancing in grocery s…

Interestingly, traumatic brain injury is responsible for more deaths than influenza. If we all wore helmets it would save a lot of lives.

Traumatic brain injury is much easier to attribute to a death, rather than viruses that are more likely to be involved in some other cause of death, like a bacterial pneumonia.

If I learned anything from COVID times, it's that attributing deaths is complex, and roughly up to whoever writes the death certificate

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#123

Post by gernb »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #37
basch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary mechanism these things are spread by is water droplets in the air expelled from the nose and mouth. A sick person wearing a mask will expel more moisture into the mask, and less into the air. None of this is binary. It's not sick or not sick. There is a viral load component, where a persons body can fight off a certain amount of virus.

I guess I’m skeptical, isn’t the majority of covid spread through prolonged close contact? Running into a grocery store without a mask for fifteen minutes seems extremely low risk compared to other activities.

I recently got it via short contact (3 weeks ago, was positive until yesterday, still have a cough).

I went to an amusement park. None of the people I was hanging out with had it nor tested positive before or after (they were all testing regularly) so the only other explanations are random people I passed at the park, food that was contaminated, or random covid virus in the air.

Of course my getting it via short contact does not invalidate the idea that most of it is spread via prolonged contact. But, given I just caught it via short contact I'm not going to stop taking prevenative measures in situations with only short contacts.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#124

Post by timr »

ABCLAW wrote: post #117
timr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're forced to wear them on your face, yes. Covering your face , as a primate, is not a natural thing to do. Our brains have huge areas dedicated to recognition of subtle differences in facial features. We're literally wired for facial recognition. More than almost any other feature of our bodies, our faces define us as individuals. Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong. I honestly can'…

>Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do. 1) Neither is wearing pants or a shirt. 2) Something being 'natural' doesn't make it right. >Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong. It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile. Let's saying masking always under all conditions is too much of…

> It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile.

I don't dispute this. You're more than welcome to continue doing whatever you want and make that trade-off for yourself. I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold (assuming that is even achievable, which I don't grant).

But the metaphor of "pants" is absurd. I wear pants because they keep me warm and protect my soft bits and make me look snazzy, not because someone else is making a moral judgment about my choice of clothing being "the correct thing to do".

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#125

Post by gjsman-1000 »

Diederich wrote: post #110
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, imagine if said hard hat caused unknown long-term effects by itself. We know, for a fact, that some plastic fibers from masks end up in the lungs permanently. What happens when they go there? Nobody knows. How many of them are there in the average person? Nobody knows. What are the long term effects? Nobody knows. How does it affect lung development in both short-term and long-term, particularly in young people…

How would you compare these cited risks associated with mask wear with the risks associated with more likely C19 infections, and perhaps more important with the emergent recognition of risks associated with long covid? My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19…

In which case, get vaccinated, and wear a mask yourself, if that concerns you. For those of us who have had COVID and recovered quickly (like myself, in ~2 days), you need to convince me that my mask-wearing protects anyone else, when they can wear masks themselves if they are so inclined. Even then, with 58% of COVID hospitalizations being vaccinated, and over 82% of the nation having had COVID at some point (according to IMHE), mask wearing and vaccination appears to be a deferment on the inevitable.

> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.

Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#126

Post by ABCLAW »

orblivion wrote: post #73
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #13

I am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so…

Are cases really rising? It looks maybe a little higher than the summer right now, maybe depends on the area. Nothing like the last two autumns, thankfully. We'll see about winter. They keep saying some new variant is going to break through but I don't see it yet.

In my area, cases are rising fairly rapidly and certain hospitals have begun to rescheduling electives on the basis that they're overstressed. This is concerning because winter is just getting started and transmission rates when people are indoors are higher.

That said, I think the seasonal wave we're anticipating is a product of when our winter hits and how hard our winter hits - other areas might have very different experiences overall.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#127

Post by gernb »

spookthesunset wrote: post #52
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #13

I am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so…

There is more to life than a myopic focus on avoiding one specific illness. I’ve got a million other problems in my life to worry about. Catching Covid isn’t anywhere near the top of that list. This applies to society as a whole as well. The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself.

On the one side we have 20 million people dead. What's the counter factual of how many people would be dead if we'd been less myopic

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#128

Post by basch »

ch4s3 wrote: post #76
basch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary mechanism these things are spread by is water droplets in the air expelled from the nose and mouth. A sick person wearing a mask will expel more moisture into the mask, and less into the air. None of this is binary. It's not sick or not sick. There is a viral load component, where a persons body can fight off a certain amount of virus.

I was under the impression that droplets are only part of the picture and that sick people are in fact spraying tons of much small particles into the air as they breathe.

droplets and airborne is a somewhat arbitrary distinction pulled out of .. thin air.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

Whether the droplet/aerosol float through the air has to do with much more than particle size.

"There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed."

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#129

Post by dietr1ch »

sn0wf1re wrote: post #32
endisneigh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone sick should be staying home, not going into grocery stores with a mask on.

How else would they get food? Not everyone can afford to order in. Is your opinion that these people should just starve?

Most could ask friend or family for help. Not wanting to bother someone else is silly, since it results in bothering way more than one person.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#130

Post by sn0wf1re »

endisneigh wrote: post #112
sn0wf1re wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else would they get food? Not everyone can afford to order in. Is your opinion that these people should just starve?

Ideally you have enough food in your fridge to last without daily trips to the grocery store, so no, not starving.

COVID symptoms (coughing in particular, which is a big spreader of particles) can last weeks. I don't know many people with multiple weeks worth of food in their fridge unless they have a deepfreeze (large chest freezer).
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