To mask or not to mask?

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G-Man said:
Tangent: I may be misinterpreting what you wrote, Murphey, but The Doctor used that _against_ the Prime Minister, to get people to question her health, abilities, and effectiveness and drive her from office. Not so much to directly mess with the Prime Minister's self-perception.
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Very true. I was referring to the concept of a "whisper" campaign.
 
skippers said:
If there were a malaria pan epidemic all the spray planes in the world would be up knocking the vector "mosquitos" out of the air to control the spread. We have thousands of aluminum vectors continuing to spread the virus and people wonder why the outbreak is spreading. Shut down air travel for several weeks. The cost will be high economically but probable no more than the medical cost of treating the sick. This would allow time for identification of carriers' contacts and slow the spread.
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All air travel was shut down back in 9/11. Inconvenient and aggravating? Yup but it can be done in a very short period of time.
 
flhrci said:
Can we preserve the North Puget Sound area? Like Whidbey Island north? I want to retire there some day. @Palmpilot can move.
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Negative. Problem is, the Polar Vortex carries all the airborne crud (virus) from your state, southwest into the interior. Gotta cut the head off the snake while we still can. Sorry.
 
They're apparently running out of masks...


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Reports were that to enter grocery stores in the affected area, one had to load a mandatory smartphone app that asked you daily questions about your health.

If your app turned from green to yellow, no entry to public spaces. If you had a confirmed case or high symptoms, it turned red.

Yay databases and tech. No possible way any of that could be compromised or manipulated...

Or even just a total pain in the ass... my battery died... go home.
 
I vote to skip the mask, even the homemade ones.
 

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Palmpilot said:
The mortality rate has gone up to 3.4%. :(

https://www.latimes.com/california/...coronavirus-kirkland-seattle-california-cases
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That number is a conclusion that can not be drawn based on what we know at this point. First of all in the US the majority of the deaths have been in a single nursing facility. These are older people with preexisting conditions. Sad for them but the reality is it got into a place with medically fragile people. As for the rest of the world there are probably 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people who may have it and don't know it or think it is just a common flu will recover and never be counted.
 
DFH65 said:
As for the rest of the world there are probably 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people who may have it and don't know it...
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Not according to the WHO. "The vast majority of those infected sooner or later develop symptoms. Cases of people in whom the virus has been detected and who do not have symptoms at that time are rare - and most of them fall ill in the next few days."

DFH65 said:
...or think it is just a common flu will recover and never be counted.
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Perhaps...
 
DFH65 said:
That number is a conclusion that can not be drawn based on what we know at this point. First of all in the US the majority of the deaths have been in a single nursing facility. These are older people with preexisting conditions. Sad for them but the reality is it got into a place with medically fragile people. As for the rest of the world there are probably 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people who may have it and don't know it or think it is just a common flu will recover and never be counted.
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The number is from the World Health Organization (WHO), and is the number of deaths so far as a percentage of reported cases. As far as I know, they're not claiming that it will turn out to be the mortality rate for all cases.

"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday."​

https://abcnews.go.com/Internationa...amble-outbreak-case-numbers/story?id=69381834
​
 
catmandu said:
Trust, but verify. Doing the math on the Hopkins Heat Map, 3.7% for China, 1.7% the rest of the world. Don't go to China.
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I think we can expect the data to change as time goes on. For example, the Johns Hopkins page you linked is currently showing the U.S. death rate as 7% (9/128). That may be because the U.S. has tested far fewer people than some other countries, so the denominator may go up significantly.
 
There is a very big unknown here, that many have touched on, but it's the denominator. It's like saying "25% of loss of control incidents result in a crash" <- but you don't actually know how many people lost control and then regained it

Same here.. you know how many people are dying, but you really don't know, unless you test daily every single person in the country, what the actual infection and mortality rate is

It's honestly just a media field day thing

PS, many of these masks lose their effectiveness after about 45 minutes, the barrier layer is broken down by the moisture in your own breath
 
A lot of information in one article:

https://www.uptodate.com/contents/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19

Excerpt:

Using data from 181 publicly reported, confirmed cases in China with identifiable exposure, one modeling study estimated that symptoms would develop in 2.5 percent of infected individuals within 2.2 days and in 97.5 percent of infected individuals within 11.5 days [35]. The median incubation period in this study was 5.1 days.

Spectrum of illness severity — Most infections are not severe, although many patients with COVID-19 have critical illness [34,36-41]. Specifically, in a report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that included approximately 44,500 confirmed infections with an estimation of disease severity [42]:

●Mild (no or mild pneumonia) was reported in 81 percent.

●Severe disease (eg, with dyspnea, hypoxia, or >50 percent lung involvement on imaging within 24 to 48 hours) was reported in 14 percent.

●Critical disease (eg, with respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction) was reported in 5 percent.

●The overall case fatality rate was 2.3 percent; no deaths were reported among noncritical cases.
​
According to a joint World Health Organization (WHO)-China fact-finding mission, the case-fatality rate ranged from 5.8 percent in Wuhan to 0.7 percent in the rest of China [15]. Most of the fatal cases have occurred in patients with advanced age or underlying medical comorbidities.
​
The article is pretty comprehensive, and includes how the disease is being treated.
 
Yay, first four cases diagnosed in the Cincinnati area, in my neighborhood, as a matter of fact. I'm staying in for the foreseeable future.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Yay, first four cases diagnosed in the Cincinnati area, in my neighborhood, as a matter of fact. I'm staying in for the foreseeable future.
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My county is the coronavirus capital of California. The first reported case in the county was hospitalized less than two miles from my house, so I'm doing my hermit thing even more than usual.
 
Monday evening I got home from my five day trip to Florida, and so far no symptoms in spite of the guy in the seat behind me coughing and sneezing every few minutes without ever covering his mouth for the five and a half hour flight from BWI to OAK. Several people on all four flights wore masks; I had one, but didn't wear it. I did have a packet of Purell hand sanitizing wipes I used to wipe the tray tables, arm rests, overhead bin handle, and my cellphone.

Many at the reunion did elbow bumps instead of handshakes; it made sense, so I started doing it.
 
simtech said:
Lets talk in 6 months or a year and see what the numbers say because I bet early on the Swine flu looked similar or there wouldn't have been mass hysteria associated with it.
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Looks like we can talk only 1 month later. The total outcome is still unknown, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, or pretty much anything that anyone alive has seen has been left far, far behind in terms of impact(and almost certainly lives taken).
 
Frankly, my personal feeling is that we're being duped. Handwashing (not that it's not otherwise a good idea) and all the disinfecting of surfaces in the world is of obvious value as nobody has shown a surface-related propagation. However, it is known that shoving a bunch of people in close proximity be it a transit station (train, airports), a market, inside an airplane/bus/cruise ship, etc... HAS caused problem. The aerosolized droplets that are KNOWN to be the problem aren't oddly limited by the six foot radius and can linger in the area perhaps for hours the infected person has moved on. My wife is has respiratory challenges to begin with, I mask up when out of the house.
 
We were lucky. We left for Australia at the beginning of Feburary so we packed a dozen N95 to deal with the smoke. Fortunately, the fires were out by the time we got there.
In addition, since I'm a woodworker, I have lots of these in my workshop and since I'm highly allergic to grass and tree pollen, I wear them when I mow the lawn. I gave one box to local healthcare workers, kept a few for myself, and gave a few to an airline pilot friend whose wife was rightfully fearful.

One thing I can't stand is the large amount of disinformation (including some opportunistic mask manufacturers).

SARS-COV-2 is not airborne. Which is a good thing, we'd have no defense at all if it did. Even being a fairly large organism (compared to, let's say measles which really is airborne), it's too small to be filtered by a mask (N95 refers to .3 micron particles and corona virus is around .1).
The transmission is from aerosolized droplets. Not just people coughing and sneezing, but just talking and mouth breathing. Your six feet doesn't mean squat when you step forward in line and occupy the same space that an infected person did 30 seconds earlier when the checkout line moved forward. Those marks on the floor just make things worse. Further, as has been shown, a good cough or sneeze can propel things farther than six feet.
 
Mrs. Steingar just made us homemade masks. I think this one is heavy enough to keep anything out of my respiratory system. I’ll wear it if I’m out in dense public. Otherwise I just avoid.
 
Checkout_my_Six said:
Warren on the Beechtalk board posted this.....I'm a believer in masking up, and not just the thin cotton flags. We need the heavy duty N95....the micro droplets are extremely small.

After seeing this....it's no wonder this thing is spreading so fast.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/he...ling-the-covid-19-pandemic-heres-why-you-dont

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-undiagnosed-spread.html

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I actually found the letter from the treating physician in New Orleans very, very sobering.
If you haven't yet read it in the Covid 19 sub forum, you should.
 
I just found a couple N95s in my bathroom closet. Used. I wore them last year while helping a friend work on his sailboat. I think we were working with somewhat unfriendly chemicals. No clue why I didn't throw them away. I guess I'll spritz them with alcohol and use them.
 
Don’t actually know if any of this really matters. This is the most infective virus I’ve ever seen. Sadly I know why. Do be careful, but if you’re in the presence of anyone who has it your number is up. I am really worried about a lot of members on this board. I think 20 year olds can shrug this off. We older folks aren’t so fortunate. Isolation and social distancing are all you really have. The rest is a band aide on a sword wound.
 
steingar said:
Don’t actually know if any of this really matters. This is the most infective virus I’ve ever seen. Sadly I know why. Do be careful, but if you’re in the presence of anyone who has it your number is up. I am really worried about a lot of members on this board. I think 20 year olds can shrug this off. We older folks aren’t so fortunate. Isolation and social distancing are all you really have. The rest is a band aide on a sword wound.
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Dunno. If they're wearing a mask I'd say the odds are on your side if the proximity is of short duration. If you're wearing a mask it might help a little, but as Chip says the main purpose of a mask is to stop most of YOUR infected droplets from going into the air.

Without the tools to make a mask, most of us are dependent on commercial sources, and sad to say, commercial masks are pretty much unobtainium right now. The fallback is an old cloth tied around the face, definitely not as good, but about the best I'll be able to do.
 
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