"Masks don't work or aren't needed" propaganda is so absurd.
According to physics and common sense, anything you put between you and the cough-er is going to reduce the number of cough particles to reach you.
Anything will work with different effectiveness.
N95 > Surgical > Handkerchief > Covering your mouth with your hand.
CDC, US, and WHO are just so incompetent around this matter. If they didn't want N95 shortage, they could've told people to wear cotton washable masks. It was such a simple and effective solution that they couldn't think of.
Anecdote: I talked with a doctor with regards to this subject and mentioned that there were no gloves or masks available in the market. Without blinking he immediately suggested I just wrap a scarf around my mouth and nose.
It boggles the mind how some people prefer to suggest to just not use anything at all.
The WHO rationale on masks includes not emboldening people to go out in less than effective masks. Isolation is better at stopping the spread than slightly slowing the spread with masks.
It’s also worth noting that there isn’t a straightforward way to map particle blocking ratio of a mask to probability of becoming infected.
> CDC, US, and WHO are just so incompetent around this matter. If they didn't want N95 shortage, they could've told people to wear cotton washable masks. It was such a simple and effective solution that they couldn't think of.
The behavior of the CDC, WHO, and FDA during this crisis has long since passed incompetence and entered the territory of active malevolence. They're institutions at their most corrupted, driven more by the bureaucratic impulse towards self-sustenance than any connection to their ostensible mission. I hope we burn them to ground after this is over (I mean that metaphorically: more literally, we should dramatically reform them).
It's not clear that a scarf's effectiveness at blocking tiny particles makes it good at protecting the wearer from those particles.
Consider the case where you're on a flight with someone who's got COVID-19 and is coughing. The scarf blocks 50% of the particles a surgical mask would block. You then spend the rest of the flight breathing in and out through the scarf that blocked those particles. Does wearing the scarf lower your risk, leave it unchanged, or actually raise it?
I co-authored an evidence-based call to action for promoting simple DIY masks some time ago [1] and it got some good resonance from politicians.
Still, we don't see adoption of DIY masks in most countries so far, and I start to wonder what is holding back officials from promoting it.
Maybe the variability in quality of DIY masks made by individuals might be too large, and officials just have too strong of a resilience against such DIY solutions as to ever promote them? Perhaps a standardized design for cotton masks, not made by individuals but local businesses would be more acceptable for officials?
[1] https://link.medium.com/LY7RRNr2X4 "Promoting simple do-it-yourself masks: an urgent intervention for COVID-19 mitigation", Svara et al. 2020
You could seal your mouth with duct tape -- it won't change the fact that you are more likely to aquire SARS-CoV-2 through your eyes than through your mouth. Are you covering your eyes?
How do you correct misinformation when the guys at the top are wrong and social media's intent on shuting down information that disagrees with the guys at the top?
The amount of misinformation coming out of the WHO has been staggering and hard to account for, but I will stop short of suggesting any conspiracy.
* They held that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission for far too long in the face of evidence out of China.
* They claimed for far to long that if you weren't showing symptoms you weren't contagious. This advice has been very widely used to not quarantine people who were exposed to a person who got sick shortly after interactions... to devastating effect around the world.
* They claimed it does not spread through atomized particles, only droplets. This has been demonstrated to be false by experiment.
* They said masks are not effective.
* They said you didn't need to cover your eyes. Medical staff now wear full face shields.
* They said travel bans don't work. This defies basic logic.
* They delayed declaraing the pandemic to be a pandemic.
* They've been completely silent about ACE inhibitors and ARBs upregulating the expression of ACE2 receptors, and that available evidence strongly suggests that people on these medicines have much more severe reactions to the disease. WARNING: I cannot say whether these drugs are the cause -- it may well not be the case -- but shoudn't this have been seriously investigated by now?
> They said travel bans don't work. This defies basic logic.
> They delayed declaraing the pandemic to be a pandemic.
I have come to think that a major problem with the WHO might be that it is not independent enough from the political interests of major countries.
Banning non-essential travel from/to highly affected countries early would probably have helped to slow down global spread, but political opposition made that impossible.
The UK deputy chief medical officer was questioned on the UK deviating from WHO advice at a press conference.
She pointed out the W was for World and suggested they have a different focus. I thought it was a brilliant swerve. Accurate, but I suspect not the whole picture.
> but I will stop short of suggesting any conspiracy
But that's what you're doing.
> They held that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission for far too long in the face of evidence out of China
Possibly true. Any pointers to that?
> They claimed for far to long that if you weren't showing symptoms you weren't contagious
If you make these claims, provide refrences please. This is new to me.
> They've been completely silent about ACE inhibitors and ARBs upregulating the expression of ACE2 receptors, and that available evidence strongly suggests that people on these medicines have much more severe reactions to the disease
Provide a link. If you're going to post stuff that sounds relevant and important, post references to it.
After this huge list and today's farce of pretending to drop a call to avoid talking about China, I think we can safely ignore the WHO from here on out. They're either in China's pocket or don't know their head from a hole in the ground.
This mask thing is a strange phenomenon. I suppose it is similar to panic buying toilet paper - people just feel the need to do something and blame someone. In Australia, although there has been panic buying of toilet paper, nobody is talking much about masks, or the lack of strong recommendations to wear them. In the USA, this is apparently a major issue, and a source of suspicion and mistrust of the government and various healthcare bodies. I don't get the obsession with it.
As a public health intervention, social distancing is vastly more effective and deserving of emphasis than mask wearing. There aren't enough masks. Public health orgs were worried about running out of masks, which is exactly what has happened, and this is a huge problem for doctors and nurses who whinge about it a lot less than your random person on twitter decrying the apparent conspiracy to stop mask wearing.
The surgeon general's tweet (February 29) at the time was reasonable. On Feb 29 there were 66 cases in a country with 327 million people.
I always thought that was a simple fiction to stop selfish hoarders from giving themselves a (randomly chosen) 10% better chance of staying healthy as opposed to people who actually need a mask to have a 200% better chance of not developing life-threatening symptoms.
But of course, truth is more important than lives. Which will earn lots of anger from people who contributed to the mask shortage, but I don't care. I'm not saying I'm right about the previous paragraph, just that it's a simpler explanation based on basic human nature than some conspiracy theory.
What does Taiwan say? We should follow leaders like Taiwan: they were at huge risk, yet economy is running and schools open, their VP is an epidemiologist and he was minister of health during their SARS outbreak. Taiwan’s CDC says: “Prevention is the same as for other respiratory infections including washing hands frequently, wearing masks and cleaning up secretion from the mouth and nose appropriately. Other measures include avoiding crowded places such as markets or local hospitals, avoiding contact with animals and dead animals and avoiding eating raw meat or eggs. Additionally, you should wear masks and attend medical attention immediately when flu-like symptoms occur (such as body temperature ≧38℃, and coughing, etc)” - https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Category/QAPage/LnqBFJsulw6fW3nswc... and “Our guidelines and policy for wearing masks have not changed, but people should consider wearing a mask in enclosed crowded spaces with poor air ventilation,” Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, told a news conference in Taipei. People who must attend events in small crowded venues, where they would have frequent and close contact with other people, are advised to wear a mask, he said.”. Of course Taiwan also has many other layers of effective control against Covid: https://www.dw.com/en/taiwan-coronavirus/a-52724523 and a wired article too: https://www.wired.com/story/taiwan-is-beating-the-coronaviru...
Also i think it is significant that citizens commonly wear masks in the countries that are most successful at controlling the virus (and haven’t shut down their economies, Taiwan, Vietnam, SK, Singapore, Japan). It is a social stigma to not wear a mask in some places. However, although Japan looks like they have slowed the outbreak maybe they are just at the corner of the hockey stick. And in HK: “Dr. Pak-Leung Ho, head of Centre for infection at @hkumed ... highlighted universal mask-wearing as one of the reasons widespread outbreak didn't occur.” https://twitter.com/lwcalex/status/1235091542219448321
> Even experts who favor masking the masses say their impact on the spread of disease is likely to be modest. Many are also afraid to promote mask buying amid dire shortages at hospitals. But as the pandemic wears on, some public health experts think government messages discouraging mask wearing should shift.
> “It’s really a perfectly good public health intervention that’s not used,” argues KK Cheng, a public health expert at the University of Birmingham. “It’s not to protect yourself. It’s to protect people against the droplets coming out of your respiratory tract.”
So even this pro-mask article makes it sound to me like wearing a mask will not protect you from getting the virus. At best, they're effective at presenting people who don't know they're sick from infecting others. And that only works if you can mask a significant portion of the population without a shortage of masks for people who we know need them. That doesn't seem to be the case in the United States at present.
I don't see any particular reason to trust the opinion section of the Boston Globe over the US Surgeon General or the WHO, but that's just me. I'm even more hesitant about calling that claim a "flat out lie". As far as I can tell, these are just two people with a point of view, who don't link to a single study on the matter.
Seriously though, do you have any evidence that the consensus of the medical profession is that getting the general, non-sick population to wear masks is useful in combating the crisis? I'm open to the possibility that it is, but remain rather skeptical.
While true, the disease was being spread weeks or a full month ago by asymptomatic people who didn’t know they had it before quarantines were in place. And that’s when we had every major news source, including the NYT, telling people that masks aren’t effective and not to buy or wear them.
It is amazing how people naively believe in politician’s bullshit. The same is with “don’t hoard the food” with appearing articles about shortage of cheap workers in agricultural sector.
Next week a dude is coming to each flat in a complex with hundreds of flats to inspect pipes. There is pandemic outside, but it’s best time to inspect pieces. Politicians scream every day about pandemic and how one should stay at home. Maybe this pipe inspection might wait couple months!?
They're asking people not to hoard the food because of the impact it has on people who can't afford to buy a month's worth of groceries in advance.
If those privileged enough to be able to afford to hoard have cleaned out the supermarkets to an extent that the supermarkets' supply chain isn't designed for, the person shopping weekly is screwed.
You talk a lot about boosting your immune system. This is very hard to study because immune function is broad and complex so it's hard to measure and test any such claims. Therefore claims like these are widespread but often not backed up with good science.
The best way to boost your immune function is to be exposed to a pathogen. Then you will develop antibodies. Those antibodies boost your ability to avoid that pathogen. Vaccines work in a similar way. Of course this advice is currently useless in the context of COVID-19.
Specific foods and supplements might help here and there, but most of the evidence is that they are antimicrobial (antibiotic/antiviral/antifungal) in vitro. There's much less research in vivo. That's not to say that some foods won't help, but just not to rely on them having a significant effect in your body. The effect, if any, is probably very slight.
There is stronger evidence for a healthy lifestyle: regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, getting adequate sleep, avoiding infection, not smoking, minimizing stress. Some good evidence for sun exposure too.
Back on the foods though, you didn't mention black elderberry syrup (sambucus nigra). A 2004 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showed efficacy against influenza.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15080016
and a 2016 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showing it reduced the duration of the common cold (often a coronavirus): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848651/ And it's quite safe -- Europeans traditionally use it for pancake syrup.
[+] [-] ergocoder|6 years ago|reply
According to physics and common sense, anything you put between you and the cough-er is going to reduce the number of cough particles to reach you.
Anything will work with different effectiveness.
N95 > Surgical > Handkerchief > Covering your mouth with your hand.
CDC, US, and WHO are just so incompetent around this matter. If they didn't want N95 shortage, they could've told people to wear cotton washable masks. It was such a simple and effective solution that they couldn't think of.
Source: https://twitter.com/CMichaelGibson/status/123971835157384397... Scarf is ~50% effective relative to surgical masks. Though this is tested against influenza, it's still applicable to COVID
[+] [-] rumanator|6 years ago|reply
It boggles the mind how some people prefer to suggest to just not use anything at all.
[+] [-] jws|6 years ago|reply
It’s also worth noting that there isn’t a straightforward way to map particle blocking ratio of a mask to probability of becoming infected.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|6 years ago|reply
The behavior of the CDC, WHO, and FDA during this crisis has long since passed incompetence and entered the territory of active malevolence. They're institutions at their most corrupted, driven more by the bureaucratic impulse towards self-sustenance than any connection to their ostensible mission. I hope we burn them to ground after this is over (I mean that metaphorically: more literally, we should dramatically reform them).
[+] [-] strken|6 years ago|reply
Consider the case where you're on a flight with someone who's got COVID-19 and is coughing. The scarf blocks 50% of the particles a surgical mask would block. You then spend the rest of the flight breathing in and out through the scarf that blocked those particles. Does wearing the scarf lower your risk, leave it unchanged, or actually raise it?
[+] [-] msamwald|6 years ago|reply
Still, we don't see adoption of DIY masks in most countries so far, and I start to wonder what is holding back officials from promoting it. Maybe the variability in quality of DIY masks made by individuals might be too large, and officials just have too strong of a resilience against such DIY solutions as to ever promote them? Perhaps a standardized design for cotton masks, not made by individuals but local businesses would be more acceptable for officials?
[1] https://link.medium.com/LY7RRNr2X4 "Promoting simple do-it-yourself masks: an urgent intervention for COVID-19 mitigation", Svara et al. 2020
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] masonic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mikedilger|6 years ago|reply
The amount of misinformation coming out of the WHO has been staggering and hard to account for, but I will stop short of suggesting any conspiracy.
* They held that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission for far too long in the face of evidence out of China.
* They claimed for far to long that if you weren't showing symptoms you weren't contagious. This advice has been very widely used to not quarantine people who were exposed to a person who got sick shortly after interactions... to devastating effect around the world.
* They claimed it does not spread through atomized particles, only droplets. This has been demonstrated to be false by experiment.
* They said masks are not effective.
* They said you didn't need to cover your eyes. Medical staff now wear full face shields.
* They said travel bans don't work. This defies basic logic.
* They delayed declaraing the pandemic to be a pandemic.
* They've been completely silent about ACE inhibitors and ARBs upregulating the expression of ACE2 receptors, and that available evidence strongly suggests that people on these medicines have much more severe reactions to the disease. WARNING: I cannot say whether these drugs are the cause -- it may well not be the case -- but shoudn't this have been seriously investigated by now?
[+] [-] msamwald|6 years ago|reply
> They delayed declaraing the pandemic to be a pandemic.
I have come to think that a major problem with the WHO might be that it is not independent enough from the political interests of major countries.
Banning non-essential travel from/to highly affected countries early would probably have helped to slow down global spread, but political opposition made that impossible.
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
Do you have a link on this for further reading?
[+] [-] cs02rm0|6 years ago|reply
She pointed out the W was for World and suggested they have a different focus. I thought it was a brilliant swerve. Accurate, but I suspect not the whole picture.
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|6 years ago|reply
But that's what you're doing.
> They held that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission for far too long in the face of evidence out of China
Possibly true. Any pointers to that?
> They claimed for far to long that if you weren't showing symptoms you weren't contagious
If you make these claims, provide refrences please. This is new to me.
> They've been completely silent about ACE inhibitors and ARBs upregulating the expression of ACE2 receptors, and that available evidence strongly suggests that people on these medicines have much more severe reactions to the disease
Provide a link. If you're going to post stuff that sounds relevant and important, post references to it.
[+] [-] rriepe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameldrv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvturner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|6 years ago|reply
As a public health intervention, social distancing is vastly more effective and deserving of emphasis than mask wearing. There aren't enough masks. Public health orgs were worried about running out of masks, which is exactly what has happened, and this is a huge problem for doctors and nurses who whinge about it a lot less than your random person on twitter decrying the apparent conspiracy to stop mask wearing.
The surgeon general's tweet (February 29) at the time was reasonable. On Feb 29 there were 66 cases in a country with 327 million people.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] l0b0|6 years ago|reply
But of course, truth is more important than lives. Which will earn lots of anger from people who contributed to the mask shortage, but I don't care. I'm not saying I'm right about the previous paragraph, just that it's a simpler explanation based on basic human nature than some conspiracy theory.
[+] [-] robocat|6 years ago|reply
What does Taiwan say? We should follow leaders like Taiwan: they were at huge risk, yet economy is running and schools open, their VP is an epidemiologist and he was minister of health during their SARS outbreak. Taiwan’s CDC says: “Prevention is the same as for other respiratory infections including washing hands frequently, wearing masks and cleaning up secretion from the mouth and nose appropriately. Other measures include avoiding crowded places such as markets or local hospitals, avoiding contact with animals and dead animals and avoiding eating raw meat or eggs. Additionally, you should wear masks and attend medical attention immediately when flu-like symptoms occur (such as body temperature ≧38℃, and coughing, etc)” - https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Category/QAPage/LnqBFJsulw6fW3nswc... and “Our guidelines and policy for wearing masks have not changed, but people should consider wearing a mask in enclosed crowded spaces with poor air ventilation,” Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, told a news conference in Taipei. People who must attend events in small crowded venues, where they would have frequent and close contact with other people, are advised to wear a mask, he said.”. Of course Taiwan also has many other layers of effective control against Covid: https://www.dw.com/en/taiwan-coronavirus/a-52724523 and a wired article too: https://www.wired.com/story/taiwan-is-beating-the-coronaviru...
Also i think it is significant that citizens commonly wear masks in the countries that are most successful at controlling the virus (and haven’t shut down their economies, Taiwan, Vietnam, SK, Singapore, Japan). It is a social stigma to not wear a mask in some places. However, although Japan looks like they have slowed the outbreak maybe they are just at the corner of the hockey stick. And in HK: “Dr. Pak-Leung Ho, head of Centre for infection at @hkumed ... highlighted universal mask-wearing as one of the reasons widespread outbreak didn't occur.” https://twitter.com/lwcalex/status/1235091542219448321
There is a huge back-pressure against wearing masks in western countries, which leads to an environment of glib advice against them. I know this isn’t a very scientific issue, but I think it matters. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... and “Why some countries wear face masks and others don't” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52015486
Finally, here is a sciency article “Would everyone wearing face masks help us slow the pandemic?”: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/would-everyone-weari...
[+] [-] bscphil|6 years ago|reply
> Even experts who favor masking the masses say their impact on the spread of disease is likely to be modest. Many are also afraid to promote mask buying amid dire shortages at hospitals. But as the pandemic wears on, some public health experts think government messages discouraging mask wearing should shift.
> “It’s really a perfectly good public health intervention that’s not used,” argues KK Cheng, a public health expert at the University of Birmingham. “It’s not to protect yourself. It’s to protect people against the droplets coming out of your respiratory tract.”
So even this pro-mask article makes it sound to me like wearing a mask will not protect you from getting the virus. At best, they're effective at presenting people who don't know they're sick from infecting others. And that only works if you can mask a significant portion of the population without a shortage of masks for people who we know need them. That doesn't seem to be the case in the United States at present.
[+] [-] blankvideo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] factsaresacred|6 years ago|reply
A flat out lie from the leading spokesperson on matters of public health.
All of the hand-wringing about foreign misinformation. But what if the misinformation is coming from within the house?
[+] [-] bscphil|6 years ago|reply
Seriously though, do you have any evidence that the consensus of the medical profession is that getting the general, non-sick population to wear masks is useful in combating the crisis? I'm open to the possibility that it is, but remain rather skeptical.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeffrallen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilkn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackrock|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mam2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mam2|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lnsru|6 years ago|reply
It is amazing how people naively believe in politician’s bullshit. The same is with “don’t hoard the food” with appearing articles about shortage of cheap workers in agricultural sector.
Next week a dude is coming to each flat in a complex with hundreds of flats to inspect pipes. There is pandemic outside, but it’s best time to inspect pieces. Politicians scream every day about pandemic and how one should stay at home. Maybe this pipe inspection might wait couple months!?
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
If those privileged enough to be able to afford to hoard have cleaned out the supermarkets to an extent that the supermarkets' supply chain isn't designed for, the person shopping weekly is screwed.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
[+] [-] rumanator|6 years ago|reply
Hoarding food increases demand, thus exacerbates potential food shortages.
[+] [-] goldenkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedilger|6 years ago|reply
The best way to boost your immune function is to be exposed to a pathogen. Then you will develop antibodies. Those antibodies boost your ability to avoid that pathogen. Vaccines work in a similar way. Of course this advice is currently useless in the context of COVID-19.
Specific foods and supplements might help here and there, but most of the evidence is that they are antimicrobial (antibiotic/antiviral/antifungal) in vitro. There's much less research in vivo. That's not to say that some foods won't help, but just not to rely on them having a significant effect in your body. The effect, if any, is probably very slight.
There is stronger evidence for a healthy lifestyle: regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, getting adequate sleep, avoiding infection, not smoking, minimizing stress. Some good evidence for sun exposure too.
Back on the foods though, you didn't mention black elderberry syrup (sambucus nigra). A 2004 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showed efficacy against influenza.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15080016 and a 2016 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showing it reduced the duration of the common cold (often a coronavirus): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848651/ And it's quite safe -- Europeans traditionally use it for pancake syrup.