200 Scientists Say WHO Ignores the Risk That Coronavirus 'Aerosols' Float in the Air (msn.com) 250
"Six months into a pandemic that has killed over half a million people, more than 200 scientists from around the world are challenging the official view of how the coronavirus spreads," reports the Los Angeles Times:
The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that you have to worry about only two types of transmission: inhaling respiratory droplets from an infected person in your immediate vicinity or — less common — touching a contaminated surface and then your eyes, nose or mouth.
But other experts contend that the guidance ignores growing evidence that a third pathway also plays a significant role in contagion.
They say multiple studies demonstrate that particles known as aerosols — microscopic versions of standard respiratory droplets — can hang in the air for long periods and float dozens of feet, making poorly ventilated rooms, buses and other confined spaces dangerous, even when people stay six feet from one another. "We are 100% sure about this," said Lidia Morawska, a professor of atmospheric sciences and environmental engineering at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She makes the case in an open letter to the WHO accusing the United Nations agency of failing to issue appropriate warnings about the risk. A total of 239 researchers from 32 countries signed the letter, which is set to be published next week in a scientific journal.
In interviews, experts said that aerosol transmission appears to be the only way to explain several "super-spreading" events, including the infection of diners at a restaurant in China who sat at separate tables and of choir members in Washington state who took precautions during a rehearsal... The proponents of aerosol transmission said masks worn correctly would help prevent the escape of exhaled aerosols as well as inhalation of the microscopic particles. But they said the spread could also be reduced by improving ventilation and zapping indoor air with ultraviolet light in ceiling units.
The Times also got a response from Dr. Benedetta Allegranzi, a top WHO expert on infection prevention and control, who argued the group only presented theories based on experiments rather than actual evidence from the field.
Allegranzi also added that in weekly teleconferences, a large majority of a group of more than 30 international experts advising the WHO had "not judged the existing evidence sufficiently convincing to consider airborne transmission as having an important role in COVID-19 spread."
But other experts contend that the guidance ignores growing evidence that a third pathway also plays a significant role in contagion.
They say multiple studies demonstrate that particles known as aerosols — microscopic versions of standard respiratory droplets — can hang in the air for long periods and float dozens of feet, making poorly ventilated rooms, buses and other confined spaces dangerous, even when people stay six feet from one another. "We are 100% sure about this," said Lidia Morawska, a professor of atmospheric sciences and environmental engineering at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She makes the case in an open letter to the WHO accusing the United Nations agency of failing to issue appropriate warnings about the risk. A total of 239 researchers from 32 countries signed the letter, which is set to be published next week in a scientific journal.
In interviews, experts said that aerosol transmission appears to be the only way to explain several "super-spreading" events, including the infection of diners at a restaurant in China who sat at separate tables and of choir members in Washington state who took precautions during a rehearsal... The proponents of aerosol transmission said masks worn correctly would help prevent the escape of exhaled aerosols as well as inhalation of the microscopic particles. But they said the spread could also be reduced by improving ventilation and zapping indoor air with ultraviolet light in ceiling units.
The Times also got a response from Dr. Benedetta Allegranzi, a top WHO expert on infection prevention and control, who argued the group only presented theories based on experiments rather than actual evidence from the field.
Allegranzi also added that in weekly teleconferences, a large majority of a group of more than 30 international experts advising the WHO had "not judged the existing evidence sufficiently convincing to consider airborne transmission as having an important role in COVID-19 spread."
So Politized it Hurts (Score:2, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Push a leftist political cause, and you'll be granted a Get Out of Scorn Free card as both the press and medical profession will refuse to speak out against anything you do. How is the public supposed to take your policy or policy recommendations
Re:So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
Over a thousand health officials signed an open letter refusing to warn the public against the riots and protests, in which they explicitly cite their personal politics, including how it overrides their professional judgedment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Push a leftist political cause, and you'll be granted a Get Out of Scorn Free card as both the press and medical profession will refuse to speak out against anything you do. How is the public supposed to take your policy or policy recommendations seriously, after they've seen that?
They don't. This is why we are having such a problem with the response in the US.
Everyone lies, the media is so biased that everything counts as an opinion piece. Fact based reporting is so rare these days it might as well be a unicorn or some other fabled beast.
as a country we have several problems, the first being the ability to get honest and unbiased reporting. Without that it is impossible to make good decisions regarding how we want our republic to run.
and the WHO messed up, who knew! Hold on, everyone knows,,,
Re: So Politized it Hurts (Score:2, Insightful)
Anecdote: I briefly dated this journalist major in college. Why did she want to be a journalist? Her answer and I quote, "Because I want to change the world".
Sigh...
Re: So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's entirely possible as a journalist without lying or distorting. Journalists are the ones that typically uncover corruption and bring it to light, not the government bodies who are supposed to do that.
Re:So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
Also compare the number of total deaths for the fiscal two quarters of 2020 against last years 2019 counts. With all this Covid scaremongering the you would expect this years numbers to be significantly higher than last year and that is not the case.
Actually, you would expect this year's numbers to be significantly lower. People stopped leaving the house. They stopped driving. They stopped doing things outdoors. They stopped doing all the sorts of activities that have significant injury risk. And in place of all of those deaths, you got only the deaths from this one virus. That's a *lot* of excess death being masked by drops in other areas.
And even if you ignore that masking, there is still a much higher death rate [cdc.gov] than expected from March through June, with the peak excess being in the week of April 11. That week, there were almost 21,000 more deaths than you would normally expect, or almost 40% more than expected.
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Two things on masked deaths: 1) Some large percentage of deaths happen within a small radius of the home; I can see those going up as reduced work and social loads leave more time to experiment with dangerous home improvement tasks. 2) Liquor stores never closed, but AA (and much of the rest of mental healthcare) has been out of business for months. Plenty of ways to kill yourself at home, all at once on purpose or slowly out of self-neglect, just because you haven't heard a friendly voice in 4 months.
Re:So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Informative)
Over a thousand health officials signed an open letter refusing to warn the public against the riots and protests, in which they explicitly cite their personal politics, including how it overrides their professional judgedment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
First things first, if you're going to cite a source don't link a 10 minute rant from a wannabe pundit on YouTube, instead try to find a proper article [www.cbc.ca].
Second, black people in the US have pretty horrid health outcomes. And if you think that the protests can reduce the cause of those bad healthcomes then there is a significant public health benefit.
Push a leftist political cause, and you'll be granted a Get Out of Scorn Free card as both the press and medical profession will refuse to speak out against anything you do. How is the public supposed to take your policy or policy recommendations seriously, after they've seen that?
Third, protesters did try to adhere to social distancing guidelines including masks, even when the police seized those masks [huffingtonpost.ca].
Finally, it's been long know that it's indoors groups that are the main source of COVID-19 transmission and the risk is significantly lessened outside. I mean that's the entire point of this article. And to my knowledge, no one has traced any real COVID-19 outbreaks to the #BLM protests, so those thousand health experts (not officials) seem to have made the right call.
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Around here contact tracing traces contacts, even if they were at protests. New cases are still down to a dozen or 2 a day and our biggest problem seems to be Americans ignoring the quarantine rules and acting like tourists.
The right to protest is a pretty important right, which is why the protests were allowed here, along with the protests being outside and practicing social distancing.
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Here (BC), they were mostly social distancing while protesting as that was the governments advice, "go out and protest, just do it safely". The virus is still mostly under control here, largely due to contact tracing and the current surge up to 24 cases in a day is mostly due to the reopening, for example a strip bar not following guidelines was a source of an outbreak.
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Why silly? Contact in this instance is physical separation not a Bacon number. Doesn't matter if you're familiar with the person next to you as long as your relative location (space and time) is known, e.g. via cell phone or, less accurately, via a report to a contact tracer.
Citation? Difficult technically, legally, competently or some combina
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No one has contact traced to protests because contact tracers were specifically forbidden from asking if anyone was at a protest.
The result of not finding protester infection rates is a predetermined politically driven no brainer.
Well people Way Smarter Than You do know how to ask these questions anyway [nber.org] and no one found an outbreak.
And because enough people know this stuff, and how China owns the lying WHO and how the CDC lied
Just skipping over the random unrelated right wing talking points...
And how they get told church is bad (even outside) but protests magically don't spread virus because "reasons"
I'm not a biologist or epidemiologist but the two big issues you hear about for transmission are indoor settings and sustained proximity, and the biggest risk factor is age.
Indoor church services are 3/3 (church goes tend to be older) so a definite no-no.
Now, I don't know of the current state of restrictions on outdoor church service in m
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Is there any evidence that China has lied about Covid cases more than, for example, Florida?
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Please stop lying if you wish to get listened to. Here in Seattle they set up a free testing site at the CHOP specifically to get good coverage of the protesters - after thousands of tests it turns out their infection rate is around 1% which is what we'd expect to see if we tested members of the general public in the city. This is of course much lower than the 6% positive rate among people tested in the county, but that number skews toward people seeking medical help.
When you're outside and everybody is wea
Outdoor protests were relatively safe (Score:5, Informative)
And it's safe to say they were at least wearing masks, what with all the tear gas...
As for "pushing a leftist cause", well, the right wing President just held 3 large rallies and he and his party actively encouraged protests against mask wearing and stay at home orders. Then there's this thing right here [cnn.com] and also this one [theguardian.com] where the right wing one thanks to open threats of violence.
So, the "leftist cause" overwhelmingly responsibly protested and did so peaceably. Meanwhile on the right wing the protestors were literally protesting for the right to be irresponsible, were encouraged by the highest politicians and leaders on their side and get violent when there is a serious chance of losing.
And before you ask, no, looters != protestors. The looting stopped around day 3. The protests are _still_ going on today. The media stopped covering them as soon as the looting stopped. Almost like the media doesn't really want police reform.
The funniest thing is that the protestors are protesting against the Police State. Shouldn't the right wing be on their side?
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The looting stopped around day 3.
Oh come on, that's not true at all. And if you include vandals, they have gone along with every protest around these parts.
By "vandals" you mean folks painting BLM signs (Score:2)
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Most of them are doing it on their own property.
No lol
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OK, listen to Dr Bonnie Henry. Especially the "Be kind" part of her advice.
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I'm decidedly not a leftist and I think protestors which block traffic or break noise regulations should be arrested and/or fined (it's pretty much impossible to do a mass protest legally, that's why in most civilized countries you need a license for a mass protest).
That said, the evidence for outside infection being negligible is even stronger than the evidence for the WHO to be completely unscientific with it's droplet theory.
Just let the left and right march, as long as they do it outside it won't affect
Re:So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is protesting against systemic racism a leftist cause? Surely you're not saying those on the right like racism? Though Trump for some bizarre reason seems to think that confederate generals are "heroes", but he's a buffoon so those on right or left should be ignoring him anyway.
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leftist[sic]
Allow me to sing you my cover of the chorus to a popular kpop song by AoA.
~ Derp derp derp derp derp derp.
Derp derp derp derp derp.
Derp derp derp derp derp derp derp derp,
derp derp derp. ~
https://youtu.be/4Xm6AkQ7Uk4 [youtu.be]
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Re:So Politized it Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
Covid-19 right now is booming, it's not dropping down by any measure at all. This is not politics, it's science and statistics. There is a guy who wants to keep making it all political because he knows a bad economy may hurt his election chances, but his claims that it's fake is encouraging people to go out and cluster in unsafe conditions. We could go back to the stores and start up businesses, if we were responsible about it and not deciding what we need are some giant raves, giant rallies, giant protests. Go out, wear a mask, keep your distance from others as much as you can, it's not that freaking hard.
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While the lowest risk is to stay home, so far there are zero cases of Covid-19 linked back to protests. Protest are outdoors, the protestors largely wear masks, and as a result aren't high risk - much safer than eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, or singing in church, certainly. The increases in Covid spread so far aren't linked to protests ( https://www.medpagetoday.com/i... [medpagetoday.com] and https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com] for example) - note that the data sources aren't protestors or politicians, they are stat
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Right now, Santa Clara County (ie, silicon valley) is having a huge surge. And it was shut down even before California was. However in my experience going to stores is that many people are not wearing the masks. I haven't been out since masks were made mandatory but I will later today to restock the fridge, and I expect some people outside will be standing in line without the masks.
There's also a boom due to younger people getting infected, because many of them went out and partied (not just US, it's nut
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It has stopped going down three weeks ago. Have fun with the second wave.
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It is much more contagious than influenza, though, so even if the same percentage of people died, you would still have O(100) times more deaths in the same time period.
Also, the influenza CFRs are based on a disease where most sick people don't bother to get tested. Right now, with coronavirus, I suspect that a much higher percentage of sick people try to get tested. That difference means that the flu CFR is likely to be overestimated in comparison with the COVID-19 CFR.
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The spike just started the last couple of weeks. The deaths come after that. Yes, many of the cases are due to young people, but they're not immune to death either, and not immune to passing it on. Also, the stats aren't showing what's in between having been diagnosed and death, such as those who are hospitalized by having serious symptoms. I predict a boost in death rates sometime this week, but if I'm wrong then that would be great and I'll be cheering.
Yes, covid-19 is still a big deal and should not b
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But deaths did not lag cases by two weeks in this: https://i.ibb.co/2sYsyHt/COVID... [i.ibb.co] whether you look at the 7 day average line of the binned data.
Why do you think that is? The shape of the graphs more or less match up, offset by no more than a few days (less than a week) from March through mid-May. After that, deaths continue to decline while cases flatten, then spike up after mid-June. If dea
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For example take the infection rates and death rates in Florida, Texas, or California. There's not such a clear downwards trend for deaths. In both Florida and Texas there's an upwards trend. California holds about steady, but since the number of new cases have been going up we can expect more deaths as well in the future.
All while in other states like New York or New Jersey, that were initially hit pretty hard a
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It wasn't "noted" anywhere - you made the claim, unsupported by any evidence, repeatedly. That doesn't make it true.
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Could you cite where the Boston clinics that collected the data that I cited were prevented from collecting the data they released? Thanks.
Avoid going into anywhere other than home base (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Avoid going into anywhere other than home base (Score:4, Interesting)
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Orange Man Bad. We get it. LOL.
I really don't think you people have actually gotten it through your heads that he is bad yet.
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Not just bad. Evil, petty, lying piece of shit who doesn't care about anything but himself. But do I get why he has so many fans - birds of feather. I just wish they would stop pretending that they stand for morals and values.
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Orange Man Bad. We get it. LOL.
I really don't think you people have actually gotten it through your heads that he is bad yet.
Saw the following reply under this video clip [twitter.com] of Trump struggling to say "totalitarianism" in his 4th of July hate speech:
And the rocket's red glare!
Covid flowing through the air
Gave proof to the right
That their leader wasn’t very bright
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You're confusing different numbers.
In the US, odds of dying if you're a confirmed case is about 6%.
But about half of the people with Covid don't show symptoms, though they are infectious and spreading Covid to others. And in the US, those people aren't tested for - all the testing is focused on people suspected of being infected (symptomatic) or politically well connected (white house staff, Congress, athletes), not the general public. So we are certainly testing, or confirming, many Covid cases. So perhaps
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Not just the WHO but most political leaders in most countries have done a dismal job of learning how the virus spreads and preventing that spread with public information bulletins.
It's so simple not to catch this virus: you don't breath in the air of other people and wash your hands and keep relevant surfaces clean as possible.
Isolation, distancing, masks, testing, tracing, quarantine. We know exactly how to stop a person from catching the virus from another person but half the world seems to be in complete
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Not a surprise considering their arguments from ignorance: "There is no/poor/unconvincing evidence of X, therefore it's not X".
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Errr. The WHO can't attempt anything. They are an advisory organisation that makes recommendations *retrospectively* based on official published data from governments and science journals *only*.
If this virus has demonstrated one thing conclusively it's that a large portion of the population don't have a clue what the WHO is, what it does, or that they operate they way they do because the UN of which the USA is a member wrote that in their charter.
WHO could have attempted a quarantine, but instead, advocated against it.
You want the WHO to *recommend* a quarantine, you have to ge
Re: I don't think they're behind the curve (Score:3, Informative)
1) the US was never elected "leader" of anything, whatever that even means
2) every president has the right to ask for resignations or flat out fire everyone appointed by the previous administration. This is in fact the standard. Most of them will tender their resignations on day one of a new president coming in to office to allow the potus the opportunity to put their own people in. Every president has done this. Trump has actually kept a fuck ton more of Obama people than previous presidents did of the
Re: I don't think they're behind the curve (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that Trump fired people, but that he fired experienced professionals and replaced them with incompetent sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. And he wiped out entire teams and departments, such as the pandemic response team, destroying their needed expertise and procedures that had kept the country safe, thus putting America at more risk.
Slashdot, please RTFA before you post (Score:5, Informative)
If you actually read the link, it says that the families who received a COVID infection were seated at the same time at tables one metre away from the COVID-infected family/individual. "we concluded that the most likely cause of this outbreak was droplet transmission", it says - not "aerosol transmission".
Re:Slashdot, please RTFA before you post (Score:5, Insightful)
Technical distinctions like the one between "droplets" and "aerosol" (aka "airborne") really trip up the popular media, but without getting them right you can't even understand what the controversy actually is.
The real issue here is not whether aerosol transmission *can* occur, the question is *how significant a risk does it pose in ordinary circumstances*? There's plenty of evidence that says what a layman would call "airborne" transmission is a practical concern, but if you look into those events the evidence doesn't preclude transmission by small droplets that remain in the air for ten or fifteen minutes. That's not technically "airborne".
That's not just an academic distinction. If true aerosol transmission is a serious practical concern, there's simply no way to protect people sharing an indoor area with an unmasked person, no matter how you space them out how many plastic shields you put up. Simply walking through a room an infected person might recently have been in is something to avoid.
Sometimes science can't give a clear answer to a question yet, but the public needs guidance *right now*. In that case public health officials have to take a precautionary stance, but it's not always clear what that would be. If you ask too much of the public, many will choose to do nothing.
"Aerosolized" is not "Airborne" (Score:2)
I've noted this here: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Highly likely (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Germany, many of the super spreading events happened in confined environments with bad air circulation (e.g. a carnival session, a meat processing facility where the cool air seems to have contributed, and several church and choir incidents).
I would take the aerosol theory very seriously.
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Here in Germany, many of the super spreading events happened in confined environments with bad air circulation
Yes, that's true eveywhere.
I would take the aerosol theory very seriously.
Everyone already knows that minuscule droplets can spread Covid. But you're talking about environments where larger, non-aerosol droplets can easily be spread between people by air currents. If spread in the worst environments lends credence to the aerosol theory in your mind, it's because you're not thinking.
What we really want to know, and still don't know, is whether Covid can be transmitted in evaporated droplets, or on dust particles — that is to say, what epidemiologis
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There's a huge middle ground between completely evaporated viral particles which can float indefinitely and >5 micron droplets which can float seconds.
For every couple of seconds more they stay infectious and airborne you have to add a couple extra feet ... it adds up to orders of magnitude more than 6 feet long before you reach full evaporation.
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For every couple of seconds more they stay infectious and airborne you have to add a couple extra feet ... it adds up to orders of magnitude more than 6 feet long before you reach full evaporation.
That may be. Six feet has always been bullshit. It's not true even outside, so it's not true inside either (where there is less UV.) The endless declarations that we should remain "at least six feet apart" are surely doing more harm than good by convincing people that the benefit of distancing ends at six feet.
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How do you expect to achieve herd immunity with everyone hiding under their beds?
With a vaccine. That way you don't have to kill a percentage of the population to get immunity.
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The vaccine is a guess about which strain may take off
We already know which strains have taken off. It's past tense.
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The flu mutates rapidly, and it takes time to produce flu shots, so they have to guess which strains will emerge as threats in a given year and produce them. So there are flu vaccines and they work well against the strains that are used to develop it, but they might not work in a given year if different strains emerge. So it's not that the vaccines don't work, but that the disease is a moving target.
For Covid-19, if it's more stable, then a vaccine would work.
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Uh... no.
Herd immunity is the response to the strain that took off in a given city or country. But if the vaccine doesn't work in one country because the virus that is spreading now is too different from the one that was spreading when the sample was taken to produce the vaccine, then it's just a matter of a few extra months before it has mutated too much from whatever strain took off in that city/country, and you're back to square one, give or take.
Of course, immunity is not binary. A similar strain can
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There are flu vaccines that work quite well against the specific strains of flu they are developed for. The problem is that the flu mutates rapidly, and immunity to one strain yeilds no defence against the many other strains, so people who get the flu and recover, or who are vaccinated against a set of strains a given year, have no protection at all against other strains that may emerge, so people can get the flu repeatedly.
Some other diseases don't mutate that rapidly, so (for example) getting the measles
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The cases have dropped, and fatality rate dropped, because almost every country has used testing, tracing and quarantines effectively to prevent Covid from spreading. That's the opposite of herd immunity. Even the UK, which started out talking about herd immunity was forced by their medical professionals to change course, because they realized that the cost in human lives for letting everyone get infected was too high to be acceptable. It's really only the US and a few other misguided countries still headin
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The very red, very southern state of Louisiana would be surprised to hear you call them Democrats.
Also, with the exception of Louisiana being on the list and Ohio and Florida not being on that list, the top 12 or so are almost a perfect (but slightly out of order) match for states sorted by population density [wikipedia.org]. Guess what coronavirus cases are strongly correlated with?
Does anyone know? (Score:3, Interesting)
- The WHO Director's wife has ownership of a hospital in China?
We may not be able to do much about China... but I want the WHO's director relieved of duties (not resigned).
CO2 as the canary (Score:5, Informative)
Buy a CO2 meter, around 400 to 500ppm - fresh air, at 1000ppm stale air been breathed in and out a fair bit - and perhaps a good few virus particles in it.
Thing is, social distancing won't work indoors if you spend hours in a room with an infected person, 1m or 2m won't mean much if there's not very good fresh ventilation.
1000ppm and above CO2 is also kind of bad for your brain, makes you a bit stupid.
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400ppm-ish CO2 is the norm these days, 1000ppm is over double that, 1000ppm outside globally would be devastating. Indoors we breath out CO2 and it can get to 1000ppm to 2000ppm inside easily, not dangerous but it literally will make you dumber the higher it gets, cogitative function is impaired, IQ goes down, creative intelligence is less. If you're taking any kind of non-physical test, open a window if you can!
Wear the fucking masks! (Score:5, Insightful)
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It can be defeated with a piece of cloth covering your mouth and nose. WEAR A MASK. It's simple, it's cheap, it works.
I mostly agree.
Unfortunately, cloth masks mostly protect OTHER PEOPLE and not the wearer. So pretty much everybody has to wear them, pretty much all the time they're in public, for them to work well enough to extinguish the pandemic.
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Wear the fucking masks!
Make me (thats right you cant). When emergency powers are over, not even the president of the USA can make me wear a mask. I wear it into Walmart because they wont let me in without one and I need to buy food. I guarantee 100% that if Trump came out with a mandatory mask order people on the left would be 100% against masks and be suing the government into Venezuela. BOTH sides say "its not partisanship" but in the USA EVERYTHING is partisan.
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These idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a respiratory disease, first and foremost. To not think of aerosolized spread is the dumbest thing ever, to dismiss it even more so.
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This crap about "no one trusts the media" is bullshit and you know it
You're full of shit and you definitely know it too.
Re:It does make sense (Score:5, Informative)
If you can transmit a virus to someone else because a droplet of your spit falls on them, it only makes sense for you to be able to transmit a virus through aeroslization of your breath.
The big scientific issue that is yet undetermined for aerosols is that the simple existence of viral material is not sufficient to determine the probability of infection. What is the viral load for those aerosols? How does viral density decrease over time and under different environmental conditions? What is the probability that a sufficient viral load will be inhaled to cause an infection? What is the probability of inhaling that critical viral load under various mitigating conditions, including wearing a mask, proximity, wind and ventilation, etc.?
Yes, aerosols containing SARS-CoV-2 can hover in the air. That's a simple empirical fact. However, that's just the simple start to understanding the infectiousness of those aerosols. Such studies should not be ignored, but they should also not sound the alarm without further investigation.
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Not this bogus stat again. To properly compare different populations sizes and different durations, you have to normalize by population and time period. Otherwise I could claim "this virus is nothing because only 23 people in my town have died to it in 4 months, while the flu killed about half a million people worldwide last year."
Current U.S. population: 328 million
Number of Americans
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Congratulations, you managed to disprove something nobody claimed. They pointed out, correctly, that the total number of dead Americans from Covid-19 is greater than the total number of dead Americans from WWI. Making up your own question and proving that what you made up was wrong doesn't mean much.
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The "don't trust the media" line seems very strong with those who are trying to push their own media outlets that are notorious for outright distortion and lies. Breitbart, OANN, etc. They think the mainstream media is lying because the mainstream media doesn't report on the conspiracy theories that the fringe outlets do.
Yes, there's bias all over, so what? Learn to identify bias. But bias is not the same thing as lying or covering up stories, bias means you just focus on certain types of stories. Also
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CNN conveniently has ignored Tara Reade's credible allegations - with multiple corroborating, contemporaneous witnesses - against Joe Biden. But CNN? Silence. You want to know why intelligent, rational people don't trust the media? Look no further than that.
That is right. CNN is the only news outlet in the World. I do not get this obsession with CNN - I do not waste my time with television news: especailly cable news garbage.
Of course, what is never mentioned by people who distrust the media is that Fox News [foxnews.com] blows the doors off all the other networks and the highest rated shows are on Fox News [adweek.com].
And those viewers of those shows are not uninformed, they are misinformed. [alternet.org]. The fast is that Fox News - the number one cable new channel attracts an audience that only
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The biggest issue I have with Fox is that they so believe in the mainstream is biased to the left that they actively engage in skewing to the right in all their stories, and they can't separate their editorials from their stories. Meanwhile the "leftist" biased media are trying to be fair and balanced, presenting two sides of a story even when it's foolish to do so. Fox is all about the profit, they know their base wants to hear a certain skew and bias and they feed that demand.
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In Boston, 3 weeks after the protests, protestors were testing at 1.3% [bostonglobe.com] which was lower than the general population. The protests were entirely in compliance with current medical recommendation— when outdoors, use a mask when it will be difficult to socially distance. It would be difficult to socially distance and there was excellent mask compliance. Better luck next troll, AC. You lose. [youtube.com]
Re: REEEÈEEEEEEEEEE!111 (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though people doing contact tracing were not allowed to ask if people were at protests?
If you don't ask people if they were at protests then you won't get "was at protest" in your statistics.
Garbage in, garbage out. The virus doesn't give a shit about anyone's political views.
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The contact-tracing would give us fine-grained detail - I was hoping for the percentage that were infected if they just marched and kept moving, versus those who ended the march by crowding up in front of a podium, standing still for an hour or more.
But there's hardly any such data to gather, because the gross numbers are that nobody saw a significant bump in infections, despite large protests. That goes all around the world, not just the States.
I missed the march, but took many photographs of the crowd at
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Oh, and the same blog has a post about how the Tulsa Rally ALSO did not show a significant case-increase in the Tulsa county, a "story" that the entire press apparently missed, leaving my blog with its three readers with the, umm, scoop.
http://brander.ca/c19#tulsaok [brander.ca]
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There were so few people at the Tulsa Rally it's not really surprising.
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"I counter the validity of YOUR statistics with the invalidity of the means used to gather different statistics! CHECKMATE!"
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attended any large gatherings of people, and they could make a note if the people told them yes
because rioters will certainly tell the truth.
Re: REEEÈEEEEEEEEEE!111 (Score:2)
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Could you point out the technicality of their being technically correct? Or how an opinion could be correct, to begin with? You know, there are whole books that give precise definitions to words so when you speak and write you don't end up looking like an uneducated fucking slob, right?
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Never gonna happen. This site is full of fucking alt-right nazis slobs. Trainwreck.
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Just an FYI, none of the studies performed at the LHC were double-blind, either.
Noting that protons are highly susceptible to The Placebo Effect. :-)
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Woah woah, you are assuming a lot there. Has there been a double-blind study performed to see if protons are susceptible even a little bit to the placebo effect? Jumping to conclusions.
They're going to do that when they build something to study small and medium hadrons.
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Aren't there concerns that masks won't help with aerosols? Namely, fabric masks that don't create a seal.
There are several studies out there about how well various fabrics can filter small particles. Generally, they don't perform very well with aerosol-sized particles (below 5 micrometers), but it depends a lot on the fabric. The French government organized tests for reusable masks with performance ratings for particles of 3 micrometer size and many of them reached 90+% of filtration efficiency. Some nonwoven fabrics and polyester fleece performed quite well.
Regarding the seal: there is no fundamental reason w
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Protection against aerosols is the whole point of the N95 standard. As for homemade masks, I've looked through Google Scholar and there seems to be enough evidence to conclude that some DIY masks can provide some reduction in risk against aerosols, but not enough to rely on by themselves.
The place where masks really help is preventing aerosols from forming in the first place. Even rudimentary masks reduce the spraying of fine droplets into the air, which can evaporate and become aerosols.
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Aren't there concerns that masks won't help with aerosols? Namely, fabric masks that don't create a seal.
As I understand it: The issue with fabric masks is protection of the wearer, and they're still good (though not perfect) for protecting others FROM the wearer.
TFA is talking about aerosols formed by particles trapped in vortices and similar air currents, keeping them airborne long enough that they lose enough of their water to become a light particle that can then remain airborne, while still carrying v