On the contrary, I have seen numerous reports that universal mask-wearing could indeed control and even end the pandemic. In short, it can reduce the R0 value below one, which if maintained would end the pandemic.
Dr. Robert Redfield (CDC head) recently reported to Congress that if he had to choose between a vaccine and masks, then he would go with masks—because masks have an immediate effect, and it will take time to distribute a vaccine.
There is also the natural experiment that recently occurred in Kansas where some counties mandated mask wearing, and some did not. There was a clear difference in the counties without mask mandates where cases have continued to rise.
Note that you have to get people on board with this, though. Even here in Connecticut, where we do have mask mandates, I watched a group of four idiots in my office yesterday have lunch and spend the entire workday in close contact with no masks.
In July, Dr. Redfield said we could control the pandemic in 4-8 weeks with universal mask wearing. In September, he modified this to 6-12 weeks. Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we at least try?
Wear a mask, keep your distance. Believe it or not, this ain’t complicated. But simplicity (not mother fucking magic. Jesus.) aside, we live in the country hit hardest on this planet. Scratch your head.
I will now leave this idiot tangent aside, and let the breaking news thread get back to breaking news.
The issue isn’t just hospitals, and hospital beds, and PPE, and ventilators – it’s also having enough doctors, nurses, and other support staff to handle a massive increase in hospitalizations. Yes, you can build or repurpose temporary hospitals (and we have), and ramp up production of PPE and ventilators.
You aren’t going to train up a surge capacity of pulmonary doctors or nurses in six months, and even if you are able to pull in doctors and nurses from other specialties, they aren’t going to be as experienced in treating patients with these needs (and you’re also now reducing your health system’s capacity for dealing with other illnesses and injuries). Also, as I’ve seen in many interviews with doctors and nurses who have been working in ICUs, treating COVID patients during surges, a big issue that they face is physical and emotional exhaustion, which reduces their ability to do their jobs, and may drive some of them to quit.
While a smaller student body is helpful because so many teachers have quit rather than go back to the classrooms, schools are losing a whole lot of money because of the missing kids. Less money for the schools means worse conditions (and Arizona schools already suck), which means more missing kids next year.
SayTwo, this is a thread about breaking news. We are well aware of your opinion of masks. I am instructing you to stop posting on this subject in this thread, but take it to other threads where it is an ongoing discussion. It is a hijack in this thread.
When she died of Covid-19 on Oct. 6, Elvia Ramirez was only 17 and had started her senior year at Parshall High School on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Elvia intended to marry her long-term boyfriend and had hopes of attending college. She had promised to take some of her younger siblings to Disneyland one day.
Instead, she became the youngest person in the state to die of the virus so far.
According to her mother, Susan Three Irons, Elvia started to experience headaches in mid-September and had stayed home from school. Her boyfriend had the same symptom, so Ms. Three Irons suggested they go to a drive-through clinic in Parshall. Both tested positive for Covid, and soon Elvia had a fever. (Her boyfriend recovered.)
On Sept. 22, when her daughter began to have difficulty breathing, Ms. Three Irons called an ambulance. Elvia was taken to a hospital in nearby Minot, but the facility was ill equipped to handle serious Covid cases.
The hospital was so short-staffed that Ms. Three Irons had to take on much of her daughter’s care. Eventually, the staff insisted she could no longer be in the room. She called Elvia on the phone. “I told her I loved her,” Ms. Three Irons said in an interview, “and she told me she was scared.”
As her daughter’s condition worsened, Ms. Three Irons arranged to have Elvia airlifted to Sanford Children’s Hospital in Fargo, 270 miles away. By the time Elvia arrived, her condition had deteriorated further, and her breathing grew more labored. She was intubated and placed on a ventilator. She never woke up and was never able to speak to her mother again.
Ms. Three Irons began to experience symptoms herself and tested positive for the virus in another hospital in Fargo, where she was admitted to the Covid wing. On Oct. 6, Elvia’s nurse arranged a video call so Ms. Three Irons could see her daughter. At some point during the call, the camera was turned toward the floor, and because there was no audio, Ms. Three Irons didn’t know that her daughter had gone into cardiac arrest and that the doctors were performing CPR to try to save her. After she died, the doctor held the phone to Elvia’s ear so her mother, weeping, could say goodbye.
…
We did try. In Melbourne Australia. It didn’t work.
Then, because of exponentially rising numbers, we went to strong lockdown. Don’t leave the house without an excuse. Don’t go to work unless it’s exempt. Close everything else.
That worked.
It seems to me that perhaps masks have some effect. A very early report was that hospital staff who used full-barrier nursing did not get infected. And that includes masking. But staff who only used surgical masks did get infected, and universal masking in Melbourne Australia did NOT control the pandemic.
I think it’s sad that, this far into the pandemic, there is still such confusion that people can be saying stuff that we now know to be false.
Minimize contact
Well ventilated spaces (‘outdoors, with a soft breeze’, not ‘indoors with a door open’)
If you do 1 and 2, masks probably won’t make any difference at all. If you don’t do 1 and 2, masks might help, but won’t be sufficient.
"a “secondary infection rate” of 53%. (The secondary infection rate is the percentage of exposed people who catch COVID-19 from the first case.)
About 75% of these secondary infections occurred within five days of the first household member getting sick."
“the new study, which was conducted from April through September, is one of the first to look at COVID-19 transmission in U.S. households in a systematic way, with participants undergoing daily testing for COVID-19.”
The Melbourne lockdown started on July 9th. The mask mandate started on July 19th.
The first time we’ve been able to judge the effects of mask wearing without any sort of stay home order is actually starting now.
I do agree that staying home is a more reliable method of controlling spread than just mask wearing while carrying on daily life. But there’s a difference between the measures you need to squash a spike that’s in the process of getting out of control, and what you need to have in place to prevent that spike in the first place. It’s possible that mask wearing together with really good contact tracing and starting of a base of very few cases may be good enough for now to allow ourselves to have some sort of vaguely normal life.
Both Austria and England have started lockdown, so there are rumors that Switzerland will follow. One canton has already run out of ICU beds. If you click on the link and scroll down a bit, there’s a graphic showing how many ICU beds are occupied by COVID patients (red), how many ICU beds are empty (green) and how many are occupied by non-COVID patients (blue).
My coworker is schedule for a hysterectomy on Tuesday. Hopefully the operation will go ahead as it’s at a separate hospital and she shouldn’t need to go in the ICU if everything goes well.
As of Monday, all restaurants, bars, museums in canton Jura will be closed. I expect other cantons to follow.
Sorry, but the most accurate news is in German or French. I am linking the articles as reference.
Color me dense, but … um … “way higher than we thought”? Seriously? It makes perfect sense to me that if someone in the household has COVID it’s extremely likely (bordering on the inevitable) that multiple people in the household will catch it, too. In fact, a “secondary infection rate of 53%” strikes me as low if everyone is exposed.
And that further adds to the mystery of why out of a group that is 100% exposed, some will get it and some not, and some will get very, very sick and even die and others experience barely a sniffle. THAT’S the part we can’t figure out.
From the linked CDC report:
What are the implications for public health practice?
Household transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is common and occurs early after illness onset. Persons should self-isolate immediately at the onset of COVID-like symptoms, at the time of testing as a result of a high risk exposure, or at time of a positive test result, whichever comes first. All household members, including the index case, should wear masks within shared spaces in the household.
Hasn’t this been what the CDC has told everyone from the beginning? If someone in the household gets COVID, they should go live in a room by themselves (hopefully, there is one), eat alone, etc., and cease contact with other household members until they go 14 days with no symptoms?
Am I missing something (and I often DO miss the obvious-- I rely on the Dope to set me straight).
I think earlier studies had shown 20-40% of household contacts got COVID. So 53% is higher than previously thought. Maybe not ‘that different’ if you were leaning towards 40%, but more than twice as common as the 20% end.
The rest is re-iterating what’s been said before. I’m good with that, since if people thought “Oh, there’s only a 20% chance I’ll pass this,” it’s good to remind them of what to do.
@Courk answered your question but I’ll add a little more to it. Some people on this board cited those earlier papers to make a case that it wasn’t that contagious within families. However, as I quoted, this study included people who were being tested regularly so no asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic people wouldn’t be missed. Also, the people in the previous studies may have been doing a better at quarantining sick people and everyone wearing masks in common areas even when people suspect they may have been exposed by someone outside their family unit.
Also, a big take away from this study is that children are passing this along at pretty much the same rate as adults.
Why the attack rate is only 53% is likely due to two things: 1) people doing proper mitigation and 2) people’s immune systems. If you quarantine someone who thinks they have been exposed as per CDC guidance, the chances of others in the rest of family of getting it drops significantly. As far as immune system, if you receive a low viral inoculum and your immune system responds well, you may not get infected.
I think it also ties back to the theory that superspreaders are responsible for 80% of the spread and the concurrent claim that most people don’t pass it along to anyone.
I don’t know the answer to that question. But I’d figure some expert in the industry would have a solution. I understand it is routine practice to make adjustments for surges each influenza season.
I’d be curious to learn what the average number of patients with the disease is at any one hospital across the US. Or to see the distribution of capacity used by covid patients across those hospitals. I tend to think of health care as a pretty huge industry, in aggregate.
