Or my comment the other way. If you wear glasses and they they fog up while wearing an N95, you’re probably doing it wrong and too much breath is flowing past the top edge of the mask, not through the filtering material.
That’s probably what’s happening with 95% of the people who don’t wear glasses.
More likely there wasn’t a Christmas bump, either. If you look at the hospitalizations data from the NYT (rather than daily reported cases or deaths, both of which tend to be very bumpy around holidays as reporting lags and then catches up), it’s a perfectly smooth curve – hospitalizations increase very sharply through all of November and at a slightly slower rate starting around the first week in December, then top out and start to decline at the beginning of the second week in January. Despite the constant media hype around holidays, I would defy anyone looking at this graph to identify where either Thanksgiving or Christmas falls without looking at the dates at the bottom.
It probably belongs elsewhere, but since it keeps coming up here, I’m of the opinion that a highly visible Christmas bump won’t be seen until February or later, if we have one. We didn’t see the full brunt of what many of us consider the Sturgis surge until several months later. That’s what happens when you have an R0 slightly above 1. Of course, I’m also of the opinion that much of the surge we started seeing in October/November was due to the return to school and Sturgis, so what do I know?
I have more masks now, but in early days, when the supply was limited, I would spray my N95’s with some isopropyl rubbing alcohol every now and again to keep them relatively fresh.
And 100% of men with beards that extend beyond the border of a mask.
I read that using alcohol is not recommended for N95 masks, as the alcohol can change the electrostatic properties of the fibers and the filtration ability would be reduced. Instead, they recommended leaving the mask alone for a few days, or using an oven at a low temperature if it needs to be immediately sanitized. Because the N95 masks work from special properties of the fibers, make sure that any cleaning procedures don’t reduce those special properties.
I have also read that the safest way to “clean” them is to let them sit for long enough for the virus to degrade on its own.
Masks don’t magically stop working after you use them. They gradually decay in several ways. The elastic wears out. The edge may not grip your face as tightly. The filter may get clogged with dust (which makes it hard to breath through more than it stop it from filtering) or may get damaged in other ways. Maybe bacteria grow on the mask, although keeping the mask dry mitigates that problem.
If you only need to wear a mask for an hour at the grocery store, and you only go to the grocery store every week or two, a few masks ought to work for months, if you are careful not to abuse them. I have friends who cover their N95 with a surgical mask to provide both mechanical protection of the mask and also to “pre filter” it, to keep it from getting clogged too fast.
(I bought some reusable N90 masks. They have the virtue of a silicone seal that’s really easy to keep tight around my face. I figure they are better than an ill-fitting N95. The “mask” is reusable, and it has replaceable filters. The lifespan of the filters is described in terms of hours of use, not as how many times you use it. I cycle the masks, and so far I’ve only replaced one filter.)
Unless you need to wear a mask most of the day most days of the week, you probably won’t be using up an N95 mask every day.
97,310,103 total cases
2,083,337 dead
69,851,783 recovered
In the US:
24,998,975 total cases
415,894 dead
14,968,716 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Link please.
I posted a link in this thread about masks:
I technically funded their Kickstarter, but i think you can buy them now.
No states reporting record high daily cases reported (seven day average) for yesterday, January 20, which is definitely good news. The bad news is that both Virginia and New Hampshire appear poised to break through to new record highs in a day or so.
In even better news, all the other states appear to be trending downwards.
It looks like all the states started trending downward at the same time. This has to just be everybody finally being done working through the holiday backlog, right? Or is there less testing happening? It doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Not really. If you look at the plots independently you can see that the peak number of cases occurs at very different times in different states. They are mostly trending down now, but that only indicates that they are all in synch, not that they were doing the same thing at the same time. As I noted, Virginia and New Hampshire are going up now, and appear to be in the midst of their most recent peak, while many states in the Midwest peaked in mid-November. Others in the Midwest peaked in early December.
Looking at the per-state 7-day average new cases on 91-divoc.com it sure looks like most states had a localized peak within a day or two of January 13.
I see now by looking at the ‘normalized by population’ graph that for many states that was a temporary bump from a previous general downward trend, so maybe that’s all I’m seeing.
98,092,757 total cases
2,100,452 dead
70,486,514 recovered
In the US:
25,196,086 total cases
420,285 dead
15,100,991 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
The world has a new record with 17,360 covid deaths recorded today.
Wow!
Another day without new record daily highs (seven day average as computed on the Johns Hopkins site) in any state or territory. That is progress.
Just a reminder, though – there are still hefty new daily reported cases. But it’s gone down so much that, here in Massachusetts, they’re starting to lift some restrictions.
Boris Johnson says U.K. coronavirus variant may be more deadly
By William Booth
Potentially bad news re the UK-identified variant.
Food for thought:
Public Health England, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Exeter have each been trying to assess how deadly the new variant is.
Their evidence has been assessed by scientists on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).
The group concluded there was a “realistic possibility” that the virus had become more deadly, but this is far from certain.
That link should take you to the NERVTAG report.
There is a realistic possibility that VOC B.1.1.7 is associated with an increased risk of death compared to non-VOC viruses.
TLDR is that the case fatality ratio (CFR in the report) was found to be increased by ~30% for the new (UK) variant.
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Coronavirus home test kits: These are the tests available now - CNET
This link from October lists 8 home test kits, including 4 spit tests, in the price range $119 to $150. But at the time, people were also predicting test kits in the area of $10.
Has any cheap test reached wide distribution anywhere?