Well, yeah because every virus is going to have different survival abilities. I was sceptical at first on masks because of the sudden turnabout. The “evidence” people trotted out was mainly “coughing into a petri dish while watched by the doctors” variety. Research in the field makes me more comfortable with mask rules.
Eta: specifically, the emerging fact that this virus doesn’t spread by surface contacts makes public use of masks much less dangerous because the drawback of average person mask use is that they use them improperly for a disease that spreads through contact.
I think this is an excellent point. Early on, the fear was that you’d touch something and get it on your hands, then touch the mask, but that seems like less of a fear than before. Meanwhile, inhaling particles seems like the main vector, and a mask helps protect others from your particles greatly, and helps protect you from others somewhat.
I am not an epidemiologist. But, what I’m seeing is that those who are, are learning rapidly, and as they learn more, the guidance on how to deal with this virus is evolving.
You mentioned “I expect the pros in the field to have long before now figured out for sure whether masks are effective against airborne viruses. This or any other one.” As I understand it, part of the issue is that not all viruses are created equal, and it wasn’t clear, at first, whether mask wearing would prevent the spread of this virus. As they’ve researched it, the evidence has mounted that, yes, masks are important.
Similarly, at first, there was a lot of concern about picking up this virus from surfaces which had been contaminated (door handles, cardboard boxes, etc.), but from what I’ve read, researchers are now thinking that surfaces are much less of a problem than was originally thought.
Research is done on existing problems. Coronaviruses are usually no big deal – they are one cause of common cold. The previous two that were big deals were stopped before they spread out of control.
This is a brand new one, one that is deadlier than the common cold type and much more contagious than SARS or MERS. Science changes and adapts. Even though the guidance was not to wear a mask before, that has now changed and we should all be wearing masks when we can’t socially distance, or any time we’re inside with others not in our own COVID bubble.
That has been the rule here in NJ for weeks or months already. Are you wearing a mask any time you cannot socially distance or are inside a store, restaurant, or other public place?
I think a better explanation is that health officials in some Western countries assumed that they had all the answers and tended to regard the East Asian custom of wearing masks as little more than baseless superstition.
Going back to the SARS outbreak in 2003, there was at least some data suggesting that masks helped. That was in 2003.
Moreover, according to the CDC’s own publications, the agencies should have been aware of the role that masks can play in reducing the spread of coronaviruses.
By April, the NIH was already saying essentially that masks probably had an impact on controlling the spread of COVID-19.
What seems fairly evident at this point is that the response itself and the federal health agencies’ interaction with the public was, on the one hand, confused and disorderly. Their own reporting about not needing to wear masks went against evidence that they already should have known.
Part of that advice, in the beginning, was because we were so poorly prepared as a country and they wanted to preserve masks for people who needed it daily for their jobs.
I’m assuming that question is for me. I do wear the mask, yes, if for no other reason than I don’t want people to think I’m an asshole who is trying to kill them. I do not subscribe to the point of view, though, that if the spread is slowing in places then it’s masks that are stopping it.
As for the part about science changing and adapting, a couple things. One, I would tend to place the question of whether the typical mask can effectively block the typical airborne virus as something closer to a physical phenomenon, which is not at the whim of experimental science. (If the masks themselves change, that is of course another story.) Two, if it’s true that things like these are just inherently so hard to model and so hard to really know, so that we always have to give science a break, then I also don’t want to constantly hear ‘follow the science’. Can’t help but feel like some people are having that both ways.
I’m in the camp that believes infection, or at least exposure, is far more widespread than estimated. That seems to be empirically the case in a number of instances, like navy ships or whatnot, and given how fast the virus spread to basically the entire globe, I can’t see why those cases would be the exception rather than the rule. And while it’s true that I have not closely followed reports from hard-hit places like Lombardy and NYC, I’m under the impression that they seem to have weathered the storm, if you will.
Lombardy and NYC didn’t simply weather the storm, though; there was a lot of suffering in the process. To their credit, officials in these communities confronted the problem with the requisite sobriety and clarity. In the time since, it would seem that there’s been a reckoning and a community-wide understanding about the need to comply with measures to reduce the spread. It seems they’ve managed to keep the infection rate down but that didn’t just happen through sheer luck; they’ve been vigilant.
Can you cite any actual expert that thinks that, for example, cases in NJ have come way down for reasons other than the shut down?
Regarding your earlier post, with a new disease like this, you would expect expert opinion to vary has more and more is learned. I don’t understand what you mean when you say that some people want something both ways – as we learn more, the opinion of experts change. Scientific opinion will adapt and change as more data comes in. It’s something handed down from on high, never changing.
In either this thread or another one, (s)he stated that there has been much more exposure to the virus than we know, and references a small town in Queens as some sort of evidence. How this would work statewide in NJ, for example, is left as an exercise for the reader, from what I can tell.
It seems like unsourced, armchair epidemiology to me.
I don’t mean to diminish any efforts or any suffering, and surely their measures did save a considerable amount of further suffering and loss of life. But the math, as you often point out, is what it is. Geometric growth is no joke, The trends were horrifying, there and in many other places. It took something really, really powerful to turn those in the other direction. I’ve not been anywhere New York, or any other hotspot, while this has been going on, but everything I’ve seen with my own eyes tells me that human behavior during lockdown just ain’t that reliable. And given how much activity and interaction still went unchecked as essential operations continued on, I just can’t fully behind the ‘circuit breaker’ notion, as Singapore called it.
So if what really happened on NYC and Lombardy was a sort of stealth herd immunity, do you think they would have had the same results if they didn’t lock down at all?
Well, I know how sampling works. And unless those areas in Queens are nicely separated from the rest of the borough, I’m inclined to think that they aren’t outliers.
I cannot readily point you to specific articles, if that’s what you like, but I have read in many places that a number of experts think the true infection rate may be as much as an order of magnitude higher than the official case rates in some places. It’s not something I’m dreaming up, in other words. But of course, even if I could point you to their specific quotes, what would that matter anyway? Aren’t we establishing that ‘the science’ is really just a snapshot at any rate, and consensus opinion (if that even exists) could well change again, as it has before?
I’m sure their measures saved many people from being infected. Does seem like the horse was mostly out of the barn by the time they got things shut down, though, so who knows how much damage was already done.
One thing I do feel pretty confident about is that the virus is not entirely erased from NYC or Lombardy, just as it evidently was not in Melbourne, so if they do ever open fully back up again, you’d expect to see unexposed people getting exposed eventually. It gives me a glimmer of optimism that I haven’t heard about worrisome spikes in either place.
