I think you were right on May 4; but it’s been a while since May 4.
N95’s are still in short supply. Something at least closely resembling surgical masks is now all over the place in boxes of 50 including for order online, and is being handed out for free at some locations at least in NYState.
Try Staples, or Home Depot, or any other big box online; or at least around here your local hardware store or grocery.
I figure that a double-layer cloth mask is good enough, since the point of masking isn’t to protect my sorry ass, it’s to be a good citizen. I mean, I don’t want to get sick or anything, but that’s not what “everybody should wear a mask” is about. It’s not a statement that everybody should be selfishly worried about their own butts, but rather that they should be careful with the butts of others.
Do you know what day it is?
Serious question:
Mask wearing , slows, not stops the spread of the disease. At the current rates of infection, we aren’t killing any more people than the common flu. (Texas numbers) We are ALL going to get the disease at some point or another, sans some miracle vaccine in a matter of months.
At the risk of hampering or killing a lot of our economy, do we need to social safety measures we are taking?
Yes, we don’t want to get grandma sick because she may die, but isn’t she going to get sick anyway?
I guess what I am asking, is there some way that this gets eradicated before it has been spread to everyone?
We don’t really know what the rates of infection would be without the current safety measures, but they doubtlessly would be far worse. Even with all the dipshits refusing to wear masks and the various businesses reopening various precautions are still being taken and many people are hewing to safer behaviors than are required.
And I don’t think that a “miracle vaccine” by the end of the year is entirely off the table.
Yes, we probably do need these precautions, since society is going to freak out if there are so many dead that hospitals run out of refrigerated trucks to store the bodies. By keeping the infection rate as low as possible, it allows hospitals to provide care to the people who are infected. But if the infection is allowed to spread unchecked, hospitals become overrun and the infected will just die in the hallways since there won’t be enough people or equipment to treat them. If that starts to happen, people will hole up and there won’t be a functioning economy.
There does need to be a balance with the economy. That’s what masks provide. They allow the economy to function in some sense while helping to keep the infection rate to a manageable level.
We’re all going to die anyway. Most of us don’t want to be in a hurry about it.
Plus which, it’s been said over and over a) that there may eventually be a vaccine b) that even if there isn’t a vaccine, there may eventually be effective treatments c) that even if we don’t come up with fully effective treatments, we may get better at figuring out which current treatments are at least somewhat helpful and how to best use them (this one has been happening for some time) and d) that even if none of a through c happened (and again c is already happening) fewer people will die, both from covid and from other causes, if not as many people get sick at one time, because medical services and a whole lot of essential non-medical services won’t get overwhelmed.
So no, I am not in a hurry to get sick and quite possibly die as fast as possible, just because some people think it will help the economy if I do. Which it won’t, anyway, because if too many people get sick all at once, that will tank the economy on its own.
Right, with the measures we are taking, it’s only killing about twice as many as the flu.
Without those measures, it would kill far more.
If we truly need to all get it in order to get over it, then we still need to slow that down, to prevent overloading the hospitals.
If hospitals are near capacity, then they will need to start rationing care. Not only to Covid patients, but to all the other people that need to go to the hospital for all the reasons why people usually go to the hospital.
There are ways of eradicating it before it spreads to everyone, but there is no way that we would ever actually implement that.
I haven’t followed all the states but here in Texas the death rate is 1% . Maybe that is less elderly people infected difference or something.
Hospitals are doing fine here but i certainly can follow that logic.
I’ve been issued a bunch of “one-time use” normally-disposable N95s by my employer.
With the guidance that if you wear it one day, leave it butterflied open sitting unmolested on a shelf for 6 days and wear it again on the same day next week, any embedded virions will have become inert while the mask is resting. Better yet if you can expose them to some UV or sunlight, but that’s not necessary.
I’m now on week 10 of the same set of 7 “one-time use disposable” masks, each labeled for its day of the week. So far I’ve only lost one and that was early in developing the mask-wearing habit. So I’ve gotten 70 days out of 8 masks. And about 60 days out of just 7 of those 8. They still appear to be good as new; the elastic is still stretchy, the metal nose-piece is still bendable without cracking, etc. I would not be surprised to get another 70 days out of these same 7 masks.
I only wear them a couple hours per day tops since I’m not out in public the whole time. So it’s plausible they’d be falling apart by now if I’d been wearing them 12h/day. But maybe not.
It seems this approach works for an individual and probably would work for the public at large once we get production ramped up a little more than it already is.
For sure the public has demonstrated that mask wearing for other’s benefit is for LOOOZERZ!!! I’m going to bet that those same selfish people can still be persuaded to wear one that effectively protects themselves. Assuming of course it really does so.
One thing to keep in mind with reusing disposable masks is even though the virus may be sterilized over time, the material which made up the virus will still be trapped in the mask. And there will be lots of other stuff like dust and pollen that will also be trapped in the fibers. All this material will clog the mask and reduce the airflow. If you wore the mask for a long enough time, eventually it would be completely clogged. This will make it harder to breathe through and more likely for unfiltered air to come in along the edges if there is not a good seal. I’m pretty certain it’s fine to use reuse a mask for some period of time, but just keep in mind that it’s essentially a filter and will get more clogged the more it is used.
Fascinating and compelling perspective. The “your” is what really sells it.
You might be right, I haven’t personally gone mask shopping in 3-4 weeks. I wonder whether the sudden increase in “surgical mask” supply is actually an attempt to offload stockpiles of general masks (for dust) which are totally useless at keeping droplets in or out. But this is getting a bit off topic, isn’t it?
Even if masks are cheap, I still tend to sympathize with the single parent who brings kids into the grocery store.
~Max
This is incorrect.
The root of such incorrect comparisons may be a knowledge gap regarding how seasonal influenza and COVID-19 data are publicly reported. The CDC, like many similar disease control agencies around the world, presents seasonal influenza morbidity and mortality not as raw counts but as calculated estimates based on submitted International Classification of Diseases codes.2 Between 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, the reported yearly estimated influenza deaths ranged from 23 000 to 61 000.3 Over that same time period, however, the number of counted influenza deaths was between 3448 and 15 620 yearly.4 On average, the CDC estimates of deaths attributed to influenza were nearly 6 times greater than its reported counted numbers. Conversely, COVID-19 fatalities are at present being counted and reported directly, not estimated. As a result, the more valid comparison would be to compare weekly counts of COVID-19 deaths to weekly counts of seasonal influenza deaths.
During the week ending April 21, 2020, 15 455 COVID-19 counted deaths were reported in the US.5 The reported number of counted deaths from the previous week, ending April 14, was 14 478. By contrast, according to the CDC, counted deaths during the peak week of the influenza seasons from 2013-2014 to 2019-2020 ranged from 351 (2015-2016, week 11 of 2016) to 1626 (2017-2018, week 3 of 2018).6 The mean number of counted deaths during the peak week of influenza seasons from 2013-2020 was 752.4 (95% CI, 558.8-946.1).7 These statistics on counted deaths suggest that the number of COVID-19 deaths for the week ending April 21 was 9.5-fold to 44.1-fold greater than the peak week of counted influenza deaths during the past 7 influenza seasons in the US, with a 20.5-fold mean increase (95% CI, 16.3-27.7).5,6
Bolding added.
As for Texas,
According to data from DSHS, the state had 1,322 available intensive care unit beds and close to 13,000 available hospital beds Wednesday. But there are important regional disparities. The Northeast Texas Regional Advisory Council reported Wednesday that 43% of its hospital beds are in use with 92 ICU beds available, while the East Texas Gulf Coast Regional Advisory Council, which includes nine counties and more than 1.3 million people, is 83% full with only 10 open ICU beds.
The Texas Medical Center in Houston, which includes 21 hospitals, used to update daily a set of “early warnings,” including its base intensive care capacity. On June 24, TMC leaders issued a statement warning that patients with COVID-19 were being admitted at an “alarming rate.” The next day, the medical center reported it had reached 100% of ICU base capacity — and then stopped updating that information for almost three days.
That link includes a heat map for the regional status of hospitals and capacity. A lot of deep red areas.
They don’t look at all like dust masks, which I’ve got experience with. They’re surgical-mask type, though whether they’re the same quality I can’t tell.
(Many dust masks, though not all, are N95’s, and if so are actually more effective than surgical masks, not less; though many of them have an exhale valve, making them ineffective for protecting anyone other than the wearer.)
I think the sudden increase is more likely because places that weren’t initially set up to make them, or weren’t initially set up to make so many of them, are now producing lots of them. It would take a while to set up and collect materials, so there’d be a delay factor; but the delay factor may be shorter for these than for the more-effective N95’s.
ETA: they may also be easier to breathe through for extended periods of time than the no-exhale-valve versions of N95’s.