Article was updated July 16. I agree that is what they say. They weren’t really addressing the policy of wearing masks, just the data behind mask effectiveness, which they say isn’t strong. Their worry is that people will put too much faith in masks.
Yes…
I was in Japan last year and I can say that it was not common to see people wearing a mask. Some people did, but is was more of an individual thing. I asked a co-worker why some people wore mask and he told it was most likely they thought they may be sick and wore a mask out of respect for the rest of the community and not wanting to subject society to their illness.
Respect for others and the community they live in, that is what we are missing.
I believe that you are absolutely correct. The email dumps from whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright reflect that. They show him - in late January and February- desperately trying to get the government to pay attention to the looming PPE and mask shortage and ramp up production.
The responses that he got revealed that their strategy (and pretty much their only strategy) for ensuring that health care professionals had enough masks was that they would discourage the general public from buying them.
I have been seeing the “Masks will save us all view” here on the dope for the last few months, and I’m sure they work to some extent… but I’m not sure masks alone will accomplish sufficiently stop the virus.
For one thing, it is entirely possible to stop the virus without mandating masks. In the Netherlands masks have never been recommended (and still aren’t), with the exception of pulic transport. We did just fine stopping the initial wave of the virus, by asking people to work from home and to keep 1.5 meters distance (restaurants and large scale gatherings were closed and forbidden for a while of course). Nobody wears masks here anywhere, unless there is a clear reason why people can’t keep sufficient distance (so some touristy areas in Amsterdam are now “masks only”, but no real enforcement mechanism exists yet).
There were two arguments why using non medical masks have not been used as a tool here:
1 People need to use them propperly for any benefits to be worthwile. I’ve been traveling through a bunch of European countries the last few weeks and it is astonishing to see how many people do’t use the mask correctly (I personally dn’t mind, but I probably did reuse the mask a bit too often). In the Vienna underground many people only cover their mouth (not the nose), or just the chin. The people working there (including police) are the worst culprits, which is understandable given the temperatures… but still. Ther there is the whole thing where everyone is fidgeting with them, which means any corona will almost certainly be on the hands. I saw an interview with Christian Horner after the first British Grand Prix, and he was readjusting his masks 4 times per question. It is an illustration of what I am talking about.
2 This one is especially important, given the previous point. A false sense of safety. Off all the countries I’ve been to the last weeks (5), Germany has the strictest mask policy… but I was shocked when I walked into some of the stores there. People reaching over each other to get an item, busy isles… I haven’t seen anything like that in the Netherlands since early March. I’m back home now and people are still not wearing masks, but in the supermarket people try to keep their distance, take side steps or steps back when people are approaching and so on. Is it really safer to have people get really close to each other with a mask, compared to staying distant without a mask?
Anyone doing a quick search will find our numbers are going up a lot the last few weeks, but that most likely has to do with policy chnges at the start of July (pretty much everything is allowed again, most of this opening up was planned for September… but they decided to open up early).
Our version of Faucy explained why they are still not advocating for masks, a few days ago. It seems the large majority of infections happen in parties or family gatherings. places where you wouldn’t wear a mask anyway.
For what it’s worth, the strategy now is to ask us all to stick to the rules a bit better. That sounds like not much, but that’s what I thought in March… and it kind of worked back then.
You can’t catch Covid-19 through your hands. If you touch the mask, wash hands or use hand sanitizer after. If you are out in public, mask or no mask, you should wash hands before and after. If you are out in public and, mask or no mask, want to touch your face, you should wash hands or use hand sanitizer before and after.
Touching a mask, for a regular person – not a healthcare worker in a high-exposure environment – is not some kind of major hazard. If the front of your mask is covered in coronavirus, then it saved you from breathing that in, and you always needed to be careful to wash hands anyway.
I do think masks should not be used to replace other precautions. But no one is advocating for that, either.
Also, I know of lots of people who are wearing masks and using physical distancing in order to more safely meet up with family members they don’t live with. You should wear a mask for a family gathering if you want your family to be safe. My family would not attend a family gathering if people were not going to wear masks.
Here is another article from 2014, before Corona reared its ugly head.
TLDR: The habit of mask-wearing in Japan got its start during the 1918 pademic and before-COVID most mask wearers were suffering from a cold or some such and wore a mask to help prevent their cold from spreading to others.
Sound familiar?
Masks don’t work among the general public. Cases exploded in California after the mask mandate.
More accurately …
- Masks don’t work when the general public refuses to play along.
- Social/physical distancing doesn’t work when the general public refuses to play along.
- A vaccine (once available) won’t work when the general public refuses to play along.
There seems to be a theme here.
I think you may be confusing cause and effect here.
Weren’t you the one arguing that Florida did great?
Just to clarify, mask wearing is less about you keeping safe and more about keeping others safe. If we have compliance and/or 6’ separation then the spread drops a lot.
You can be contagious and not know it, sneezes, coughs, shouting, etc. have a pretty large dispersal range. The sneeze is the worst of course. The mask greatly reduces what sprays through the air from your mouth thus protecting others.
It protects you a little, partly as a reminder not to bring your hand to your mouth and to avoid rubbing your eyes which is very tough.
At restaurants you are suppose to be 6’ from other tables. (Doesn’t always work out that way). When the servers go near the table you should re-mask and the servers should give you a reasonable chance to do so. This is clearly not happening all that much. But you aren’t really a danger to or in danger from the other diners, just the servers.
It is these practices in New York, New Jersey, Italy and etc. that slowed the spread way down. Places not using masks and ignoring social distances result in flare ups and some are big flare ups.
I find that so hard to believe, given a) how it seems that people in many places just don’t like to follow rules or be told what to do, and b) that there could be other explanations, like the virus running out of easy victims in its immediate reach.
Well, New Jersey did an excellent job of isolation, separation and masks for 2 months and then relaxed a little with summer. We have our share of stupid people with stupidly large gathering and a few bars got smacked down shortly after re-opening.
We also still have only outside dining and tables are spread out pretty well.
You can see our spikes where we relaxed and then tightened again.
I can’t immediately tell where to look on the page you linked, but at Worldmeters I can’t see anything in the graphs that looks like there is a strong outside influence in either direction.
Yeah, you’re going to have to be a lot clearer. I have no idea why you think that page shows where you relaxed. I see one spike day in cases that I’d bet was a record taking change.
If you expand the bar chart, you’ll see some spikes in mid-July. That was the first try for bars to open.
If you look at the 7 day average, not really.
When did New Jersey start implementing its suppression measures?
Why wouldn’t you just type those same words into Google?
I’m not having a discussion with Google.