Coronavirus Outbreak

[Robert]

[silentreader]

An interesting opinion piece in Newsweek....

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scien ... on-1776630

[RZehr]

An interesting opinion piece in Newsweek....

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scien ... on-1776630

Good article.

[MaxPC]

I was reading back through this entire thread for the sake of having a sense of this pandemic and its effect on people. Something seemed quite oddly familiar and I finally realised what it is. In my youth, my friends and I consumed science fiction and Lovecraftian horror stories and it can be argued that this pandemic could have been lifted from those very pages.

We could not get enough of our long discussions about these alternate realities. Oddly we found they distracted us from the war and the post-war shortages. WWII, post-war Europe and the Cold War were stark realities that did not seem quite so bad in the face of the unknowable in the vast universe. In the present day it now seems that Lovecraft was either a small prophet or someone has been inspired by his stories to create a modern Lovecraftian reality.

[Valerie]

I was reading back through this entire thread for the sake of having a sense of this pandemic and its effect on people. Something seemed quite oddly familiar and I finally realised what it is. In my youth, my friends and I consumed science fiction and Lovecraftian horror stories and it can be argued that this pandemic could have been lifted from those very pages.

We could not get enough of our long discussions about these alternate realities. Oddly we found they distracted us from the war and the post-war shortages. WWII, post-war Europe and the Cold War were stark realities that did not seem quite so bad in the face of the unknowable in the vast universe. In the present day it now seems that Lovecraft was either a small prophet or someone has been inspired by his stories to create a modern Lovecraftian reality.

Oh, it was definitely "created"!

[MaxPC]

Now the meds are creating new mutations of the virus. I sense a new sci-fi movie in the making.
Merck Covid Drug Linked to New Virus Mutations, Study Says

[Grace]

Now the meds are creating new mutations of the virus. I sense a new sci-fi movie in the making.
Merck Covid Drug Linked to New Virus Mutations, Study Says

They want to control the population and make money while doing it.

[RZehr]

Face masks made ‘little to no difference’ in preventing spread of COVID, scientific review finds:

When comparing the use of medical/surgical masks to wearing no masks, the review found that "wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (nine studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (six studies; 13,919 people)."

Next, the review compared medical/surgical masks to N95 respirators (or P2 respirators, which are used in Europe).

It found that "wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (five studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (five studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (three studies; 7799 people)."

Dr. Siegel said he has never supported mask mandates.

He believes that while masks might be effective on an individual level, they don’t work as well on a population level.

"If you’re going to mandate something, you’d have to be sure of consistency across the population, and that’s never happened," he said.

However, the physician pointed out that the CDC never actually mandated masks — with the exception of a public transportation mandate in January 2021.

"It was the state and local authorities that took the CDC’s recommendations and implemented the mandates," Dr. Siegel said.

"The recommendations may have been wrong, but the CDC doesn’t deserve the blame for everything. I think they were aware that masks may have value on a personal basis, but they got carried away with the politics."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/face-masks-m ... 48577.html

[Ken]

Honestly, what I find rather depressing about this whole COVID experience is how little systemic study actually occurred with respect to all of this stuff. The study that RZehr referenced above is a meta analysis of a variety of smaller scale studies. But there was no large-scale effort by the CDC to actually gather systemic data on all of these subjects back when they basically had a blank check and the attention of the whole country and a bazillion state and local health departments fully mobilized.

It was one thing when the pandemic started and the virus was new and basically all we had to go on was previous experience with other similar but not identical viruses when all the hand washing, hand sanitizing, masking, and social distancing made some logical sense. ESPECIALLY before vaccines became available.

But once we were well into the pandemic and could start taking stock there were still no large-scale government-lead studies on any of the following topics as far as I can tell:

masking
social distancing
distance learning vs hybrid schools vs regular schools
all the various proposed remedies like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
various ventilation systems in public spaces like schools, stores, etc.
plexiglass screens
lock downs
everything else I'm forgetting

This was all a giant lost opportunity and next time we get some new pandemic like bird flue that starts killing hundreds of thousands we will be back to square one and making up everything as we go and dividing again into different camps based more on political ideology than actual science.

It all seems an enormous wasted opportunity given how many billions of dollars we actually spent on this pandemic.

[Soloist]

I have a hard time believing N95s are not effective, but there would be a number of questions with that…
1: is the study following Healthcare providers who are trained and fit tested? or just Joe your neighbor?
2: was this conducted while these masks were being reused?
3: what duration was the masking followed?
4: for healthcare workers, how would you determine community spread versus infection while wearing N95?
5: did the study follow only properly made N95s? Or did it include the improperly made ones?
Prior to covid, there were carefully controlled rooms along with proper masking regulations and it was understood what would cause infections. N95s are the correct tool for airborne disease in short term exposure. Longer term exposure needs better equipment due to mask fatigue. None of this is somehow unknown but for some reason all this factual science flew out the window.
Even right down to O2 CO2 exchange rate was scientifically tested and understood on an N95…