Coronavirus prep

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  • Diatonic12
    Diatonic12 Posts: 32,344 Member
    'Do vaccines against pneumonia protect you against the new coronavirus?'

    No. Vaccines against pneumonia, such as pneumococcal vaccine and Haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) vaccine, do not provide protection against the new coronavirus.

    The virus is so new and different that it needs its own vaccine. Researchers are trying to develop a vaccine against 2019-nCoV, and WHO is supporting their efforts.

    Although these vaccines are not effective against 2019-nCoV, vaccination against respiratory illnesses is highly recommended to protect your health.

    https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/myth-busters


    Thanks for the previous replies. <3 This particular answer does seem like more doubletalk in some ways. Sigh.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,932 Member
    @kimny72


    Thanks for that Forbes article about masks. :lol: I went down an internet rabbit hole with that one! It was good!

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/04/01/should-everyone-wear-a-mask-in-public-maybe-but-its-complicated/?fbclid=IwAR0ZwcAFs3WS_0e0cnLO-OczcxRX_W33CSgjcr0tfNH5tEFrp1815Pm4i9k#147ca23da02f
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,959 Member
    just_Tomek wrote: »
    Easter is next week. I already did get my parents upset telling them I will not be coming over for breakfast / dinner.
    Anyone else? How many do you think are going to stay home and not visit family / friends???

    I have no idea about the percentages at large. I know I'm staying home rather than visit family, and I know the family I would be visiting otherwise are staying home and not having anyone else over.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,959 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    lynn_glenmont wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »

    I can't give you cites because my source was listening to NPR and BBC on radio, but I believe there's a new study out in just the last few days showing potentially-infecting particles from coughs/sneezes traveling much farther than previously thought (like twice as far), plus some fairly new information about the nature of virus shedding by people who are still asymptomatic.

    You are referring to this, I believe https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763852?appId=scweb
    and this https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/31/824155179/cdc-director-on-models-for-the-months-to-come-this-virus-is-going-to-be-with-us

    Thank you. The JAMA paper sounds like it may be what I heard mentioned in passing, and while I don't think I heard the Redfield interview or a focused news item about it, that's consistent with what I did hear in the reports.

    Normally, if I hear something on NPR/BBC/other audio source, I can find the story in a text or audio snip on their web sites, and would include it in a post. In this case, I hadn't zeroed in on the radio items for follow up when it occurred, had the radio on all day, had no idea what service/program mentioned it. Appreciate you being a better researcher! :flowerforyou:

    Shifting gears:

    Throughout all of this rapidly evolving public-policy response, I'm aware that we (including me) sometimes aren't able to acknowledge in our guts that scientists and public officials are human beings, who, like us, can be confused, communicate poorly, change their minds (and should, BTW), and generally make mistakes. Keeping that in mind is especially difficult in a context where some officials clearly are negligent, willfully ill-informed or self-dealing actors. (I won't go further than the generality, avoiding the politics prohibition here - and my intent is not partisan anyway, as IMO all large-scale groups include a segment of idiots and scoundrels.)

    Of course, their mistakes are high-stakes and incredibly costly (in lives!) at a time like this. They've taken on the job (like doctors, or police, or others whose jobs routinely involve life and death matters), so we can hold them to high standards, but holding them to inhumanly high standards is just unrealistic. (Not saying we can't or shouldn't hold them accountable for even well-intended actions that turn out to have disastrous consequences. We can, and should. With some compassion, IMO. Any decent human who makes a deadly error, and realizes it, has a burden of conscience, as well, possibly life-long.)

    Just my dumb opinions, as usual.

    Thinking about what I've written on this subject, I hope I didn't come across as though I thought that those behind the messaging on masks were evil or even completely in the wrong. Sadly, I think that to the extent that they were trying to avoid hoarding of medical masks by the general public, they were probably right that there are too many people who would try to do so if given a message of "we need to save medical masks for health care professionals on the front lines, but the rest of you should cover your mouth and nose in public with whatever non-medical or makeshift mask you can find."

    Edited to try to fix the quote nesting. I'm seeing so much more of this problem lately that I'm wondering if it's an MFP glitch.

    To me, no, you didn't come across that way.

    Part of the reason I wrote what you just quoted (and frankly stupidly did so in a part of the thread where it didn't logically tie up ideally), was that I thought I'd not been clear. My basic point (in my post that I think started this subthread) was that I'm seeing a few people (mostly in my FB feed) quickly leaping to conspiracy theories and/or outrage over the shifts in mask recommendations. "Why didn't they tell us that before? Were they trying to kill us?" (<== cartoon level representation).

    I don't think that's reasonable. Personally, I think the situation should be interpreted mainly as human beings, who happen to be officials, trying to make sense of a mountain of information that keeps growing and changing. Some people I know bizarrely seem to think that pretty much all officials know everything all at once at the start (including a bunch of secret stuff), and manipulate it cynically (or at least officials from "those other parties" do). That's bizarre thinking, to me. (JMO) Officials are regular humans no different from us, mostly.

    I don't want to try to imagine what you're thinking behind the limited interpretation I can make from what you do write, but do have the impression that you may feel that the impulse to avoid a public run on masks loomed larger, in officials' initial thinking, than I do.

    I think that I'm giving relatively more weight to the officials being humans trying to sort out a lot of conflicting advice, in a context where most politicians/deciders are not subject-matter specialists; and I'm thinking that there was initial belief that (near-)universal mask wearing by the general public was not going to have a major helpful effect, and had some potential negatives (such as a run on supply more urgently needed elsewhere).

    Recently, more information seems to be coming out (various ways: studies, clear expert consensus emerging from what was previously a less-clear diversity of expert statements, etc.), and shifting the apparent weight of masks' importance. That's just my inexpert impression, nothing more.

    If this perception about your/my opinions is even true, I don't particularly want to chase it down between us to the Nth degree. I respect your intelligence and opinions over a long period of posts here. I don't consider the opinion I've perhaps mistakenly attributed to you to be an irrational one. I haven't seen you say anything that's (IMO) irrational about this topic. Some of your posts have seemed to me to be asking me to defend my opinon, focusing on a sub-part of my (intended, maybe unclear) thesis, so I've responded.

    I'm not an expert on what the experts (such as researchers) are saying. I wasn't trying to pile up a mountain of evidence (specific studies and their timing) to support the the idea that calm, rational people could/couldn't have or should/shouldn't have made a "general public should wear masks" recommendation earlier, or not. The people acting haven't had the luxury of calm rationality: I think most are thinking on their feet as best they can, under tremendous stress, with such expert advice (from many quarters, needing to balance many competing factors of various weights) as they can find.

    Thank you for fixing the quote nesting. I'm the one who broke it, and didn't notice until too late to edit. I don't know how it happened, but assume it was my typo, since I haven't had that problem with any frequency.

    Thanks, Ann. Yes, what you think I'm thinking is pretty spot on. Seems like a good place to leave it.
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    Off topic, but: IMO a greater worry than cursive is that current-day records are not on paper, but electronic.

    With each change in storage technology, records are lost. (An analogy is what happened to the then-sparse then-mostly-unimportant data when we moved from literal floppy disks to CDs/DVDs to USB storage, while upgrading our processing boxes along the way: Do you still have all your old household data, carefully transferred to the newer storage medium?)

    If you believe the cloud-storage companies are converting every single thing they ever stored, forever, during tech changes . . . I think that's naive. (Yes, you may see all your data transferred. Did they transfer data from inactive/deleted accounts? Deceased account holders? etc.)

    With each change in app fashionability, more data goes "poof". How about those MySpace pages? The older MFP logging data they said they'd dump? The photo-storage sites that have gone out of business? The blogging platforms? Social networks sites like Ning that are bye-bye? How will our great-grandkids read those?

    Household records from history tend to be in family ledgers and record books. The online bills, blogs, photos, etc., that paint a similar picture of my household are spread all over the internet, and many companies aren't committing to leave infinite years of data out there. Historians will not have this data. (Are you thinking they won't care? They seem to care about analogous data from a century or two back.)

    Furthermore, the electronic world has its own jargon, that will age and be near-untranslatable. Younger folks, how's your ability to interpret ASCII art? Will the future folks understand abbrevs? Emojis? (If you're not sure about some, you probably look them up online. Will that reference exist?).

    Cursive gets people excited, but I don't think it's nearly as big a problem.

    I think this is a valid concern. However, paper records tend to be ephemeral as well.

    Only time will tell whether the accidents of fire, moving, and intervening generations just not giving a kitten have more or less impact on the preservation of history than the vagaries of electronic media. A whole bunch of people had webpages on Geocities back in the day, filled with what they considered important writing and original research. Most of it’s gone. But if those same people had been passing around typed manuscripts to their close friends, as used to be the case, most of those are gone too.

  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,526 Member
    If concerned, contributions to the https://archive.org/about/ and the wayback machine may be useful!
    https://archive.org/web/
  • mkculs13
    mkculs13 Posts: 597 Member
    I don't know what historians will fine about this particular time period, when they look back. I do know that a small group of very intelligent online friends--who typically have thoughtful discussions about social issues, politics, etc.--recently had a very long string about their dishwashers. I thought, "This is what someone studying life during the Great Shutdown of 2020 will find; people debating the merits of one dishwasher product over another."

    In defense of another poster here, I found the comment "horrifying" to be hilarious.

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