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Face mask or no face mask?

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  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    edited August 2020
    moonangel12 wrote: »
    I don’t know, I have the mindset that something is better than nothing. I don’t see it as “security theater” I see it as people making an effort to do their part with the materials that they are given or that are made available. Are some people being silly about it by wearing open mesh “masks” to prove their own point about flawed regulations? Yes, but are they the majority? No. And because of the few making their mark in the news by being verbally or even physically aggressive against said mandates, people aren’t going to be as comfortable enforcing them for fear of retaliation. The world has gone mad.

    If you didn’t see spit splatter on the inside of your face shield when you sneezed, even if air flow did move it, to me that shows the mask as having some form of a success rate (it blocked spray, which is what contains the virus and spreads it ridiculous distances in those situations).

    “Perfection is the enemy of good.”
    Since something doesn’t work 100%, might as well not bother, reducing the effectiveness to 0%... that doesn’t make sense to me.

    The question isn't whether it's having some effect. The question is how effective it is. There's a lot of memes such as "mask it or casket!" or "if you think it's hard to breathe with a mask, try using a ventilator!" that basically say that if you don't wear a mask, you will die, and if you do wear a mask, you will not die. The question is, how true is this? In which subset of situations was the mask the difference between catching COVID-19 and not catching it? And in what subset of those situations did the person actually end up dying of COVID-19? Are people really catching COVID-19 and dying of it from just walking around the grocery store, for example? And could some of those cases have been prevented by wearing masks? And if so, what percentage of cases does this represent?

    I think a lot of people also use the mask as a security blanket, basically assuming it's 100% effective despite a lack of data to suggest that. For example, people who were normally pro-lockdown felt perfectly fine gathering in large crowds to protest for hours and hours, because "everyone is wearing a mask" (even though there's a lot of photos and videos of protestors not wearing masks, or not wearing them correctly, but I digress). A lot of municipalities made the decision for contact tracing to not ask people if they had been to a protest, so we couldn't collect sufficient data on whether wearing masks in a huge crowd is sufficient to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (Although, coincidentally, a lot of those areas with large protests had case surges in people under age 45 a few weeks later.)

    But then, ironically, the same people who justify doing what they want to do with "everyone was wearing masks," get mad when you ask "if masks are so effective, and given the devastating effects of lockdown that also kills many people, why don't we just open everything back up with mask laws?" Which indicates to me that they really aren't interested in what the science has to say -- and right now what it has to say is pretty inconclusive on the matter -- but are just pushing an agenda.

    Also, don't forget, people are also being physically aggressive against people who don't wear masks. Which is pretty ridiculous since that involves close contact with the person, but, this is the world we live in now.

    The other question is what the end game is here. Are we supposed to wear masks forever? Until COVID-19 is done with? (It's already been effectively done with in my state for months, and yet we're still wearing masks in any indoor public space, without any clear information on whether they're actually doing anything.) For other respiratory pandemics such as the seasonal flu? Or, should only people with symptoms wear them? (which is how masks were typically worn in Asian countries where they were commonplace, post-SARS) And what are the long-term health effects, if any, of wearing one? There are still no answers to any of these questions.
  • Dnarules
    Dnarules Posts: 2,081 Member
    moonangel12 wrote: »
    laurenq1991 wrote: »
    slimgirljo15 wrote: »
    Your original post said Australia , yet you were talking about Victorian restrictions obviously that was confusing to me.

    Victoria is part of Australia, is it not?
    Nevermind. If you're spoiling for an argument, you won't get one here.

    "Spoiling for an argument"? I was just stating my opinion. Other people are the ones who started arguing with me by accusing me of "spreading lies about their country." And then "disagreeing" with my posts that were just posting news articles supporting what I was saying...like what exactly are they "disagreeing" with, the existence of these facts?
    moonangel12 wrote: »
    Not knowing the exact set up you have, did the face shield move from facial muscles during your sneeze instead of air flow?

    I doubt it because, also, the other day I sneezed while wearing a mask but no face shield, and I felt air come out of the mask. Also, the face shield attaches to the face around the forehead and it usually doesn't move easily from talking, facial expressions, etc.
    If so, might be time for a new mask. As a quilter, there are wide varieties of fabric and even “thick” doesn’t mean tight weave.

    And yet the mask restrictions just say "wear a face covering," regardless of whether it's actually effective. Most people aren't quilters and aren't able to find or make the perfect mask that actually works. Especially as, obviously, you can't try them on or take them out of the package before you buy them. If the multi-layered mask I use doesn't work, probably very few masks on the market do, making this little more than security theater.

    I don’t know, I have the mindset that something is better than nothing. I don’t see it as “security theater” I see it as people making an effort to do their part with the materials that they are given or that are made available. Are some people being silly about it by wearing open mesh “masks” to prove their own point about flawed regulations? Yes, but are they the majority? No. And because of the few making their mark in the news by being verbally or even physically aggressive against said mandates, people aren’t going to be as comfortable enforcing them for fear of retaliation. The world has gone mad.

    If you didn’t see spit splatter on the inside of your face shield when you sneezed, even if air flow did move it, to me that shows the mask as having some form of a success rate (it blocked spray, which is what contains the virus and spreads it ridiculous distances in those situations).

    “Perfection is the enemy of good.”
    Since something doesn’t work 100%, might as well not bother, reducing the effectiveness to 0%... that doesn’t make sense to me.

    Well said.
  • Roadie36
    Roadie36 Posts: 45 Member
    None for me.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    edited August 2020
    AliciaHollywood wrote: »
    I think if everyone just wore the stupid mask for 14 days, stayed to themselves and didn’t cheat, we would have been over this months ago!

    Everyone I know stayed home for months. About 20% of the population lost their jobs. I know some people who still haven't even left their property the entire time. My friends and I didn't see each other for five months until there were basically no cases/deaths in my state. And even after that, we met outdoors. I literally didn't have an in-person conversation with anyone other than my husband for months. Everyone I know, and everyone who I see out and about, wears masks in public when social distancing is not possible (which is the law in my state). I see people wearing face shields pretty frequently and my husband and I wear them sometimes. We still don't have indoor dining at all in my state and gatherings are limited. My state has only been having about 0-10 COVID-19 deaths per day for months, yet still hasn't fully reopened and is more locked down than almost any state.

    My state still has the highest COVID-19 death rate per million of any state in the US, and a higher death rate than almost any place in the world. The states that were vilified for having bars open and such, like Arizona, have much lower death rates -- and their case surges are declining now.

    These officials want to blame the public for a policy failure though, by implying that they didn't follow the rules, even though they did. How did "wear the stupid mask, stay to yourself, and don't cheat" work out for Australia and New Zealand?
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    ShredWeek1 wrote: »
    I may have missed it, but did anyone who is anti-mask explain how they would vanquish the virus?

    Same thing we did for H1N1 in 2009.

    It can't be "vanquished." The only way out is through. At this point that should be very clear considering that no country has been able to eradicate it. Not even isolated island nations. Not even China, which welded people into their apartments and brought everyone food instead of allowing them to go to the supermarket. Even if we had a vaccine -- and, historically, the fastest vaccine ever developed was the ebola vaccine which took four years -- no vaccine in history has ever been 100% effective. The testing phase for vaccines takes 12-18 months alone. (And now we have countries like Russia forcing untested vaccines on their population.)

    The lockdowns were never originally intended to get rid of the virus. They were intended to slow down the spread of cases in order to prevent the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. That's what "flatten the curve" meant. In March, public health officials made it clear that eradication was impossible and we were moving to a mitigation strategy. Somehow everyone forgets this.

    However, at some point, the goalposts were moved to de facto eradication even though the evidence clearly shows it is impossible, or "lock down until a vaccine" even though historical precedent shows it won't be coming for years. Lockdowns continued in areas that never saw any cases, until it was no longer financially possible to continue the lockdowns. Then, everything reopened, and cases predictably went up, and everyone was shocked for some reason, while any science literate person saw this coming 100 miles away. Meanwhile, anyone who had a non-COVID medical problem during the initial lockdown couldn't get medical care despite hospitals being empty, and many people died from that. Lockdowns also continued in places like NYC that have reached close to herd immunity and are having almost no cases and deaths.

    The best strategy would have been to let low-risk people go about their lives and build herd immunity to protect medium and high-risk people. This would have mitigated the devastating consequences of lockdowns -- which also kill many people, everyone forgets that -- as well as mitigating deaths. Sweden did that and they have much lower deaths per million than my state, for example, and are done with the virus. And their deaths per million are on par with other European countries such as the UK, France, Italy, Belgium, etc. They also haven't had the second-order deaths and other negative consequences of lockdown. My state did the opposite -- they deliberately spread COVID-19 into nursing homes for some baffling reason -- which is part of why our death rate is so high.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    slimgirljo15 wrote: »
    I don't know about NZ but in my opinion although Vic and NSW are doing it tough I think the rest of Australia isn't doing too bad.

    Yes, but, by the "logic" of "we would have been done with this if everyone followed the rules," New Zealand and Australia should have eradicated it by now, considering they have the harshest lockdown rules in the world outside of China. I seem to recall when New Zealand claimed to have zero cases, a lot of smug posturing from them about how they eradicated it because they "behaved," whereas people in other countries supposedly didn't. Well, that didn't work out for them very well, did it?

    (Of course, don't ask them what the long-term plan would be even if they did eradicate it....)
  • Dnarules
    Dnarules Posts: 2,081 Member
    Rhumax67 wrote: »
    I'm reading "The Great Influenza" by John Barry now. I recommend it. Regardless of the book, I wear a mask. Where I live,NYC suburb, people wear them. There was a lot of hostility in the beginning - but that seems to have stopped. NY was hit really hard & I think people realized it was necessary & a small thing to do. My family goes nowhere - groceries once a week - that's it. We are retired. The last thing I want to do is end up in a hospital & make some poor nurse, who has to take care of me, sick. If wearing a mask helps prevent that I'm all for it!

    That's a great book. I've started reading it again.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    edited August 2020
    Rhumax67 wrote: »
    I'm reading "The Great Influenza" by John Barry now. I recommend it.

    I wrote a paper on the Spanish flu in high school and used that book as one of my main research sources.

    However, I don't get why the same people who say "you can't compare COVID-19 to the flu" also think it's ok to do so when it's the Spanish flu. Especially considering that the Spanish flu was much worse. The Spanish flu fatality rate is often cited as 2.5%, but researchers (including John Barry) think that's an underestimate. It seems like the average of the estimates is somewhere at 6-8% which would make it more similar to 2002-2003 SARS than COVID-19. And those deaths were heavily skewed towards young healthy people. https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-is-nothing-like-the-spanish-flu/

    The CDC currently estimates the fatality rate of COVID-19 at around 0.65%, and other researchers estimate it in the range of 0.2-1%, heavily skewed towards elderly and immunocompromised people. https://theconversation.com/how-deadly-is-the-coronavirus-the-true-fatality-rate-is-tricky-to-find-but-researchers-are-getting-closer-141426
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Dnarules wrote: »
    Rhumax67 wrote: »
    I'm reading "The Great Influenza" by John Barry now. I recommend it. Regardless of the book, I wear a mask. Where I live,NYC suburb, people wear them. There was a lot of hostility in the beginning - but that seems to have stopped. NY was hit really hard & I think people realized it was necessary & a small thing to do. My family goes nowhere - groceries once a week - that's it. We are retired. The last thing I want to do is end up in a hospital & make some poor nurse, who has to take care of me, sick. If wearing a mask helps prevent that I'm all for it!

    That's a great book. I've started reading it again.

    Me too.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    The virus may not be eradicated, but so far this strategy seems to have worked out great for New Zealand. They have a death rate of 4 per million. America has lost 532 people per million. New Zealand’s current outbreak had 22 new cases today. America had 43 THOUSAND cases today. We had ten times as many new cases as all of New Zealand in my home town of Memphis alone today!

    Sweden, on the other hand, has ten times as many deaths per capita as Tennessee.

    Yes, so New Zealand is basically where the US was in February. No population immunity. The second they open up cases are going to begin to spread again. All they've accomplished is pushing cases forward by a few months, just like the states in the US that locked down before their initial surge and then reopened. So what's the end game for New Zealand, since obviously they failed at getting to zero cases before and likely will again? Remain on lockdown for years until a vaccine?

    Sweden has, on average, only a few COVID-19 deaths per week now, despite never locking down. You can see from the graphs I've posted that cases and deaths have already peaked. Meanwhile, the outbreak is still ongoing in Tennessee and cases are rising. So it's disingenuous to compare the two. That's why I compared Sweden to an area of the US that's also pretty much done with COVID-19 and is having comparable deaths per week -- NY and NJ, which have much higher deaths per million than Sweden does (around 1500-1700 per million).

    https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?country=~SWE
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    Sweden, on the other hand, has ten times as many deaths per capita as Tennessee.

    Sweden's stats aren't actually bad compared to some other states, but they are dreadful compared to its neighboring countries, and there are other factors that matter, such as how dense an area is, how early it got significant cases -- notable that Italy, Spain, and France, as well as the UK, seem to have gotten hit much earlier than some other parts of Europe, and the areas of the US that did worse early on have some similar factors. I doubt Sweden has herd immunity, but I think it's way might be workable for IT, with its specific culture and the fact people are doing a lot of things to minimize spread without a lockdown, plus a healthy population and a great health care system and various other factors. I don't think the US is really comparable, unfortunately.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    edited August 2020
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    Based on you saying highest death rate of any state, I'm assuming NJ. NY and NJ were bad (apart from the nursing home disaster in NY), because NYC metro is so dense and a travel hub, and there clearly was lots of community spread before NY/NJ shut down -- it was there in significant numbers before a lot of other areas in the US. There also likely is something to it hitting the north harder when weather was relatively bad and people were indoors more, and the south worse during the heat, when they are indoors more.

    Yes, so, did the lockdown in NY/NJ accomplish anything? Did it even help to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of cases? Or did the pre-lockdown community spread ensure sufficient population immunity, that the cases were going to peak in April either way?

    Also, why did other areas of the country lock down when the virus hadn't even spread there yet, and there was no curve to flatten? What did they expect would happen once they opened back up?
    At least at first NYC had lots of people who weren't compliant from anecdotal stuff I've heard from people I know there, as well as various articles. Don't know about NJ. From a good friend in Philly it doesn't seem like they are any more compliant than people here (Chicago), and that's only okay, hardly most people being hermits and never socializing and always wearing masks. Indeed, when it was hitting the early states/cities worst, we were still being told not to bother with masks.

    But were they less compliant than almost anywhere else on earth? Because the theory that "if we just behaved we would be done with this" seems to indicate that areas with the most deaths have the lowest levels of compliance. So by that measure, everyone in my area must have been out in March having wild parties every night and spitting on one another.
    The idea that the difference is because AZ didn't lock down as much early, and that helped, needs a lot more evidence, as there are a huge number of obvious differences. (I think we should have handled this on more of a regional basis myself, but I think the idea that most states would have had FEWER deaths if they'd not shut down at all seems inconsistent with what happened in other countries, like many in Europe, as well as Australia and NZ. The problem is we never really did a hard lockdown -- and those places that came closest started way too late, like Italy.

    What would a "hard lockdown" accomplish? Even if we did a "hard lockdown," all it would take is a few undetected cases to cause cases to spike again once everything opened back up. Which is exactly what happened in NZ.
    Are you imagining that the current stats in Australia or NZ are anything close to the US? Yeah, I'm sure NZ thinks their policy was awful.

    They're at the very beginning of the outbreak. Their options are either to never open up again until a vaccine (which could take years), or to open up and get into the same situation the US and Europe are in. The point was that even they haven't been able to eradicate COVID-19 despite being geographically isolated, low-population nations, that did "hard lockdowns."
    And because of good early action many places can return to normal or even never really had to cancel school at all.

    Which places? Certainly not Australia and NZ, where you can't even go outside without being harassed by the police.
    Anyway, this is all really off topic. The question is masks, and in that masks make it safer (mainly for those others you are around, but if we all wear them, even better) to get back to normal life, I don't see why people object to them.

    My original point was, the mask is a minor concern compared to all this other stuff. I'll wear it if it gets people to shut up about "killing grandma," but I also think its efficacy is likely way overstated. And the hard evidence for its level of efficacy is inconclusive so far.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    Gisel2015 wrote: »
    @laurenq1991 Great idea (about the bolded part of your message). What a genius >:)>:)

    The long-term impacts of Covid-19 (Dr. Sanjay Gupta)

    For many Covid-19 survivors, the diagnosis was just the beginning. Since then, their lives have been turned upside down as unexpected symptoms continue to linger. They are known as long haulers. Many were young and healthy, but now, weeks or months later, even getting out of bed is a struggle for some. And doctors don’t know when, or if, they’ll ever fully recover.

    I spoke to several patients who have told their doctors they experience difficulties breathing, nerve pain, or even memory loss and brain fog.

    The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 35% of adults still don’t feel back to normal, even two to three weeks after testing positive and exhibiting symptoms. A study of 143 Italian patients found that 87% reported having at least one lingering effect 60 days after the onset of their first symptom.

    The long-term symptoms are so mysterious that there is now a center for Post-Covid care at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. It’s the first of its kind focusing on recovery.

    Dr. Zijian Chen, the medical director of the center, says one of the tricky parts is figuring out who might have long-term symptoms.

    “I would presume that if you had a pre-existing condition that the infection with the virus can worsen that condition,” Chen said. “But again, we're also seeing patients who are previously healthy ... but their symptoms have also persisted throughout their illness and beyond.”
    [/i]

    Ah, the classic shifting the narrative from deaths to the vague and poorly defined "long-term effects."

    a) Again, how are lockdowns supposed to prevent this? Lockdowns only delay cases.

    b) That's 35% of cases that were both symptomatic and tested positive. A lot of the milder cases never even get tested for, either because they're asymptomatic or the symptoms are so mild as to barely be noticeable. It's estimated the actual case prevalence is 10-12x what is tested, and obviously more severe cases are more likely to be tested. So, no, it's not 35% of all cases...but they're phrasing it that way to make you think it is.

    c) It can take people weeks or months to recover from the flu or pneumonia. That's considered to be normal, in fact. It took me months to recover from the flu (likely H1N1) that I got in 2011. In fact I missed so much class due to the lingering effects, that it affected my GPA. Nobody shut anything down for me. (In fact, a student at my school actually died from H1N1 in 2009, and the school didn't shut down at all.)

    Hey, look, it's an article from 2010 about the "long-term effects" of swine flu! https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2010/03/29/swine_flu_fallout_many_suffer_nagging_symptoms_long_after_h1n1_subsides.html

    d) Psychosomatic illness exists, and we are basically creating an optimal environment for psychosomatic symptoms to flourish, with all the fear-mongering in the media. "Brain fog" and "nerve pain" are classic psychosomatic symptoms, for example.

    One of the women in this article is clearly a hypochondriac...just check out her ridiculous account of going to the hospital, then realizing she wasn't actually that sick, and going home and miraculously not dying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/11/coronavirus-chronic/?arc404=true

    Another lady in that article admits that the doctors keep telling her that "your body took a hit and it will need time to recover," yet she still refuses to believe it for some reason.

    I've also seen those "COVID-19 long-term effects" discussion groups, and some of the people say they never even tested positive!
  • BrustMannEiner
    BrustMannEiner Posts: 360 Member
    Thank you @laurenq1991

    Sorry that you are also receiving the backlash of comments such as "What a genius". Been there, addressed comments like that, thread was closed then reopened after being edited. I guess it's positive that those disagreeing with you, and us, are not stating we should be thumped from a social distance with a 72" 2"x4".

    Every little win is a plus.
  • cgvet37
    cgvet37 Posts: 1,189 Member
    ShredWeek1 wrote: »
    I may have missed it, but did anyone who is anti-mask explain how they would vanquish the virus?

    Hell, we should vanquish the Flu.
  • laurenq1991
    laurenq1991 Posts: 384 Member
    BrustMannEiner wrote: »
    Thank you @laurenq1991

    Sorry that you are also receiving the backlash of comments such as "What a genius". Been there, addressed comments like that, thread was closed then reopened after being edited. I guess it's positive that those disagreeing with you, and us, are not stating we should be thumped from a social distance with a 72" 2"x4".

    Every little win is a plus.

    It's to be expected. And it's pretty mild compared to some of the comments I've gotten in the past. Like, some guy once accused me of "not believing in water fluoridation" because I don't agree with lockdowns. Someone else started mocking me and accusing me of "claiming I was psychic" and spamming me with crystal ball emojis, just because I stated that I accurately predicted certain things about the projected IFR, peak of cases, and policy decisions (which I predicted with research and common sense, not any clairvoyant abilities!) Another person accused me of being a "Nazi who supports eugenics" and said that I wanted her grandparents to die so that I could personally profit off the economy being open (????), simply because I said that high-risk people should be locked down but low-risk people shouldn't, and that the lockdowns cause deaths too. I lost one friend, who I had been friends with for years, because she accused me of "distorting the facts to promote a political agenda" when I stated (with no discussion of politics) that the IFR would turn out to be below 1%, and posted sources supporting that claim. She believed the IFR would turn out to be 4% or higher. Now it's consensus among researchers that the IFR is below 1% and possibly even below 0.5%...still haven't gotten an apology from her for being so hateful.

    I've never gotten so much hate in my life, as I have since March when I discussed being anti-lockdown. I've lost so many friends and acquaintances over it, either because people blocked me once they started losing the argument, or because they got so nasty with their personal attacks once they started losing the argument, that I decided I wanted nothing more to do with them. When people resort to insults, it really signals that they have nothing substantiative to back up their argument. And I find that usually in these situations, I'm the only person posting sources to support my argument.

    The funny thing is that almost everyone who accuses me of being ignorant, stupid, and "anti-science" doesn't even have any formal educational background in science, and hasn't taken a biology class since the 9th grade. They usually majored in some liberal arts field. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, I have a degree in molecular biology (from one of the top research universities in the US), and worked in research labs, including medical research, for a few years.
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