The UK-US gap on this is very strange. I also hear that Italians and Germans are more into them than the French are. Northern Europe is of course also not mask-obsessed.
I saw a family - husband wife and kid all masked. I thought I bet they are American, and as I got closer the accents were clear. The germans are in love with their masks and will never drop them. There are very significant cultural differences on masks in Europe and it totally wasn't what I expected. As you mentioned, the italians are all in on covid nonsense but so are the Spanish and Portuguese. The Czech Republic is positively militant. The French are a mix but somehow the Swiss and Dutch wind up being very free? I cant explain it but am sure there will be many papers written about it. It tells me a lot about a country and culture
1) The size of a micropore in an n95 is 8 microns [1]. The size of micropore in cloth masks range from 80 to 500 microns [2] (and this is before they are washed, which increases gaps). The size of Covid virions ranges .08 to .14 microns. At the best-case scenario, an n95 micropore still could fit ~2,550 of the larger virions side-by-side, and just under 8,000 of the smaller virions. And this is assuming the air current you are pulling in through your mouth passes through the holes and not the sides of the mask. For surgical and cloth masks you could fit somewhere between 785,000 and 30,000,000 virions PER micropore (someone please check my math, I'm basically just treating this is the "how many small circles can fit in a larger circle"). Doesn't this completely negate the premise that community masking serves any benefit? Does this not explain why we have known for 100 years that they didn't do anything after trying them in 1918? Why even in the operating theater we have been unable to find through RCT any benefit and probably just have our surgeons wear them out of tradition? [3,4]
2) After we realized the virions were airborne and not in respiratory droplets [5] why are mask-adherents still treating this as if the virions are attached to large enough particles to be filtered? What is going on?
3) Why can't a blind RCT be conducted using "fake masks"? Couldn't Abaluck have supplied a bunch of villages with realistic looking fake masks [6] and told the villagers a "noble lie" like they had extra special electrostatic charge? See how they compared to villages with real surgical masks?
4) Why don't we know the following (anyone who comes across this comment and has these answers please share sources, I have a few weak citations only):
- Exactly how many viable virions are expelled per breath, per activity
- Exactly how many virions pass through each type of mask per breath
- Exactly how many virions which are initially trapped are pushed through after subsequent breaths for each type of mask
- The infectious dose, in terms of virions, to trigger infection
5) Why the Nordic countries had the best outcome by almost every metric [7] even though they had the lowest mask usage in the entire world? If the masks stopped covid in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan in 2020, why did they stop working in 2022?
[7] yes, that includes Sweden which had zero excess deaths ages 0-64 between 2020 and 2021, and lower total excess deaths than every country except Norway, New Zealand, and possibly Australia (lacking 2021 data) see: https://imgur.com/a/lJzh87w
Ian Miller has done the job proving that masking did little to affect spread. His myriad of charts and now book are seen https://ianmsc.substack.com/ and on Twitter.
Yes, I have his book he's one of my 24 paid subs here. While his charts are perfect for pointing out the absurdity of this nonsense, we need a stronger scientific push to end this "debate". We need to find the next William Farr to discard their cherished theory and accept the truth. I think only by helping the strong adherents to this pseudoscience understand they have duped themselves can we make progress. I love Ian's sarcasm, but that won't crack through to a true believer, only make them clutch their religion stronger.
It's scary to consider the tens or hundreds of thousands of health experts, physicians, researchers who consider them to be effective because that means they have an incorrect understanding of the dynamic behavior which will influence their downstream research, treatments, containment protocols, etc.
To go back to the William Farr analogy, imagine how many hours were spent completely wasted by the hundreds of researchers who followed his lead and believed that elevation and miasma explained Cholera. The brightest minds of the time followed (by hindsight) completely dead-end routes of theory for at least 9 years (given when Snow had proposed transmission through water).
We are seeing worse on a larger scale. Probably 5 million hours of time spent justifying what appears to be a completely bullshit hypothesis - my rough estimate based on the literature published backing masks from such hard-hitting papers like "Effectiveness of Face Mask or Respirator Use in Indoor Public Settings for Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infection — California, February–December 2021" and "Science Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2" (the infamous Salon study).
I remain stunned that so many are ignorant of Ian's work. I managed to get kicked on a number of platforms by stating the conclusions from his charts. He was careful on Twitter not to draw the obvious conclusions.
I too looked at the various papers that informed us that masks help reduce spread. None of them supported the hypothesis. The Danmask study illustrated the folly of poor mask handling. I can't recall any PSA teaching us that those masks are hazardous and need to be changed much more often. Mine hangs in my car and is now ~ months old. The ear pieces break eventually on my cheapies. But they are my talisman for admission in some places. I don't care to make any statement, just get on with life.
It's actually fascinating how the public health establishment has been able to create so many bad studies in such a short time and refuses to concede the poor design and logical fallacies they all contain.
Yet, at the same time, should you present these same people with a paper noting benefit of <insert HCQ, Ivermectin, etc> they will go through it with a fine tooth comb to find any many possible excuses to dismiss the study ("N is too small", "This is a pre-print", "The author is biased as he previously stated he thought XYZ would work", etc, etc)... but tell these people a lady in a salon didn't infect half her clients who agreed to be tested while wearing a cloth mask? That paper will make headlines and cited by the CDC. Crazy.
(I now suspect this behavior might explain how the world clung to bloodletting for 200 years after William Harvey published "De Motu Cordis" and challenged practitioners of bloodletting to an RCT)
In the US at least it seems Katelyn Jetelina/YLE re-posting the Twitter Mask List from "@nuanceORDEATH" to FaceBook in Nov 2020 [1] was a pivotal moment in "the science being settled" for lay people. After that, anytime I tried to point out how "extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence", they would refence that FB post as some sort of "mic drop" moment, as if a list of 70 bad studies constituted extraordinary evidence.
No, rather, if after 70 studies you can't produce an RCT, then the 70 bad studies degrade your argument worse than if there were simply no studies at all. (I propose a variation of Hitchens Razor - claims backed by bad evidence can be dismissed with bad evidence).
I took that list they made, carefully reviewed, catalogued, and added to it (including notable articles at times, a few rebuttals from substack) and now stands at 273 entries. Here is copy in Google, I noted author, study type, setting, and some quotes from each study to jog my memory (privately I have extensive notes for each entry too): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahaJui6Af0kGYMwHgAtnKCE6-bHbCLxnrQxuMC0kygA/edit#gid=0
Going through the initial 70 studies they tweeted, it was quickly apparent they committed the logical fallacy of "counting your hits and forgetting your misses" - they excluded any existing study that found no benefit, in addition, they would include systemic reviews, then proceed to double dip by including the individual studies from the systemic reviews - but only those which were favorable towards Masking.
For example they included "A rapid systematic review of the efficacy of face masks and respirators against coronaviruses and other respiratory transmissible viruses for the community, healthcare workers and sick patients" by MacIntyre, et al (#17 in my google sheet), which is a systemic review, then included favorable studies included in that review such as Barasheed et al (#40 in Google Sheet), but excluded any which were not favorable (e.g., "Non-pharmaceutical public health interventions for pandemic influenza: an evaluation of the evidence base", #99, it's in MacIntyre et al review, but not listed individually).
It's really frustrating because explaining this sort of problem to the lay public is near impossible... hell it is near impossible to explain this to people who supposedly have background in study design, statistics, or basic logic.
It's frustrating to be bogged down by brandolinis law like this. There is no reason I should have even had to waste my time on such a ridiculous claim. It should have ended when we asked proponents to explain how we found viruses in the first place, and after they explain how Pasteur's assistant found water kept getting contaminated after passing through CERAMIC filters, they realized there was something even SMALLER than bacteria. That should have been the end. Jesus.
I guess I don't quite understand Sheets. Are your comments somewhere? The notes tab doesn't present them. I do appreciate the effort to catalog these studies.
And I have seen comments from time to time denying the existence of any virus. Those statements along with a poor understanding of how sequencing is done in today's parallel systems are troubling . There is something to be said about how we infer the presence of things difficult to directly image.
My comments are set to private for now, I’ve been slowly going through to make them presentable but in current form there’s too much short-hand notes to make much sense to anyone but me. I really don’t want to put in more work. It’s insane I have felt compelled to take it this far, but needed to be ready for the hysterical pseudoscience crowd when they tried to mask kids in our school.
I like your comment about "everyone" wearing masks could possibly give a false sense of security to people who are more at risk. I see this all the time, even in the time of delta and before vaccinations were available. Elderly people getting about a foot apart with others while masked up.
I still see this in my adult school classrooms. People who wear masks indoors and outdoors crowding together during group work. I even advise them to distance from each other, especially since we have a lot of space in there room, but they insist on getting close together.
On top of that, about half of them continue to wear cloth or surgical masks. There is no mandate anymore. I don't mask up. So if you truly believe masks will help you, why continue to wear less effective ones? I even offer KF94s from my stockpile, and most don't take me up on that offer. It truly boggles the mind.
I also have students telling me that the vaccines are just as effective against omicron as they were against delta. They tell me that boosters effectively restore themselves to the same level of immunity. They recommend that I wear a mask again even though we have great ventilation (a bungalow style classroom that has a front door to the outside that we leave open, and large windows on both sides that remain open, plus two air purifiers).
And that's what it is. Most people (just "many"?) will need a lot of time to deprogram themselves from this insanity. Meanwhile, how many people are actually using the pandemic as a wake-up call to improve their overall health?
Vancouver BC and mandate was lifted but masks abound! Even outside!!! Please, people. Please. I hope the more I happily and peacefully don’t wear mine, the more others will notice and break free.
Yeah, I think it takes a certain proportion of people not wearing masks for those who are hesitant to finally take theirs off as well. There are plenty of people who simply continuing to wear masks because they don't want to stand out or seem like they don't care.
I just came back to the mainland from 4 days in Hawaii, where indoor mandates fell while I was there. Extremely uneven wearing, from some tourists wearing them on the beach (and *while wading into the Pacific ocean* to others not wearing them at all even before the "end of mandate." Outside Honolulu, people seem to have mostly and quickly stopped after the official rule change (if they hadn't already).
How do folks who "believe in masks" deal with the sheer cognitive dissonance?
Can I suggest you stay in London during your break. Face coverings are still mandatory in Scotland. We are the only nation in the United Kingdom still enforcing this bonkers policy. Its obviously working very well as Scotland has the highest rates of infection at the moment.
In the vein of false reassurance are those who aren't feeling well but socialize or attend events and think it's OK b/c they are wearing a mask. My friend, with symptoms of cold/allergy/covid, decides to attend a symphony concert (full of elderly patrons) and thinks it's fine since she is wearing a mask...
There is a law suit where 10 pilots from a number of commercial airlines are suing the CDC on not eliminating the recommendation for masks on airlines. Their case covers 7 points one of which is ignoring what the studies have shown on masking. Unfortunately we are ignoring a ton of medical and public health literature that does not fit the narrative. Instead of burying or censoring the supporters and authors of these studies we should be holding public debates about the topics so we can arrive at scientific consensus. That is kind of how we always shared data and results before. Why is the scientific community at large not speaking to this?
I know I tend to be a simpleton, but why hasn’t someone just hooked up an N95 mask and sucked through a known quantity of coronavirus at average inspiratory pressures and measured how many came through? Can that not be done? How did they determine that N95s filter 95% of TB bacilli? Not possible to do that with virus? Or is it all extrapolation and no measurement?
I am not “zero covid” - I have accepted I will be exposed if I haven’t already and I am less anxious about it now thanks to Vinay and others. However my one hesitation is the impact to immunocompromised and how the disability justice community calls for more community care and not treating those still vulnerable as disposable. Perhaps they are misguided in their solutions, but I believe Vinay does care about impacts to vulnerable people (as he argues about why we should keep schools open), so I honestly would like to know what can we do to protect others?
I personally don’t find the argument in this article compelling bc it seems to say community masking is ineffective bc not everyone will do it correctly (but if they did, then it would help? I can see how this lends itself easily to virtue signaling). What feels more compelling to the mask argument to me is to say the benefit of masking is so small compared to vaccine so better to focus our efforts there. Also to focus on systemic changes like access to healthcare and treatments. I wonder if people feel helpless to affect systemic change and that’s why it becomes easy to focus on individual actions.
I don't wear them and not simply because I sport a full beard.
I have found a use for Safety Toe sneakers however working against Infection Vectors that exhibit above average decibel utterances of a medical nature.
Vinay... I know this is unrelated, but the latest NYT “debunking” of ivermectin... references clinical trial, which concluded there was “no significant effect” from ivermectin... but then you go to the data table, and the ivermectin group had less deaths, less people on ventilators, and less adverse events while sick with covid. What is going on???
I'm in London for spring break where its basically 2019 here.
People in masks are a slim minority and look like weirdos
The UK-US gap on this is very strange. I also hear that Italians and Germans are more into them than the French are. Northern Europe is of course also not mask-obsessed.
I saw a family - husband wife and kid all masked. I thought I bet they are American, and as I got closer the accents were clear. The germans are in love with their masks and will never drop them. There are very significant cultural differences on masks in Europe and it totally wasn't what I expected. As you mentioned, the italians are all in on covid nonsense but so are the Spanish and Portuguese. The Czech Republic is positively militant. The French are a mix but somehow the Swiss and Dutch wind up being very free? I cant explain it but am sure there will be many papers written about it. It tells me a lot about a country and culture
5 Questions for believers in the mask hypothesis:
1) The size of a micropore in an n95 is 8 microns [1]. The size of micropore in cloth masks range from 80 to 500 microns [2] (and this is before they are washed, which increases gaps). The size of Covid virions ranges .08 to .14 microns. At the best-case scenario, an n95 micropore still could fit ~2,550 of the larger virions side-by-side, and just under 8,000 of the smaller virions. And this is assuming the air current you are pulling in through your mouth passes through the holes and not the sides of the mask. For surgical and cloth masks you could fit somewhere between 785,000 and 30,000,000 virions PER micropore (someone please check my math, I'm basically just treating this is the "how many small circles can fit in a larger circle"). Doesn't this completely negate the premise that community masking serves any benefit? Does this not explain why we have known for 100 years that they didn't do anything after trying them in 1918? Why even in the operating theater we have been unable to find through RCT any benefit and probably just have our surgeons wear them out of tradition? [3,4]
2) After we realized the virions were airborne and not in respiratory droplets [5] why are mask-adherents still treating this as if the virions are attached to large enough particles to be filtered? What is going on?
3) Why can't a blind RCT be conducted using "fake masks"? Couldn't Abaluck have supplied a bunch of villages with realistic looking fake masks [6] and told the villagers a "noble lie" like they had extra special electrostatic charge? See how they compared to villages with real surgical masks?
4) Why don't we know the following (anyone who comes across this comment and has these answers please share sources, I have a few weak citations only):
- Exactly how many viable virions are expelled per breath, per activity
- Exactly how many virions pass through each type of mask per breath
- Exactly how many virions which are initially trapped are pushed through after subsequent breaths for each type of mask
- The infectious dose, in terms of virions, to trigger infection
5) Why the Nordic countries had the best outcome by almost every metric [7] even though they had the lowest mask usage in the entire world? If the masks stopped covid in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan in 2020, why did they stop working in 2022?
._____________________________
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7253999/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6599448/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214031X18300809
[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01658736
[5] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
[6] https://fakemaskworldwide.com/the-fake-surgical-mask-2-layer/
[7] yes, that includes Sweden which had zero excess deaths ages 0-64 between 2020 and 2021, and lower total excess deaths than every country except Norway, New Zealand, and possibly Australia (lacking 2021 data) see: https://imgur.com/a/lJzh87w
Ian Miller has done the job proving that masking did little to affect spread. His myriad of charts and now book are seen https://ianmsc.substack.com/ and on Twitter.
Yes, I have his book he's one of my 24 paid subs here. While his charts are perfect for pointing out the absurdity of this nonsense, we need a stronger scientific push to end this "debate". We need to find the next William Farr to discard their cherished theory and accept the truth. I think only by helping the strong adherents to this pseudoscience understand they have duped themselves can we make progress. I love Ian's sarcasm, but that won't crack through to a true believer, only make them clutch their religion stronger.
It's scary to consider the tens or hundreds of thousands of health experts, physicians, researchers who consider them to be effective because that means they have an incorrect understanding of the dynamic behavior which will influence their downstream research, treatments, containment protocols, etc.
To go back to the William Farr analogy, imagine how many hours were spent completely wasted by the hundreds of researchers who followed his lead and believed that elevation and miasma explained Cholera. The brightest minds of the time followed (by hindsight) completely dead-end routes of theory for at least 9 years (given when Snow had proposed transmission through water).
We are seeing worse on a larger scale. Probably 5 million hours of time spent justifying what appears to be a completely bullshit hypothesis - my rough estimate based on the literature published backing masks from such hard-hitting papers like "Effectiveness of Face Mask or Respirator Use in Indoor Public Settings for Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infection — California, February–December 2021" and "Science Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2" (the infamous Salon study).
I remain stunned that so many are ignorant of Ian's work. I managed to get kicked on a number of platforms by stating the conclusions from his charts. He was careful on Twitter not to draw the obvious conclusions.
I too looked at the various papers that informed us that masks help reduce spread. None of them supported the hypothesis. The Danmask study illustrated the folly of poor mask handling. I can't recall any PSA teaching us that those masks are hazardous and need to be changed much more often. Mine hangs in my car and is now ~ months old. The ear pieces break eventually on my cheapies. But they are my talisman for admission in some places. I don't care to make any statement, just get on with life.
It's actually fascinating how the public health establishment has been able to create so many bad studies in such a short time and refuses to concede the poor design and logical fallacies they all contain.
Yet, at the same time, should you present these same people with a paper noting benefit of <insert HCQ, Ivermectin, etc> they will go through it with a fine tooth comb to find any many possible excuses to dismiss the study ("N is too small", "This is a pre-print", "The author is biased as he previously stated he thought XYZ would work", etc, etc)... but tell these people a lady in a salon didn't infect half her clients who agreed to be tested while wearing a cloth mask? That paper will make headlines and cited by the CDC. Crazy.
(I now suspect this behavior might explain how the world clung to bloodletting for 200 years after William Harvey published "De Motu Cordis" and challenged practitioners of bloodletting to an RCT)
In the US at least it seems Katelyn Jetelina/YLE re-posting the Twitter Mask List from "@nuanceORDEATH" to FaceBook in Nov 2020 [1] was a pivotal moment in "the science being settled" for lay people. After that, anytime I tried to point out how "extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence", they would refence that FB post as some sort of "mic drop" moment, as if a list of 70 bad studies constituted extraordinary evidence.
No, rather, if after 70 studies you can't produce an RCT, then the 70 bad studies degrade your argument worse than if there were simply no studies at all. (I propose a variation of Hitchens Razor - claims backed by bad evidence can be dismissed with bad evidence).
I took that list they made, carefully reviewed, catalogued, and added to it (including notable articles at times, a few rebuttals from substack) and now stands at 273 entries. Here is copy in Google, I noted author, study type, setting, and some quotes from each study to jog my memory (privately I have extensive notes for each entry too): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahaJui6Af0kGYMwHgAtnKCE6-bHbCLxnrQxuMC0kygA/edit#gid=0
Going through the initial 70 studies they tweeted, it was quickly apparent they committed the logical fallacy of "counting your hits and forgetting your misses" - they excluded any existing study that found no benefit, in addition, they would include systemic reviews, then proceed to double dip by including the individual studies from the systemic reviews - but only those which were favorable towards Masking.
For example they included "A rapid systematic review of the efficacy of face masks and respirators against coronaviruses and other respiratory transmissible viruses for the community, healthcare workers and sick patients" by MacIntyre, et al (#17 in my google sheet), which is a systemic review, then included favorable studies included in that review such as Barasheed et al (#40 in Google Sheet), but excluded any which were not favorable (e.g., "Non-pharmaceutical public health interventions for pandemic influenza: an evaluation of the evidence base", #99, it's in MacIntyre et al review, but not listed individually).
It's really frustrating because explaining this sort of problem to the lay public is near impossible... hell it is near impossible to explain this to people who supposedly have background in study design, statistics, or basic logic.
It's frustrating to be bogged down by brandolinis law like this. There is no reason I should have even had to waste my time on such a ridiculous claim. It should have ended when we asked proponents to explain how we found viruses in the first place, and after they explain how Pasteur's assistant found water kept getting contaminated after passing through CERAMIC filters, they realized there was something even SMALLER than bacteria. That should have been the end. Jesus.
The post that fanned the fire:
[1] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
I guess I don't quite understand Sheets. Are your comments somewhere? The notes tab doesn't present them. I do appreciate the effort to catalog these studies.
And I have seen comments from time to time denying the existence of any virus. Those statements along with a poor understanding of how sequencing is done in today's parallel systems are troubling . There is something to be said about how we infer the presence of things difficult to directly image.
My comments are set to private for now, I’ve been slowly going through to make them presentable but in current form there’s too much short-hand notes to make much sense to anyone but me. I really don’t want to put in more work. It’s insane I have felt compelled to take it this far, but needed to be ready for the hysterical pseudoscience crowd when they tried to mask kids in our school.
I like your comment about "everyone" wearing masks could possibly give a false sense of security to people who are more at risk. I see this all the time, even in the time of delta and before vaccinations were available. Elderly people getting about a foot apart with others while masked up.
I still see this in my adult school classrooms. People who wear masks indoors and outdoors crowding together during group work. I even advise them to distance from each other, especially since we have a lot of space in there room, but they insist on getting close together.
On top of that, about half of them continue to wear cloth or surgical masks. There is no mandate anymore. I don't mask up. So if you truly believe masks will help you, why continue to wear less effective ones? I even offer KF94s from my stockpile, and most don't take me up on that offer. It truly boggles the mind.
I also have students telling me that the vaccines are just as effective against omicron as they were against delta. They tell me that boosters effectively restore themselves to the same level of immunity. They recommend that I wear a mask again even though we have great ventilation (a bungalow style classroom that has a front door to the outside that we leave open, and large windows on both sides that remain open, plus two air purifiers).
It's frustrating.
Given the barrage of bad information we have been consuming, the fear will take some time to abate.
And that's what it is. Most people (just "many"?) will need a lot of time to deprogram themselves from this insanity. Meanwhile, how many people are actually using the pandemic as a wake-up call to improve their overall health?
Vancouver BC and mandate was lifted but masks abound! Even outside!!! Please, people. Please. I hope the more I happily and peacefully don’t wear mine, the more others will notice and break free.
Yeah, I think it takes a certain proportion of people not wearing masks for those who are hesitant to finally take theirs off as well. There are plenty of people who simply continuing to wear masks because they don't want to stand out or seem like they don't care.
I just came back to the mainland from 4 days in Hawaii, where indoor mandates fell while I was there. Extremely uneven wearing, from some tourists wearing them on the beach (and *while wading into the Pacific ocean* to others not wearing them at all even before the "end of mandate." Outside Honolulu, people seem to have mostly and quickly stopped after the official rule change (if they hadn't already).
How do folks who "believe in masks" deal with the sheer cognitive dissonance?
Can I suggest you stay in London during your break. Face coverings are still mandatory in Scotland. We are the only nation in the United Kingdom still enforcing this bonkers policy. Its obviously working very well as Scotland has the highest rates of infection at the moment.
PROUD PAYING SUBSCRIBER! thank you for being the voice i dont have. 🇨🇦❤️
In the vein of false reassurance are those who aren't feeling well but socialize or attend events and think it's OK b/c they are wearing a mask. My friend, with symptoms of cold/allergy/covid, decides to attend a symphony concert (full of elderly patrons) and thinks it's fine since she is wearing a mask...
There is a law suit where 10 pilots from a number of commercial airlines are suing the CDC on not eliminating the recommendation for masks on airlines. Their case covers 7 points one of which is ignoring what the studies have shown on masking. Unfortunately we are ignoring a ton of medical and public health literature that does not fit the narrative. Instead of burying or censoring the supporters and authors of these studies we should be holding public debates about the topics so we can arrive at scientific consensus. That is kind of how we always shared data and results before. Why is the scientific community at large not speaking to this?
I know I tend to be a simpleton, but why hasn’t someone just hooked up an N95 mask and sucked through a known quantity of coronavirus at average inspiratory pressures and measured how many came through? Can that not be done? How did they determine that N95s filter 95% of TB bacilli? Not possible to do that with virus? Or is it all extrapolation and no measurement?
I am not “zero covid” - I have accepted I will be exposed if I haven’t already and I am less anxious about it now thanks to Vinay and others. However my one hesitation is the impact to immunocompromised and how the disability justice community calls for more community care and not treating those still vulnerable as disposable. Perhaps they are misguided in their solutions, but I believe Vinay does care about impacts to vulnerable people (as he argues about why we should keep schools open), so I honestly would like to know what can we do to protect others?
I personally don’t find the argument in this article compelling bc it seems to say community masking is ineffective bc not everyone will do it correctly (but if they did, then it would help? I can see how this lends itself easily to virtue signaling). What feels more compelling to the mask argument to me is to say the benefit of masking is so small compared to vaccine so better to focus our efforts there. Also to focus on systemic changes like access to healthcare and treatments. I wonder if people feel helpless to affect systemic change and that’s why it becomes easy to focus on individual actions.
I don't wear them and not simply because I sport a full beard.
I have found a use for Safety Toe sneakers however working against Infection Vectors that exhibit above average decibel utterances of a medical nature.
Very important to protect ones feet......
Vinay... I know this is unrelated, but the latest NYT “debunking” of ivermectin... references clinical trial, which concluded there was “no significant effect” from ivermectin... but then you go to the data table, and the ivermectin group had less deaths, less people on ventilators, and less adverse events while sick with covid. What is going on???