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I don't understand why we are not trying to interrupt the transmission vectors with masks and hand sanitizer like the Chinese do. They ramped the daily producti

• bosswipe 7y ago
  The anti-mask thing in the west is so upsetting, and it's more aggravating because it's the health care workers giving the horrible advice. I don't care that we don't have enough N95 masks for everybody, N95 are for preventing inhalation of virus. What we need are the disparaged "surgical" masks which are for preventing spittle flying everywhere. And they do not have to be high-tech they just have to cover the mouth. It should be mandatory to wear one out of the house. That's what China did.
  • geomark 7y ago
    It seems strange to me as well. I am in Thailand and, in Bangkok at least, most people wear masks, carry disinfecting hand gel and are very wary about close contact with people and surfaces. Stores like Makro (Thai version of CostCo) have mask-wearing guards at the store entrance that take your temperature and provide hand gel, while cleaning crews wipe down the handles of shopping carts with disinfectant. To be fair, many people in Bangkok already wore masks because of the pollution. So there is no stigma. But it seems that the Thais started taking Covid-19 serious right away, so maybe that's why Thailand, which was on the leader board in number of infections early on, has reached only 114 confirmed infectinos with 1 death as of yesterday. But only time will tell if all the precautions can slow down the spread since it only takes a few infected but symptomless highly social spreaders to really blow things up. And it looks like that may have happened in the last few days.
    • ncallaway 7y ago
      > It seems strange to me as well. We don't have nearly enough masks, and the authorities are trying to ensure that as many masks as we have can go to a healthcare setting. It's why they're giving us incongruous messages: both "masks don't help reduce the risk of transmission", AND "we need to save masks for health care workers". Obviously, since we're trying to preserve the supply for health care workers they do have some utility in reducing the risk of transmission.
• swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  Do masks even work on things as small as viruses?
  • badpun 7y ago
    I'm not an expert, but I believe they stop the droplets, which are vectors for viruses.
    • wisienkas 7y ago
      It has been proved that most of those masks sold simply aren't closely sewed enough to stop the droplets containing the disease. So in general the mask don't help. Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus
      • pishpash 7y ago
        Just think about what you're saying. The mask is a piece of material, it has no directionality. Stop repeating ignorance that you hear second-hand and think for yourself.
        • yokaze 7y ago
          Try to suck out a candle instead of blowing it out. That's where the directionality comes from. You mask is not hermetically sealed and only going through the material.
      • mtreis86 7y ago
        Avoiding spreading from yourself to others is half the battle though.
      • neuronic 7y ago
        > Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus This is a large contribution for containment. Masks should be worn by anybody at this point.
• Havoc 7y ago
  You’d think that if the west gets the concept of condoms this wouldn’t be that far fetched...
• smallnamespace 7y ago
  I think the easy answer here is that there’s no culture of wearing masks in public and it’s very visible and easy to ridicule. This isn’t Tokyo, where everyone was wearing masks before this crisis and you get one for 400 yen at any convenience store, even inside the rail station. Authorities in a democracy work mainly by persuasion, and they have a limited budget of how much they can educate and bend people’s behavior. This is what you would expect a system that takes citizen feedback into account, where citizens have a very strong prior that is inappropriate to the current situation. Note most people in a democracy are strongly against government propaganda, but propaganda is basically state-owned tax on citizens’ attention. Think about how much attention it would take to educate people until they all voluntarily wore masks, whether that education would be politically popular, and also how many dollars in ad revenue that would have cost in the private attention market (ads).
  • pas 7y ago
    Good points, but still, it's not consistent to use that low-bandwidth channel for wrong messages. Sure, say that don't hoard masks, but don't say that it doesn't work anyway. Say that it would only work if everyone would use them. (Because you don't know when you are contagious anyway, so saying only sick folks should wear them is again a bad message.) Also, saying that everyone should wear them is consistent with don't hoard them. (After all, if doesn't help you if you have masks but don't distribute them to others to protect you and "your loved ones".)
• marcus_holmes 7y ago
  In Asia, where mask-wearing is common (part of the culture, nothing to do with COVID), sick people wear masks. It's very practical, and also a social signal that "I am ill". As a manager of a business in SE Asia, people coming in sick but wearing masks was awesome. The mask-wearing reduced their infectiousness (because the mask stops saliva-borne virus communication) and made it OK to come in to work if you're feeling well enough to work. It's socially acceptable to not shake a mask-wearer's hand or otherwise touch them. It's as much social signal as anything ("I might be infectious, I'm not going to be offended if you treat me as a walking virus bomb"). Part of the problem for the West is that we wear masks when we don't want to get sick. Masks don't really work for this (the rest of the mask-wearer still gets covered in virus). And if we're diagnosed sick, then we stop wearing masks. Again, that's not how the mask thing works, because this is when masks are most useful. Both as a social signal and practical way of reducing infectiousness. To use masks effectively, we need to stop wearing them when we're scared, and start wearing them when we're infected. But I think the social change to do this will be difficult.
  • Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    > when we don't want to get sick. Masks don't really work for this They do, they decrease the chance to get infected. They don't guarantee it. The previous poster wrote about exactly this.
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      Situation: Infected person coughs near a non-infected person. If the Infected Person is wearing the mask, all good. Cough contained in mask, no virus spread anywhere, everyone OK. If the Non-Infected Person is wearing the mask, they're still covered in virus-laden cough mess. All they have to do is touch their face once in the next 3 days to catch the virus. Washing their hands will remove the virus from the hands, but not from their clothes, hair, etc. Also, they're now covered in virus. Everything they touch will be covered in virus. Virus everywhere, infecting everyone. Everyone not OK. It's possible that a non-infected person wearing a mask might prevent a tiny bit of infection, but it's MASSIVELY more effective on the infected person. Surgeons wear masks in case they cough on the patient. They don't put a mask on the patient...
• bsder 7y ago
  > 1. you go out, you wear a mask If you can get a mask. The mask manufacturers in the West are not going to ramp up without a significant amount of money up front. The last time they did with SARS they almost went bankrupt after it fizzled out and demand collapsed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavirus-mask-shortage-texas-manufacturing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir... So, you need the US government to either command or fund the manufacturing ramp up. Unfortunately, that requires people in charge who actually don't suffer from cranio-rectal impaction.
  • roenxi 7y ago
    Or we could encourage mask producers to charge more during a crisis. If mask producers could charge enough that the masks weren't quite fly off the shelves, we would be swimming in masks made and kept in storage for times of pandemic. It is pretty obvious what happens; producers are shamed into not making a profit when demand is high so they don't bother to produce.
• MisterTea 7y ago
  At the risk of sounding stupid, why hasn't anyone been talking about making makeshift masks using clothing or cloth? There's plenty of that in everyone's home. What about a scarf? Fine, it's not N95 but it can't be any less effective than a simple surgical mask that does blocks spittle.
  • pas 7y ago
    A scarf (and other soft cloths) sounds problematic, because it traps droplets and then gives them more time to get into your airways. Though it probably helps with someone coughing at you directly. (But you have to instantly remove the scarf, and should wear glasses too, and then remove that too, and then wash your face, then the glasses and then the scarf.)
    • TheCoelacanth 7y ago
      The masks are to stop you from infecting other people, not to stop you from getting infected.
    • MisterTea 7y ago
      The surgical masks are disposable which I get but worst case wash your makeshift mask or carry multiple and keep them segregated in bags. It's not as easy as tossing a surgical mask but a viable alternative in a pinch. And a further thought, I wonder how many surgical masks we'll find floating in the great garbage patch in the next few years. At my work they also threw out all the plastic cutlery so assuming there is a massive trash surge happening. I'm interested in the environmental impact of this outbreak.
      • shalmanese 7y ago
        Viruses, unlike bacteria can't survive outside of a living host. Thus, they can only decrease over time on an inanimate object. This means if you have ~10 - 20 disposable surgical masks you can reuse them until they're disintegrated. Simply adopt a First In Last Out protocol to maximize the days between reuse. The longest we've seen the literature indicate the virus survives on a surface is 3 days and viral loads decrease at an exponential rate so at 6 days, you're >99.99% safe, at 9 days, you're >99.9999% safe etc. Distributing 20 - 30 disposable masks to every American is not outside of logistical possibility. Just make sure you wash and dry the mask as soon as it's off your face so bacterial colonies don't have time to multiply.
• notacoward 7y ago
  I love how everyone wants to talk about masks and hand sanitizer, but not about gloves or good old soap and water. To me, it's a sign of wanting to score internet points more than to actually inform. The best information I've seen so far suggests that SARS-CoV-2 can survive 2-3 hours as aerosol, 2-3 days on some surfaces. You're much more likely to be exposed or to expose others by touching something than by walking around. The "hottest" thing you've been around recently is probably the door handle or the credit-card terminal you touched when you went to buy a year's worth of toilet paper. And what's the surest way to prevent infection via touch? A physical barrier. People who walk around wearing masks but not gloves are making a fashion statement. People who are serious about the issue (including health-care workers) wear both.
  • simiones 7y ago
    What does wearing a glove really achieve? You can't get the virus through direct skin contact, so virus living on your skin is not going to infect you. Touching your face while you have virus on your skin is how you get infected, and touching other surfaces while your hand is dirty is how you help spread the infection. Both of these work just as well if the virus lives on a glove rather than your skin. So no, gloves are entirely useless for protection from this kind of virus. They are much more useless than masks, which could at least temporarily prevent some amount of virus-filled water droplets from reaching your nose.
    • notacoward 7y ago
      You're exhibiting exactly the kind of non-science-based attitude I was talking about. Droplets, oh no, run away! Let's say you're unknowingly infected, like all of those people who were hanging out at bars as though they're invulnerable this weekend. So you have virus on your skin already. Are you more likely to pass it on to others via surfaces if your skin is bare or if you put a glove on it? The answer's pretty obvious. If you touch your face then the probability of infection either way increases again, but (a) people touch their faces less often with gloves on and (b) every time you change gloves the probability drops back to near zero. So yes, gloves do protect you somewhat, and they protect others even more. Just as importantly, there's no sane scenario in which they'd make things worse or deny resources to those who need them more (as with masks). It doesn't make much difference whether the surface transmission route is directly on skin or via face touching. That's why health care professionals use gloves even when dealing with respiratory diseases like COVID-19.
• falcolas 7y ago
  Masks are not effective. There are not only professionals saying this, there are scientific studies, and as a result, fewer surgeons are wearing them, favoring instead a plastic face shield. Why are they not effective? Because they don’t contain the aerosolized moisture from your breath. Most masks, unless properly sealed against your face and not impeded by moisture in the mask, will bypass the mask entirely and vent out the sides. How long does it take for moisture to impede airflow through the mask? About 30 minutes. So, unless you are replacing your mask for a new one every 30 minutes, and are ensuring that its properly fit every time, wearing a mask is a placebo at best. Can a mask block you from spitting on everyone? Sure, but so can your arm or hand when you’re coughing.
• unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I don't understand why we're relying on governments to do this for us. Ethanol is not difficult to make at home and we can do it ourselves (I just don't want to share methods because it's questionably legal in my state/kinda dangerous to do with an open flame).
• panarky 7y ago
  It helps to understand the relative sizes of the particles masks are expected to filter from the air. A coronavirus is about 0.1 µm while surgical masks start to become effective at around 200 µm and up. So a coronavirus is about 2000 times smaller than what a surgical mask can filter. I imagine a chain link fence which is pretty effective at stopping basketballs. A pollen spore is about 2000 times smaller than a basketball. Chain link fences are useless in stopping pollen spores, just like surgical masks are useless in filtering coronaviruses. The only benefit to a surgical mask is to prevent the infected person from spraying large drops of saliva and mucus onto surfaces, there is zero benefit for the uninfected. If you're uninfected, you don't need a mask unless you're caring for sick patients. And even then a surgical mask is pretty useless, you'd need a quality N95 or N100 mask and eye protection.
  • marvin 7y ago
    Those virus particles usually ride on a droplet of fluid, or another big particle. And you're not guaranteed to get sick if you ingest one virus.
  • remmargorp64 7y ago
    Everyone seems to missing one very big, important thing that masks accomplish, even if they don't stop the airborne virus itself: Masks stop people from constantly touching and/or itching their mouth and nose. Think about that for a second, before you tell people how useless masks are.
  • shalmanese 7y ago
    Near universal masking reduced the rate of all infectious diseases, including influenza down to near zero. The size of the virus is irrelevant, it's the size of the carrier medium which is droplets that are very effective at being caught in masks.
• adultSwim 7y ago
  CDC appears to be lying about masks since there aren't enough for everyone. This is harmful guidance as many already have masks (eg for sanding/painting)