Health care workers are exposed to much higher viral loads than members of the general public. It takes only one small mistake to become infected. Dr Li in Wuhan said he became infected because he let his guard down and made one small mistake when dealing with an asymptomatic patient. It cost him his life.

The key with masks is that everyone has to wear them. No exceptions. The main reason is that it stops people who have the virus from spreading it to everyone in their vicinity. Non-infected people wearing a mask add an extra barrier that the virus has to penetrate.

The above is just my non-expert opinion by the way, so feel free to rip it apart or w/e.

A picture for the dumbest person in this thread. He's violently sneezing with and without a mask:



The block rate isn't 100% during a violent sneeze, if you look hard you can see a very tiny bit leak out the bottom (a few white dots vs >1000 without a mask). But they stop 99% of infectious droplets reaching others.

Tell us again how masks don't work, how it's stupid to wear them because they didn't fully protect healthcare works in massive aerosolized environments (it's the infected who need to wear them, you assclown, that's where the benefit is, they stop most of the spittle, sneezes and coughs of the infected spraying out everywhere, as well as help stop unconscious nose/mouth to hand to surface spread), and how you're an expert on vaccines.

Those images are from a 2007 study in the British Medical Journal, by the way, indicating the optimal way to sneeze in theaters.

These are just regular surgical masks, not N95 respirators, and they block 99+% of infectious droplets going out. There's something mentally wrong with you if you don't think the population wearing masks greatly helps reduce spread. Maybe even gets it below 1 on its own with a little bit of minor social distancing plus better hand washing plus quarantining known infected.

Yeah, I'm becoming more and more convinced by the day that the human race is too stupid to survive.

I get that masks, if properly used, work pretty well.

The issue is, getting 350 million people to wear them 100 percent of the time for the next 18 months until a vaccine is developed is going to be a pretty hard sell.

But hold on to your dream that everyone in the US will suddenly become so incredibly aware that this happens.

As I said before, good luck.

It's hard to have a discussion with someone who thinks that 'some health care workers got sick' is logically equivalent to 'we protected nobody.'

Then don't.

How does this actually work in places like Japan & Korea where masks are already common?

Do people just carry 10 masks with them and whenever they sneeze they throw the mask away at the next opportunity? Or is it more like the mask is there for when you don't feel the sneeze/cough/... coming, and when they feel it coming they take off the mask and sneeze/cough in a tissue?

Sorry if this is a ******ed question, just curious about this .

Ok, so if 200 million use them 70% of the time then it's pointless? You seem to have some weird "all or nothing" take on this. You can't think rationally. It's embarrassing. This is about a combination of actions to get spread rates below 1 from the 3 or so it is without distancing, without hand washing, without quarantining of the sick, without testing and contact tracing. Masks are a huge part of that fight however imperfectly they're worn.

It is actually not that difficult to go from 3 to 1 with a multifaceted approach to reducing spread, while keeping your economy mostly open. Japan has done it by nothing more than their population wearing masks and being responsible when sick.

What is with this "all or nothing" despairist thinking? This is socialist level thinking, and the main reason I'm against unskilled third world immigration (most think like socialists/have socialist views).

I think its also important to state that all other health problems will likely be compromised. Your random heart attack will not be attended to as normal. There will be many more casualties in the fog of war.

I'm trying to point out to you how much steam you are blowing off and white space you are taking up here over a simple logical error, and how bad you are making yourself look by doing so.

No one believes that 0% spread is an achievable goal (in the short-term). But aiming high and hitting below the mark is going to affect a better overall outcome than being oblivious.

Liken it to 'countdown to zero' workplace injuries programs. Of course people will still get injured and die at work. It's probably a systemic fact. But the programs definitely reduce them.

The only question about the masks is going to be whether countries are able to produce sufficient amounts of them. If there is no shortage, you can be certain that it will become mandatory in public in multiple if not all countries having a major outbreak.

The fact that you think this is difficult just shows how little you understand of this infection.

In most countries that are locked down, there are already multiple temporary laws & fines if you are outside without a good reason, and it's being enforced (in my country it is €250 every time you get caught & fined). People are being fined for inviting friends over for a barbecue, and the public opinion is fine with it.

A temporary law where wearing a mask outside is mandatory will be incredibly easy to enforce by the police, it's not like you can hide not wearing a mask.

Iirc some countries in Eastern Europe already made it mandatory to wear a mask in public, they allowed homemade masks to make sure everyone would be able to comply.

Surgical masks are pretty cheap. Just carry a handful in your pocket or w/e.

Personally I wear an N95 mask when I go to the supermarket (high density of people), and a surgical mask when I'm out and about.

It's almost certainly true and preventing collapse needs to become a bipartisan, international issue immediately once we come out of this.

The nice thing about this is that we will see. If this virus turns out to have a similar profile to the Spanish Flu, which I don't believe it does, then you and TS and others think we are looking at six weeks of shutdown and then a lot of hand washing and mask wearing.

I think that's a pretty bad take. If it does have the characteristics of that pandemic, I think we are in for a much rougher ride.

But I don't see this as being as dangerous as initially thought, so that's the first hurdle. We can cross the next bridge when we come to it. Antibody testing should give us the initial answer we are looking for.

It's the story of humanity. Really smart outliers drag the unwashed masses, kicking and screaming, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, into the future.

Six weeks of shutdown is past the point of possible. That was the best case scenario 3 months ago. Most countries came to the conclusion that the population would not comply with emergency powers level shutdowns, or that it would be too hard/resource heavy to contain, and opted instead for a progressive herd immunity strategy. That is, of course, totally backwards. It will be many orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult to contain, in the short-medium term, than a hard and fast sweeping shutdown in the early stages would have been.

However, they made the choice. They will gradually open the economy back up again over the next 6-24 months, deliberately infecting more and more people, with the ultimate goal of getting through the pandemic without overwhelming the health care system.

I don't even know what you're saying here. The world has changed a lot since 1918. Inferring consequences from an influenza virus in 1918 to a coronavirus in 2020 is quite a leap.

The opposite is true. Initially, they didn't even think it spread human to human. It's been shown to be not only 100x more dangerous than the flu to human health, but the world economy as well. I don't mean to be a dick, but you're about 3 months behind the curve in understanding this situation. You're blasting things in the thread today that were debunked months ago. Go back and read the thread.

I can't even keep up with the crazy ITT.

I was the guy saying, if this is as serious as some believe, it will take 18-24 months to get things going again, and now my argument is being used to show how behind I am of my intellectual superiors.

I don't have any clue what your take is on how long it will take to get back to normal. This discussion started with you making the logical error that wearing masks is the same as not wearing masks, because some people will still get infected despite wearing masks.

Also, you just said this

Decent documentary on the origins of the virus, and the initial coverup by the CCP.

I didn't say that. I said that wearing masks is not 100 percent effective, and that even trained medical professionals who wear them can get infected by a virus, much less people who have never been properly trained on how to wear them and who have never had to wear them for any extended period of time before in their lives.

I mean, don't misrepresent my argument to that extent and then claim you are smarter than me.

I would guess a more likely outcome is everything is going to be framed by the neoliberal elites and their media mouthpieces through a partisan politics lens where 50% of the people will blame Obama and the other 50% Trump, and spend most of their energy bickering among eachtother; and most of the responsible parties get off scott free (and probably end up actually benefiting from this).

And so the world turns.

Everyone knows this. It's irrelevant. Your stated implication was that masks are useless at containing the disease, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

The major reason western recovery to normalcy will lag eastern recovery by 1-2 years is because it is now impossible to totally contain the disease. It has nothing to do with masks, and everything to do with the slow and half-measured response. That said, masks will undoubtedly help recovery and limit spread.

No, I never stated that masks would be useless in containing this virus. If worn correctly and by a majority of the population, they would be really effective at containing this.

But I think the chances of that happening are not very high.

So now that you understand my argument, stick to that.

Except that's not what you said. You straight said that even hospital workers (with masks) get plenty of infections, so how will the general populace (knowing less how to properly use them) have a chance of them helping?

So let me explain why that take is dumb:
You're comparing places with massive viral load - spending all day around bad corona cases, touching them, wiping up their fluids, breathing in infected coughs and sneezes by the thousands - with the general population. The fact that masks work at all in that environment is a testament to how amazing and necessary masks are.

You're also confusing the point of masks - it's not about protection of the healthy from droplets (hello unmasked eyes), although that's part of it. The effect that's far more important is in stopping the emissions from the sick, who without masks are flying large amounts of infected spittle when they talk and cough/sneeze droplets around everywhere. I think one of the dumb conceits of the "experts" was that they would be able to stop this because they believed only highly symptomatic people spread it, similar to the flu. So they advised sick people to wear masks but not the healthy. That was the main driving force behind not taking masks more seriously. Of course that turned out not to be true (which you could have derived logically from watching Wuhan and China's response). You don't know who's sick and spreading it. On top of that some of the sick won't wear it unless everyone has to.

It's outgoing containment which is much easier than incoming containment. It's also another reason why your hospital take is dumb (as if we needed another) - none of this major benefit of stopping outgoing viral particle emissions exists in hospitals to which you're comparing. Patients don't wear masks in hospitals.
No one is doing that. It's all on you.