OT: Pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19

The CDC still makes no mention on the covid-19 part of their website about wearing masks that might actually be rated to stop viruses. They encourage the use of cloth muzzles.

The Illinois Department of Public Health still says "Do NOT use a facemask meant for a healthcare worker."

Guess they're not serious yet.

resting little paper

ing symptoms of Covid-19 are responsible for most of the spread of the dise ase, and emphasises the well-known fact that rapid contact tracing and isol ation of the potentially infected are crucial to preventing epidemic spread .

terest is in getting everybody back to work seem reluctant to take it on bo ard.

Face masks don't stop virus particles. They capture water droplets. Infecte d people exhale water droplets that do carry virus particles, and can infec t other people who happen to inhale them.

They capture enough water droplets to help a lot.

More likely that Illinois - a state with a Democrat governor - can't get as many face masks as they need, and are having to ration the face masks they have got. Trump's administration has bought up a lot of that kind stuff, a nd distributes it in ways that might help him get re-elected.

It is almost impossible to make practical filters that will stop viruses effectively (at least outside of clean room air filter technology).

The origin of the word was for infectious agents too small to see with a light microscope and impossible to detect or filter out with any technology available at the time of their discovery. You wouldn't be able to breathe through a filter that was capable of stopping viruses and it would clog up in no time flat from all the other junk in the air.

Making filters that would reliably stop all bacteria what what enabled viruses to be discovered as non-filterable infectious agents. It required an electron microscope before they were actually discovered.

It is probably sensible. Most members of the general public do not use PPE effectively and so higher grade kit would be wasted on them. No point if they fail to observe basic inside clean outside dirty rules.

In any case the main effect of wearing a mask is to prevent the wearer exhaling infectious aerosol material into the environment. It doesn't need to stop individual virus particles to work pretty well.

Whilst you can in theory catch it from a single virus that gets lucky the cellular defences take down most attackers pretty quickly so that you need an initial viral load in the hundreds or thousands before you are likely to be infected. It is a numbers game.

I've seen too many people wearing masks over their mouth but not their nose. At least one, a Big issue seller(!), continued after I pointed out the error. No, I didn't buy one.

Of course there's this justly famous "Make America Grate Again" photo:

Fauci lied about masks to reserve them for medical providers. Sounds like CDC and Illinois are still doing the same.

He didn't have enough guts/respect for deplorables to tell them the truth, or to use government power to allocate masks.

The home-made cloth masks are a distraction to prevent the public from buying possibly-useful masks. Sort of like garlic and vampires.

Does breathing spray as many viruses as talking?

Vocal cords seem like pretty effective atomizers to me, with a direct path to outside.

(from a few months ago)

Speaking is 10 times more effective radiator (i.e., to accumulate a sufficient viral load, you need to be around "breather" ten times longer than a "speaker" (all else being equal).

Note article refers to data compiled for influenza. Given that this is more infectious than flu, it could require a smaller viral load to infect. Or, different particle sizes...

Sinuses are good particle filters, probably in the exhale direction too.

When a person sings, and maybe shouts a lot in a noisy bar, they inhale through their mouth, bypassing the intake sinus filtering. I bet being in a brass or reed band is bad in both directions.

We prefer quiet neighborhood dive bars, where you don't have to shout, or fight for a barstool or for service. Jessica pulls us an Archer Blonde when she sees us walk in the door. Sometimes she forgets to charge us.

False. A lie is an attempt to deceive; that's not likely. The 'reserve them for...' might be accurate, though, because some categories of mask were in short supply.

Oh, that's a long reach, just to support a comspiracy theory. The theory isn't worth much, and distraction such as you describe is worthless, as far as I can tell, to EVERYONE. So, why would any rational person join a conspiracy if it's worthless?

eresting little paper

wing symptoms of Covid-19 are responsible for most of the spread of the dis ease, and emphasises the well-known fact that rapid contact tracing and iso lation of the potentially infected are crucial to preventing epidemic sprea d.

nterest is in getting everybody back to work seem reluctant to take it on b oard.

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He wasn't silly enough to risk saying anything that might have created a wa ve of panic buying. Lots of people are selective in understanding what they see and hear - you are a prime example - and it's wise to make sure that t he message doesn't lend itself to being misunderstood.

Not true. Cloth masks are less effective than medical grade masks, but effe ctive enough to be well worth wearing. Anything that reduces the probabilit y of infection helps. Medical grade masks aren't 100% effective either, as we can all work out from the number of medical staff who get Covid-19 despi te their elaborate personal protective equipment - which they are trained to use.

At first consideration, that's what anyone would think, but it seems more complicated. I've referenced this (commercial) page previously, but they give the scientific references they get their information from: (from )

From the information presented there, it appears that even simple surgical masks can stop a reasonably high percentage of virus-sized particles (around 80%), although cotton handkerchiefs stop only 28%.

teresting little paper

owing symptoms of Covid-19 are responsible for most of the spread of the di sease, and emphasises the well-known fact that rapid contact tracing and is olation of the potentially infected are crucial to preventing epidemic spre ad.

interest is in getting everybody back to work seem reluctant to take it on board.

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I think you are a victim of not reading the references. The one reference draws a conclusion which is the exact opposite of what the bogus article cl aims it says.

Conclusion: The N95 filtering face piece respirators may not provide the e xpected protection level against small virions. Some surgical masks may let a significant fraction of airborne viruses penetrate through their filters , providing very low protection against aerosolized infectious agents in th e size range of 10 to 80 nm. It should be noted that the surgical masks are primarily designed to protect the environment from the wearer, whereas the respirators are supposed to protect the wearer from the environment.

Does that sound like good protection???

Super. I'll trade your local hospital all the cloth muzzles they can use for their n95 masks made by honeywell or 3m. If it's good enough for everybody else, it should be fine for them too.

What's the word on the street about legitimate non-chinese masks and their supply these days? Are plain old contractor type P100 cartridges back on the shelves at home depot again?

As for the governor here, he's a bumbling fool from a billionaire family so stupid/inept/crooked they actually ran a bank into bankuptcy in 2002. Only 4 banks failed in the US that year. It had to be fraud of some sort. But yeah, people here seem to really love the guy. There's defintely full speed ahead with stupid voting mentality here.

Ok, can all the hospital workers just shut the f*ck up then about their PPE and get on with things with the stuff "good enough" for common folks?

It's this double standard stuff that irks me. I don't see visitors at construction sites being offered paper cook's hats when everybody else has a hard hat. That's how stupid this whole thing is.

n95 masks cost virtually nothing to make. If you want me to not cough viruses on old people the grocery store, don't tell me to just drape what looks like old underwear over my mouth. I'm not going to wash it, it's going to be in my pocket half the time. All my spit is just going to dry out and blow out all everyone the next day.

While this sounds valid, as it been proven? So far the "experts" in other things are not experts in covid as it seems to be unlike anything else ever seen before. There's lots of backpedalling and so forth as nobody seems to even have any idea of what they're talking about.

I though the mask is to prevent blobs of spit witj viruses from going over the place.

Never seen anybody talk or blow spittle out of their nose. Not sure why noses need to be covered in the first place, if that's what cloth muzzles are for.

Distraction sounds about right. Until they fess up, I'll gladly ignore the rest of the "advice". You can lie to me once, then I stop listening.

Here's another amusing thing here in Illinois. The Illinois Department of Public Health has a list of cities with covid testing. Chicago isn't listed (why list the biggest city in the state?) and there's no information on where to find testing sites here. As usual, goverment isn't really good at much, and still doesn't understand how to use the internet yet. Even something as dumb as text in a Word file on a website is something they can't scrape up yet.

teresting little paper

owing symptoms of Covid-19 are responsible for most of the spread of the di sease, and emphasises the well-known fact that rapid contact tracing and is olation of the potentially infected are crucial to preventing epidemic spre ad.

interest is in getting everybody back to work seem reluctant to take it on board.

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But it happens to be wrong. Cloth masks are useful, if somewhat less effect ive than disposable masks designed for hospital use (which aren't exactly 1

Of course you will. Any excuse will do.

John Larkin has just lied to you. He doesn't know enough to realise that he was lying, but he just told something that wasn't true. He makes a habit o f this, and he's much too proud of his own judgement to ever realise it.

That's what the conclusion states (assuming you are referring to the article at ). The question posed was "Do N95 respirators provide 95% protection level against airborne viruses, and how adequate are surgical masks?"

The answer, as you noted, was "The results indicate that the penetration of virions through the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)-certified N95 respirators can exceed an expected level of

Unfortunately, I do not have access to all the info in the article (behind a paywall), but assume you are criticising the webpage comment they made in the figure "

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interesting little paper

showing symptoms of Covid-19 are responsible for most of the spread of the disease, and emphasises the well-known fact that rapid contact tracing and isolation of the potentially infected are crucial to preventing epidemic sp read.

y interest is in getting everybody back to work seem reluctant to take it o n board.

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ce draws a conclusion which is the exact opposite of what the bogus article claims it says.

e expected protection level against small virions. Some surgical masks may let a significant fraction of airborne viruses penetrate through their filt ers, providing very low protection against aerosolized infectious agents in the size range of 10 to 80 nm. It should be noted that the surgical masks are primarily designed to protect the environment from the wearer, whereas the respirators are supposed to protect the wearer from the environment.

Since infected people don't exhale virus particle, but rather droplets of m ucus that include virus particles, this is all entirely irrelevant.

Masks are designed to block aerosols where the droplet size is a whole lot bigger that virus particles being carried by droplets.

If you wanted to spread a cloud of virus particles around, you'd have fun g etting them out of the aqueous environment they are used to.

Some bacteria form spores, but they are a whole lot more complicated than v iruses.