As the new coronavirus COVID-19 spreads in the U.S., people who are well want to stay that way. But since no vaccines are currently available, the strongest weapons Americans have are basic preventive measures like hand-washing and sanitizing surfaces, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Remember this, next time you are told to trust the experts at the CDC.The simplicity of those recommendations is likely unsettling to people anxious to do more to protect themselves, so it’s no surprise that face masks are in short supply—despite the CDC specifically not recommending them for healthy people trying to protect against COVID-19. “It seems kind of intuitively obvious that if you put something — whether it’s a scarf or a mask — in front of your nose and mouth, that will filter out some of these viruses that are floating around out there,” says Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. The only problem: that’s not effective against respiratory illnesses like the flu and COVID-19. If it were, “the CDC would have recommended it years ago,” he says. “It doesn’t, because it makes science-based recommendations.”
The science, according to the CDC, says that surgical masks won’t stop the wearer from inhaling small airborne particles, which can cause infection.
Maybe the CDC was right that the masks were useless. The evidence for masks is dubious. I am not sure myself. But the official CDC recommendations don't seem to be any better than common-sense judgments from the average person.
Roger,
ReplyDeleteWashing your hands regularly, not touching your face after touching things in public places, and not using your bare hands to open most store doors will do far more than any ridiculous mask that has no ability to stop inhalation of viruses, or entirely politically arbitrary six feet spacing rules. Six feet spacing guidelines are not based on any science (why not four, five, seven, or eight feet?), and entirely moot inside a modern building like a supermarket or department store with forced air handling which mixes the air constantly.
In addition, when you are breathing through (but mostly around the edges of) your useless face mask, you are warming the mask and making it damp with moisture from your breath, which makes for a pretty good petri dish for quite a few bacteria...and then you are breathing through it. If you suffer from any kind of actual lung affliction, like asthma, breathing through such a mask is more of a danger to you than Covid.
Perhaps people should start asking some very simple questions about what is really going on, as our fearless leaders seem hysterical and clueless, while our news media seems suspiciously incurious.
1.) For example, If silly masks that don't have any required filtration and make no kind of proper seal against the face are so effective against viruses, why has the CDC never publicly proscribed them before during any other far more deadly airborne viral outbreak?
2.) How has death by any kind of Immunodeficiency, Cancer, Diabetes, other viruses, heart disease, pneumonia, or bacterial infection been largely cured by a Coronavirus? If you subtract yearly averages of other forms of death from total deaths, you should be left with a rather small margin of difference, this small margin does not agree with the disproportionate number of claimed covid deaths. Miraculously, other forms of mortality seem to be in a strange remission...and my bullshit detector is ringing off the hook.
3.) If President Joe Biden is so concerned about Covid lockdowns to the point he would destroy the economy to enforce them, why is he entirely unconcerned about his own remarks encouraging literally hundreds of thousands of people to enter the country illegally without any type of health screening? This purely political theater is tantamount to bitching about how hot it is out of one side of your mouth while out of the other side of your mouth you tell someone to crank up the thermostat.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it."
H.L. Mencken.
Yeah, well, I ❤ Mencken too, for decades now. But ...
ReplyDeleteexcerpt: "[Stanford University] said it strongly supports the use of masks to control the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus."
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/stanford-university-disavows-study-claiming-masks-worthless-against-covid-19