7 ms·

I really don't think they are doing enough. The virus is still growing at an exponential rate, and when you look at the other countries that managed to get thin

• jmull 7y ago
  > People need to be required to wear a mask when they go out. Well, you can’t do that here because those masks don’t exist. We don’t have enough for healthcare workers, much less everyone else.
  • jariel 7y ago
    I think in this case any piece of cloth will do - we're not talking N95s. Basically, it reduces the likelihood of spittle etc. and so it reduces spread. That said Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore are all riding the Subways, going to Restaurants, going to work. They're more aggressive with testing and tracking.
    • ajross 7y ago
      It also keeps your hands away from your mucus membranes. Just tying a bandana around your face is absolutely a useful mitigation. But staying home is better.
      • DanBC 7y ago
        If anything it makes you touch your face more -- masks are weird and itchy, and they need to be adjusted when they slip. There's good reasons why the CDC, Public Health England, The World Health Organisation, etc etc all say that masks don't work. ANd that's because they don't work. > Just tying a bandana around your face is absolutely a useful mitigation. This "protective" mask will helpfully absorb any moisture droplets and hold them in place in front of your mouth and nose, and you will breathe in the virus as these droplets dry out. https://twitter.com/MedtechMustKnow/status/1241295034286084101 https://twitter.com/MedtechMustKnow/status/12412950342860841...
        • ceejayoz 7y ago
          The CDC actually says masks work if you dig down to details. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article During SARS, they reduced risk by 70%, and that’s among the general public, not healthcare workers. No reason it’d be different here.
    • fludlight 7y ago
      The Instagram and Etsy crowd need to popularize fashionable home-made masks like the ones the new Slovakian president wears. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fmeyis/corona_fashion_continues_zuzana_caputova/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fmeyis/corona_fashi...
      • watwut 7y ago
        And day before https://i.redd.it/njkm2on8kwn41.jpg https://i.redd.it/njkm2on8kwn41.jpg
  • 13415 7y ago
    It's probably not surprising to anyone who knows how industrial production works, but to a layman like me it's really surprising how hard it seems to be to produce more suitable masks in a short time. I didn't expect the supply chain and machines for such simple products to be that complex and hard to set up.
    • kevmo314 7y ago
      It's probably not hard to increase production, but it's definitely hard to increase it 100x.
      • lrem 7y ago
        I have no clue about softer materials, but setting up the tooling for making the simplest of plastic parts is a multi-step process where each step takes weeks. And, for roughly the same reasons as in software development, making that shorter is likely to be both expensive and drop some quality. With medical equipment you generally don't want to drop quality. So, if making these masks is any similar to the only industrial process I know about, we might have the needed capacity just in time for the autumn rebound.
    • Taek 7y ago
      Not surprising at all. First off you need screens, molds, and other one-per-machine equipment that has to be fully custom to whatever product you want to build. When expedited, these things can still take a week or more to create. From there you need to assemble a pipeline and do an enormous amount of tuning. Your first runs are generally going to completely unusable products because of a large number of mistakes in the manufacturing process. It takes time (also generally weeks) to find all the places where errors are happening and make the appropriate adjustments. When you are making 10,000 (or more) of something per day, no product is "simple".
    • fma 7y ago
      That's what happens when manufacturing is outsource to China. They were able to ramp up by 20x and produce 200 million mask per day. As a comparison, 3M makes 300 million per year and said they will increase by 30%. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/814929294/covid-19-has-caused-a-shortage-of-face-masks-but-theyre-surprisingly-hard-to-mak https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...
  • fortran77 7y ago
    And the response is to tell people "don't worry! Masks don't help. They only work for doctors!" See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
    • 1996 7y ago
      Like inkjet cartridges, masks have a DRM chip: if they detect you are not licensed to use them, they stop working!
    • saila 7y ago
      I don't think this is necessarily contradictory. Masks need to be worn correctly and not be reused. There's a good chance that a lot of people are wearing them incorrectly, and most people aren't going to have a sufficient supply on hand to avoid reuse. As such, they might give some people a false sense of security. This article gets into some of the potential issues: http://blogs.hcpro.com/osha/2009/05/ask-the-expert-n95-respirator-reuse/ http://blogs.hcpro.com/osha/2009/05/ask-the-expert-n95-respi... It at least seems plausible that for the average person masks won't do much good and that it's much more important for health care and public safety workers to have access to them.
      • wideasleep1 7y ago
        Since my N95 respirator supply is limited, I have been removing it in the car and spritzing it with 91% alcohol inside and out until moist. It is usually dry in minutes, and should be sterile for the next use.
        • fortran77 7y ago
          I've been baking mine in a 350 degree oven
          • wideasleep1 7y ago
            Interesting, hadn't considered that one...how long and are the 'rubbers' holding up? Also cheers on that article...I've been finding it confounding that both masks and disposable gloves are NOT being preached in all media, if one must go into confining public spaces.
  • bagacrap 7y ago
    which masks are we talking about here? cloth masks used throughout the population effectively reduce the transmission rate
• lonelappde 7y ago
  Who is driving all the essential workers to work without public transport?
• dnhz 7y ago
  How can it still be spreading like that if people are staying indoors away from each other? I read that grocery stores even limit the number of people shopping at one time. Is it spreading though essential-type workers?
  • umanwizard 7y ago
    The typical latency between being infected and testing positive is quite long, I’d guess around two weeks. The new cases being reported now are from before the shutdown measures started in earnest.
  • maxerickson 7y ago
    There's a period of days between exposure and symptomatic infection. The social distancing started ~a week ago Friday (and ramped up over the next several days). We are only beginning to see the impact from that, and it will be quite a few more days until we see the full impact (and with some states taking longer to put the measures in place, even longer).
    • sixothree 7y ago
      Unfortunately social distancing in some states didn't start until two days ago.
• mrfusion 7y ago
  No thanks. I’ll keep my bill of rights.
  • Ericson2314 7y ago
    For the sake of the rule of law, we need to reform our constitutions into something we will actually follow. A mix of lofty and silly aspirations that nobody can take seriously is far worse than something less ambitious but precise. I am 100% for a constitutional amendment that abridges the freedom of assembly in pandemics, provided that pandemics have a mathematical definition that is hard to abuse.
    • shadowgovt 7y ago
      Honestly, for the US at least, the existing system is sloppy but workable. * In times of crisis, the government abuses the Bill of Rights in a state of emergency * People who feel sufficiently aggrieved can sue (once, y'know, order has been restored and courts are functioning) * Sometimes, there is precedent showing the government overstepped and the plaintiff gets a nice payout to make them whole It's win-win, in the sense that whatever the emergency was that necessitated infringement of rights can be mitigated and the aggrieved can essentially be retroactively bribed to be okay to be a part of a society that has survived a situation that exceeded the planned-for circumsntances the Constitution was written to handle.
      • malandrew 7y ago
        I'd say it would have to be restricted to only novel airborne infectious diseases with an R0 greater than approximately 2.5.
    • briandear 7y ago
      Something with barely a 1% death rate ought not count.
      • macintux 7y ago
        The irony of course is that 1% is only achievable if we take it seriously enough to try to keep it under that percentage; otherwise our health care system might well collapse under the load, and lead to large numbers of unnecessary deaths. But more importantly: 3.5 million deaths in the U.S. alone (1%) doesn’t strike you as a pandemic?
• mrfusion 7y ago
  We should weld their doors shut!
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    At least try to stay serious. If you can't maybe write nothing at all?
    • mrfusion 7y ago
      So abandoning the bill of rights is ok but welding doors shut isnt?
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        Depends. * Is welding the doors shut going to get people killed? * Is dogmatic adherence to the letter of the Bill of Rights during a state of emergency going to get people killed?
        • jacquesm 7y ago
          You are giving credence to something that is based on false premises, making things worse rather than better. Nobody is going to weld shut any doors in Western countries.
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        You brought in the welding shut of doors. Which has only been reported from Wuhan but which did not actually happen there and has been blown wildly out of proportion by the usual suspects on the web. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/46044/were-covid-19-patients-in-wuhan-welded-into-their-apartments-to-enforce-the-lock https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/46044/were-covi... If you seriously suggest that the US or any other Western government will resort to such measures than I don't know how to continue the conversation. It is preposterous.
• zamfi 7y ago
  > Italy got the growth rate down to 15% per day. That's still enough to hit the whole population by early May. We won't know the lockdown's effect until all the severe cases from people who got sick pre-lockdown have shown up at the hospital. That will be in the next few days. If the number of new reported cases starts to drop from day to day, we'll know they succeeded. If not...
  • Taek 7y ago
    It's hard to accept that Italy hasn't even been under water for a full two weeks yet, it feels like months. But I guess you are right, Italy didn't really crack down until early March.
• bagacrap 7y ago
  Do you have any data or is this idle fear mongering? We're living through a man made disaster and you say we aren't doing enough? Look at the (higher quality) data from Germany and SK. Very low mortality. 99% or more do not need medical treatment. Yet the societal devastation is already immense and harming much more than 1%. It's uniquely bad in Italy. Not entirely clear why. But even there the vast majority of affected people are elderly and have other co morbidities. So let's put it in perspective when we're cancelling our children's future. I agree with masks. That just makes sense. Martial law keeping folks inside? You're living in a fairy tale. I don't think we should do nothing, even though the worst case scenario of doing nothing is less bad than what's already happening. But what we are doing is totally wrong headed, rather than "not enough". We need to focus on protecting vulnerable groups, not indiscriminately turn everyone into a victim.
  • malandrew 7y ago
    > It's uniquely bad in Italy. Not entirely clear why. Aging population that generally lives in multi-generational housing or at least in close proximity. The US, especially in blue states, is unique in how separated different generations are physically.
    • T-hawk 7y ago
      Also a hypothesis that seems plausible as a factor: Smoking. Italians have more of a history of smoking than any other affected area as of yet. Smoking could also explain why the mortality skews more to men over women.
      • malandrew 7y ago
        Oh yea, smoking too. That would also explain what we observed in China. Almost everyone who smokes in China is a man because there is a stigma that the only women who smoke are prostitutes (or at least that was the case when I lived there over a decade ago). Something like 30% of China smokes, but almost all of those are men, making it over 50% of men smoking. "In 2015, smoking prevalence was 27.7% (52.1% among men and 2.7% among women)" ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6546632/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6546632/
• sizzle 7y ago
  Why are people forgetting they can get infected through their eyes? We need protective eyewear in addition to N95 face mask + gloves.