Covid-19 #15 : It Ain't Over Until It's Over

[Zorral]

Again the UK wins the prize as the only nation with people and leadership to rival those of the USA; both own depths with no bottom of revealed stupidity and selfishness.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/25/major-incident-declared-as-people-flock-to-england-south-coast

 

 

[Clueless Northman]

7 hours ago, JoannaL said:

I really do not get why it is this controversial to wear masks. As lock-down rules go this is easy to achieve and is not hard like staying at home or school closures or shop closures.

Simple: most people are morons and selfish scumbags. This is the year this truth will be undeniable and clear for everyone to see. This is the year we find out in real-time that our leaders are incompetent fools. This is the year we see at long last that most humans are totally unfit and too stupid to benefit from rights and freedoms.

And this is also the year when I will have final evidence that misanthropy is the great equalizer - it's the best way to put into practice equal opportunity

And dumb-as-shit people not wearing mask isn't purely a Trumpian factor. There are European countries where the government fucked up so much in being wholly unprepared they basically convinced (or rather brainwashed) a good chunk of their people that masks were useless for them, so that they'd have enough for the hospitals; and now that wearing masks should be mandatory when lockdown ends, they're fucked and can't be arsed to make them mandatory, but just "advise" people to wear them when it's crowded - with the obvious result that most people can't be arsed to wear them.

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

And dumb-as-shit people not wearing mask isn't purely a Trumpian factor. There are European countries where the government fucked up so much in being wholly unprepared they basically convinced (or rather brainwashed) a good chunk of their people that masks were useless for them, so that they'd have enough for the hospitals; and now that wearing masks should be mandatory when lockdown ends, they're fucked and can't be arsed to make them mandatory, but just "advise" people to wear them when it's crowded - with the obvious result that most people can't be arsed to wear them.

I looked into where the bad guidance originally came from and it turns out that it wasn't just individual countries. It was -- surprise, surprise -- the World Health Organization:

Quote

In March, both the World Health Organization and the CDC said face masks shouldn't be worn by healthy members of the general public and instead should be reserved for those who are sick or caring for the sick.

...

WHO in June also reversed its guidance. The global health agency now says countries should urge the public to wear fabric masks where there's widespread transmission of the virus and where physical distancing is difficult.

Of course, this does not absolve national politicians either, but the WHO turnaround took a really long time.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

I looked into where the bad guidance originally came from and it turns out that it wasn't just individual countries. It was -- surprise, surprise -- the World Health Organization:

Of course, this does not absolve national politicians either, but the WHO turnaround took a really long time.

I mean, it's not bad advice reserving masks for the sick and those caring for the sick, where mask supplies are limited, which was the situation back when WHO gave that advice. Clearly this indicated WHO does advice that mask wearing is protective. And the evidence still shows that sick / infected people wearing masks is more protective than healthy/uninfected people wearing masks.

WHO has never said masks are useless. So anyone trying to blame WHO for lax mask-wearing policies in their country is plain wrong. 

Dr John Campbell Youtube said Phase 3 clinical trial have just started for a couple of vaccines. This is very promising, because it means these vaccines have been shown to generate protective immunity in people under controlled condition. Phase 3 is to do a proper real world test drive, and to find out exactly how long protective immunity lasts, which is why we have no chance of getting a vaccine before mid 2021, because they will want to be pretty certain that in most people immunity will last for at least a year. Vaccines with immunity of less than 1 year will only be of limited use, but they would still be useful for the vulnerable, but need regular boosters, and very useful for countries that are free from the disease, since you would only need a person to be immune when they enter the country and it doesn't matter if the immunity wanes while they are in the country. Short duration vaccines can also be deployed in countries that were formerly free but where there is a confined outbreak. The population around where the outbreak happens can be vaccinated to be immune and prevent the outbreak from going wide and the outbreak should be all resolved by the time immunity starts to wane.

Ideally though we want a vaccine that will confer at least 1 year of immunity because that will be useful everywhere and people can just get an annual shot like they do for 'flu. And anti-vaxxers can be damned, the good thing being in a country like mine there will be a no-vaccine, no entry policy so no anti-vax evangelists visiting to preach their dangerous philosophy here any more.

[Altherion]

8 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

WHO has never said masks are useless.

Actually, that's almost exactly what they said at the end of March:

Quote

Still, mask wearing by the general public is not among the WHO’s recommendations. “We don’t generally recommend the wearing of masks in public by otherwise well individuals because it has not up to now been associated with any particular benefit,” said Ryan.

Granted, his statement is not quite as absolute as yours and does stress that this is only the current understanding, but it took them a really long time (until June) to reverse course on this.

[rotting sea cow]

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I mean, it's not bad advice reserving masks for the sick and those caring for the sick, where mask supplies are limited, which was the situation back when WHO gave that advice. Clearly this indicated WHO does advice that mask wearing is protective. And the evidence still shows that sick / infected people wearing masks is more protective than healthy/uninfected people wearing masks.

WHO has never said masks are useless. So anyone trying to blame WHO for lax mask-wearing policies in their country is plain wrong. 

 

We discussed that already. Yes, it's responsibility of each country to implement adequate policies. But the WHO here, and in other cases, has been utterly irresponsible too. They are supposed to keep a certain level of credibility and when governments are trying to implement policies and they come back with such BS which in turn is echo by the media, it only creates confusion in an already difficult situation. And notice, the WHO is still not convinced that masks are helpful as a broad intervention, despite the growing evidence of the contrary. Japan for instance has barely done anything else, except using masks everywhere and they have been spared of the worst.

 

 

[Fragile Bird]

Oh please, the West has always mocked Asians for their ‘stupid’ habit of wearing masks. Look at those sissies, putting a mask on when they have a sniffle, instead of going out like Real Men with their face uncovered! Every flu season some news show would have street shots from Tokyo while the newscaster would try not to sneer.

Why does Trump refuse to wear a mask? Because he’s not a gutless yellow coward, of course! Or, worse, a woman!

And, as I mentioned before, back in March I posted instructions on Facebook on how to make a mask and people immediately chimed in and said wearing a mask is useless. I said if it helped by even 10% that was better than nothing, and the answer back was I was wasting my time. The only useful mask was an N-95, and even then ‘people don’t even know how to wear them properly’.

Blaming the WHO for not turning around that attitude is just looking for a whipping boy.

[Guest]

Florida just announced nearly 9,000 new cases.

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

Actually, that's almost exactly what they said at the end of March:

Granted, his statement is not quite as absolute as yours and does stress that this is only the current understanding, but it took them a really long time (until June) to reverse course on this.

You conveniently didn't quote the next bullet point which is WHO saying masks are very effective.

Quote

Masks should be worn by those with the disease or those in close contact with those infected.

This was WHO trying to prioritise use of a scarce resource to make sure the highest risk situations and people don't experience shortages.

The thing is that statement is still generally accurate and not at all the same as WHO saying masks are useless. Mask wearing by healthy people in a public space with good social distancing does not provide much additional protection to the uninfected wearer. Mask (and eye cover) wearing in risky places, like COVID wards, and risky people suspected of or known to have COVID-19 is quite effective at preventing those people from passing on infection.

What you are seeing there is not a mis-perception of the value of masks, but a mis-perception of the significance of asymptomatic spread. Healthy people who are either brewing the infection or will get through the whole infection without feeling ill at all were not regarded, at that time, as particularly infectious. So, healthy-seeming people were effectively told to assume they didn't have infection or if they did they weren't going to be spreading it except perhaps by intimate contact so plain, mask-less social distancing was considered sufficient. We now know that isn't true and asymptomatic spread is more significant than was thought back in March. So, once asymptomatic spread was known to be a problem messaging gradually changed to everyone should assume they are infected and wear a mask to protect the unaffected around you.

Did WHO incorrectly value masks? Not really. Did WHO fail to catch on to asymptomatic spread and give sound advice on that subject? Yes I think they were a too slow on that.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Oh please, the West has always mocked Asians for their ‘stupid’ habit of wearing masks.

Life is funny. I have a number of friends who grew up in various parts of SE Asia, but immigrated to the U.S. at various points in their lives.

They are all roaring with laughter watching, mainly at white people, just completely failing at something they knew how to handle when they were children. 

[Zorral]

32 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Did WHO fail to catch on to asymptomatic spread and give sound advice on that subject? Yes I think they were a too slow on that.

They underestimated the utter and determined and depthless incapacity of contemporary human beings in charge of anything in the US and UK to employ analytical tools to reading and listening comprehension.

[Wilbur]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Life is funny. I have a number of friends who grew up in various parts of SE Asia, but immigrated to the U.S. at various points in their lives.

They are all roaring with laughter watching, mainly at white people, just completely failing at something they knew how to handle when they were children. 

There is definitely a significant social reluctance in the west to covering your face.  It contravenes most social mores to fail to look a person in the eye, or to wear a mask, in a western society.  When I was a kid my dad would strap me for not looking him in the face when I was in trouble, for instance.  "Be a man" includes telling the truth, owning up when you fail, and looking the other guy in the eye.  Only outlaws cover their faces, and this is why a lot of us have a problem with the police wearing those black military helmet and face-covering combos: that is the bad guys' outfit.

This is not the same in Asia, where customs permit and even encourage individuals to avoid direct eye contact and to wear a mask.  Dinner time discussions about this in the past have even brought up the idea that wearing a mask promotes a mannerly posture for the lower-status individual in some of the five Confucian relationships, for instance.  

Given the many millions of miles I have flown, I wear a mask on aircraft and have done so for most of my adult life.  For me, the airplane interiors are too dry, and wearing a mask helps keep me from developing cracked lips and a dry throat on long trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic flights.  On these flights, no one bats an eye at the mask.  However, on two separate occasions I have had federal air marshalls come up the front of the plane, wake me up, and ask me why I was masked up on trans-continental domestic flights.  Masks just hit westerners as "wrong" at a gut level.   Rolling into my bank with a mask on is still giving me a thrill after three months of this.

Right now everyone should be wearing masks.  My wife has supplied me with a variety of masks that she thinks I will think are manly and cool.  However, Trump and others have leveraged Americans' natural reluctance to score political points, which is just evil at this point.  Witness the recent political idiocy here in my town, for instance.

[Altherion]

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

You conveniently didn't quote the next bullet point which is WHO saying masks are very effective.

But only for those who are close to the infected! That is the entire crux of the argument. There was never any debate over whether hospital workers should wear masks. The question was whether everyone else should wear masks in public and the WHO (as well as the US Center for Disease Control and many others) unequivocally said that they don't recommend it. Furthermore, they did not say that the sole basis for this recommendation is to conserve masks for healthcare workers, they said it is because they currently cannot see any benefit to having the general population wear masks.

[Clueless Northman]

The WHO have been gutless shitheads at some times, and the masks issue is one of them. They definitely obeyed their Western overlords and went into face-saving mode, trying to convince people they didn't need masks, so that Western governments wouldn't be shown for the inept treacherous idiots they are, being so unprepared months after the Wuhan outbreak. Granted, after a couple of months, at long last, WHO admitted wearing masks was necessary - this happened after the shortages were over, but it happened too late because many people had bought into the initial lie. And it was a lie, WHO never said "Wear a mask, but make it yourself because the factory-produced ones are reserved for health workers" - and Western governments didn't bother with it either. This was a criminal mistake.

Of course, as Fragile Bird said, most Westerners have this condescending view of Far-Eastern mask-wearers, don't want to wear facemasks and are happy to be convinced that they're of no use.

Then, there's the fact most masks are designed for East Asian people and aren't really fit for many Western noses, and are even worse if you're a big-nosed glasses-wearing Westerner. But I don't blame China for this. I blame Western industries who are wholly unable to create better-fitting masks and are actually unable to produce masks on their own, so that months after the catastrophe, face masks still have to be imported from China because our own factories can't do it...

[williamjm]

53 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

Right now everyone should be wearing masks.  My wife has supplied me with a variety of masks that she thinks I will think are manly and cool.  However, Trump and others have leveraged Americans' natural reluctance to score political points, which is just evil at this point.  Witness the recent political idiocy here in my town, for instance.

Maybe the way to make Trump support wearing masks is to point out how much money could be made selling Make America Great Again branded masks to his supporters.

[Galactus]

But only for those who are close to the infected! That is the entire crux of the argument. There was never any debate over whether hospital workers should wear masks. The question was whether everyone else should wear masks in public and the WHO (as well as the US Center for Disease Control and many others) unequivocally said that they don't recommend it. Furthermore, they did not say that the sole basis for this recommendation is to conserve masks for healthcare workers, they said it is because they currently cannot see any benefit to having the general population wear masks.

The reason they did not recommend for the general public to wear masks at the time was that there was a real shortage of PPE's in many places, and uncertainity in many more (IE: They had enough masks now but couldn't guarantee future supply) and they wanted to first secure supply for the most crucial areas (wards/hospital workers/etc.) 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Wilbur said:

There is definitely a significant social reluctance in the west to covering your face.  It contravenes most social mores to fail to look a person in the eye, or to wear a mask, in a western society.  When I was a kid my dad would strap me for not looking him in the face when I was in trouble, for instance.  "Be a man" includes telling the truth, owning up when you fail, and looking the other guy in the eye.  Only outlaws cover their faces, and this is why a lot of us have a problem with the police wearing those black military helmet and face-covering combos: that is the bad guys' outfit.

This is not the same in Asia, where customs permit and even encourage individuals to avoid direct eye contact and to wear a mask.  Dinner time discussions about this in the past have even brought up the idea that wearing a mask promotes a mannerly posture for the lower-status individual in some of the five Confucian relationships, for instance.  

Given the many millions of miles I have flown, I wear a mask on aircraft and have done so for most of my adult life.  For me, the airplane interiors are too dry, and wearing a mask helps keep me from developing cracked lips and a dry throat on long trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic flights.  On these flights, no one bats an eye at the mask.  However, on two separate occasions I have had federal air marshalls come up the front of the plane, wake me up, and ask me why I was masked up on trans-continental domestic flights.  Masks just hit westerners as "wrong" at a gut level.   Rolling into my bank with a mask on is still giving me a thrill after three months of this.

Right now everyone should be wearing masks.  My wife has supplied me with a variety of masks that she thinks I will think are manly and cool.  However, Trump and others have leveraged Americans' natural reluctance to score political points, which is just evil at this point.  Witness the recent political idiocy here in my town, for instance.

Why do masks and lack of eye contact go hand in hand? If anything the former would require better use of the latter, IMO.

The problem here in the U.S. is that people are selfish and don't want to be told to do even the most modest of things to help others. It kind of explains a lot of our culture. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, williamjm said:

Maybe the way to make Trump support wearing masks is to point out how much money could be made selling Make America Great Again branded masks to his supporters.

You silly fool.

You just need to call them freedom masks, and imply that anyone not wearing those specific ones are terrorists. 

Problem solved. 

[williamjm]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

You silly fool.

You just need to call them freedom masks, and imply that anyone not wearing those specific ones are terrorists. 

Problem solved. 

I feel our ideas could easily be combined.

We could also start a conspiracy theory about how Bill Gates and the Obama/Clinton/Biden Deep State are going to use 5G technology to spread vaccines through the air and only masks can protect Real Americans from it, since that's apparently the sort of thing people will believe these days.

[Wilbur]

23 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Why do masks and lack of eye contact go hand in hand? If anything the former would require better use of the latter, IMO.

The problem here in the U.S. is that people are selfish and don't want to be told to do even the most modest of things to help others. It kind of explains a lot of our culture. 

You are totally correct about the selfishness.  Formerly I would have expected people to be willing to give up some personal freedom to help out their neighbors.  No longer true, apparently.

With respect to the masks, someone wearing a mask here in the west could generally expect to end up like Bill Brazelton:  Brazen Bill wears a mask, dies of acute lead poisoning.