Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Sheilbh]

The WHO only changed their position in June and their position is still that they should be worn in public when social distancing is not possible because they "could" prevent spread: "in light of evolving evidence, the WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments".

Perhaps the CDC recognized it would not protect you from infection and did not want people overly reliant on them? Beats me.

This is the point the CMO of Wales makes. People stop distancing and behave like the mask means they're totally immune. It's not magic, it provides a small layer of a barrier - that's all.

[viper37]

And why were legal actions taken in the UK against mask sellers advertising their effectiveness? Isn't there something deeply Orwellian in that: if they really knew the masks were effective, and still went after those selling something that would save lives for speaking the truth?

non-N95 masks do not protect yourself, but they will protect others in ideal conditions.

If you advertize a cloth mask saying it will protect your from covid-19, that's false advertising.

[viper37]

The WHO only changed their position in June and their position is still that they should be worn in public when social distancing is not possible because they "could" prevent spread: "in light of evolving evidence, the WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments".

That's a reasonable stance.  I just wish it wasn't a wall to wall approach for all of Quebec.  There's no widespread transmission here, hence no necessity for the mask.

[Valmy]

And why were legal actions taken in the UK against mask sellers advertising their effectiveness? Isn't there something deeply Orwellian in that: if they really knew the masks were effective, and still went after those selling something that would save lives for speaking the truth?

non-N95 masks do not protect yourself, but they will protect others in ideal conditions.

If you advertize a cloth mask saying it will protect your from covid-19, that's false advertising.

Exactly right. You are only protected if everybody is wearing them.

[viper37]

Edit: I look back at this thread and lots of posts about people wearing masks but nothing saying that we are advised not to wear them. Dorsey even posted a joke about wearing a mask to keep safe from Corona Beer back on Feb 4th so where is this "we were told not to wear masks" stuff coming from?

In the US, I believe Fauci, and/or the CDC publicly advised against masks to protect yourself.

Same in Quebec, with our director of public health, he expressely told people in march to not wear a mask to protect themselves, that they should wash their hands and keep their distance.

[viper37]

And why were legal actions taken in the UK against mask sellers advertising their effectiveness? Isn't there something deeply Orwellian in that: if they really knew the masks were effective, and still went after those selling something that would save lives for speaking the truth?

non-N95 masks do not protect yourself, but they will protect others in ideal conditions.

If you advertize a cloth mask saying it will protect your from covid-19, that's false advertising.

Exactly right. You are only protected if everybody is wearing them.

partly.  If I am infected and then touch my mask, my hands will spread the virus to everything I touch.  And if I'm very close to someone, it's highly possible I may still contaminate that someone.  But in these case, it's still better than nothing.

[11B4V]

Edit: I look back at this thread and lots of posts about people wearing masks but nothing saying that we are advised not to wear them. Dorsey even posted a joke about wearing a mask to keep safe from Corona Beer back on Feb 4th so where is this "we were told not to wear masks" stuff coming from?

In the US, I believe Fauci, and/or the CDC publicly advised against masks to protect yourself.

Same in Quebec, with our director of public health, he expressely told people in march to not wear a mask to protect themselves, that they should wash their hands and keep their distance.

That was back in January, but nice Fox news talking point. Look at the rest of what he said during that same interview.

Get your mask on when required Karen.


Correction March


https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/outdated-fauci-video-on-face-masks-shared-out-of-context/

Get your mask on when required Karen.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/video-trump-twists-faucis-words/

[DGuller]

I suspect cultural arrogance could be a part of the original fiasco with the masks.  Wearing a mask is something Asians do, not us Westerners.  I don't think a lot of Westerners are yet at a point where they're ready to concede that Asians get something right that the West doesn't.

[Sheilbh]

I suspect cultural arrogance could be a part of the original fiasco with the masks.  Wearing a mask is something Asians do, not us Westerners.  I don't think a lot of Westerners are yet at a point where they're ready to concede that Asians get something right that the West doesn't.

I agree totally.

There was an article with a comment by a French civil servant in the Health Ministry who said that not just about masks but about everything. He said basically the perception at the start of this crisis was "France is not a country that takes advice from Korea" and I think all of the sentiments in that apply equally to the UK and maybe some other countries too.

[merithyn]

I suspect cultural arrogance could be a part of the original fiasco with the masks.  Wearing a mask is something Asians do, not us Westerners.  I don't think a lot of Westerners are yet at a point where they're ready to concede that Asians get something right that the West doesn't.

Oh, I 100% believe this.

[DGuller]

Another piece of arrogance that I think is forgotten now is how back in January, the Western pandemic experts were patronizing about China's quarantine of Wuhan area.  The almost literal quotes were something like "we know that such measures are desperate and doomed to fail".  I suspect that half a year later they wish they hadn't said that.

[Sheilbh]

Another piece of arrogance that I think is forgotten now is how back in January, the Western pandemic experts were patronizing about China's quarantine of Wuhan area.  The almost literal quotes were something like "we know that such measures are desperate and doomed to fail".  I suspect that half a year later they wish they hadn't said that.

On that I think it was slightly different here - I don't remember people saying it was desperate or doomed to fail here, but I was in hospital at the time so not watching the news. I remember looking and it and thinking it seemed like something from a dystopian movie. And I remember watching Wuhan and thinking that sort of thing was only possible in a very strong, authoritarian state and I was wildly wrong.

But that very wrong assumption was also one that the scientists made - and, weirdly, despite the involvement of behavioural scientists it didn't come from them. It was just this unquestioned assumption in all of their models that the maximum compliance you could get was 75%, which obviously made lockdown look like it would be far less effective.  In the UK that was one of the reasons we locked down later because the scientists and the modelers assumed British people wouldn't comply with it and the British state couldn't enforce it (the last bit is true).

[DGuller]

Another piece of arrogance that I think is forgotten now is how back in January, the Western pandemic experts were patronizing about China's quarantine of Wuhan area.  The almost literal quotes were something like "we know that such measures are desperate and doomed to fail".  I suspect that half a year later they wish they hadn't said that.

On that I think it was slightly different here - I don't remember people saying it was desperate or doomed to fail here, but I was in hospital at the time so not watching the news. I remember looking and it and thinking it seemed like something from a dystopian movie. And I remember watching Wuhan and thinking that sort of thing was only possible in a very strong, authoritarian state and I was wildly wrong.

But that very wrong assumption was also one that the scientists made - and, weirdly, despite the involvement of behavioural scientists it didn't come from them. It was just this unquestioned assumption in all of their models that the maximum compliance you could get was 75%, which obviously made lockdown look like it would be far less effective.  In the UK that was one of the reasons we locked down later because the scientists and the modelers assumed British people wouldn't comply with it and the British state couldn't enforce it (the last bit is true).

After I posted this, I did a Google search just to confirm that my recollection was accurate.  Here's one article I quickly found that in hindsight is full of cringe: https://www.wired.com/story/would-the-coronavirus-quarantine-of-wuhan-even-work/.  I recall such articles being the rule rather than the exception. 

The linked article is right in that the quarantine failed to contain the pandemic, but it only failed to contain the pandemic because the Western countries were not nearly as decisive as China was.  Meanwhile, China's response is still effective for China, despite a huge portion of the rest of the world offering itself up as an incubator for the virus.

[Sheilbh]

I mean I'm not sure - a lot of those quotes look pretty prescient to me:

"The problem with social distancing is that we have very little evidence that it works," says Larry Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. "At most, it might delay for a short time an outbreak, but it's very unlikely to stop the progressive spread."

Wrong. We now have evidence that social distancing works. It's not enough on its own to stop spread, however and once it got out of Wuhan it was arguably too late.

Edit: Although "professor of global health law". Wouldn't be my first go to - same with a few of these. I get the USAID guy but surely you'd be better getting quotes from epidemiologists or public health experts not the Urban Warfare and Law professors?

et police have already begun barricading roads. The siege, against all sense and logistics, is on. "It would be nearly impossible to be effective, even if you threw the entire Chinese military at it," says John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the US Military Academy Modern War Institute. "You'd have to have a coast guard, a military. It's just not feasible to seal in a major city in the modern age. It wasn't even feasible before."

So this is sort of true. But we're not quarantining locations, locations are going on lock-down - we're sort of doing the quarantine on an individual basis instead.

"Mandatory, involuntary quarantines can be difficult to enforce, and counterproductive," says Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and former head of Global Disaster Response at USAID. "What you really want is for people to buy into it and feel they're supported." Otherwise they don't comply, which is at minimum chaotic, and at maximum denies visibility on the health threat to the people who need it most. And at maximum maximum, people with symptoms don't come forward and, confined with uninfected people, make them sick as well.

100% correct. But I think the note on people not coming forward with symptoms not being supported are probably particularly relevant for someone who worked at USAID.

All of which makes China's reasoning here even weirder. If the disease turns out to be what it looks like so far, it kills about 3 percent of the people it infects and has already spread beyond Wuhan, though researchers still have a lot to learn about how readily that happened. (For comparison, the case fatality rate for the 1918 influenza epidemic was 2.5 percent, but it was also wickedly transmissible.) "That raises questions about how useful a quarantine is at this point," Kondynyk says. "The horse has probably already left the barn."

The horse had left the barn and was infecting people in France in December.

In the worst case, that horse is a pale one, and death is riding with it. Quarantine is either a disproportionate, crazy response ... or it's not. It's a last resort. "If you're closing down a megacity like Wuhan, which is also central China's major transportation hub, it tells me you've lost control of the epidemic," Gostin says. "It tells me there's widespread community transmission person-to-person, and that all the things we've been told about this being essentially an animal-vectored disease with limited or no human transmission were either false, or information that wasn't well thought out." It's hard to trust the official line from China; one local estimate now puts the number of cases at more than 6,000. Gostin worries that the epidemic is already out of control.

100% agree again - this is the point I've made before that lockdown isn't a long-term policy, it's what happens when your policy fails. It's a last resort, it's a failure and it just buys you time to control the disesase in another way.

And even then, a security services-enforced lockdown might only exacerbate things. "You literally can't close down a city to close down a microbe," he says. "All these things seem to me to be impossible. You'd have to have a police state." And it'd confine the uninfected with the infected, a public health disaster in the making.

I agreed with this and was 100% wrong.

[DGuller]

The way I look at it, Chinese actually did a brilliant job in Wuhan, all things considered.  Yes, the horse did leave the barn, but at least in China all the horses in the wild were eventually caught. 

The reason that Chinese response ultimately failed for the world at large is that China wasn't in charge of the response in Lombardy or NYC.  On the territory they did control, they extinguished their own one hotspot rather effectively and prevented any more from flaring up. 

To the extent that this Wired article did turn out to be prescient, it was prescient only because the non-Chinese dropped the ball, which wasn't where they were going.  It wasn't prescient because of any "what in the world are they doing" commentary presented there.