Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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The 1918 epidemic provided a comparison between cities like St Louis and Philadelphia, showing that lots of lives could be saved by cancelling large group events like parades.

New York, New Jersey and Maryland are requiring everyone to wear a mask or a substitute face covering to leave home. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suddenly flipped from urging the public not to wear masks to recommending that they wear something that covers their nose and mouth.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new signature look is a western-style bandana pulled up over his mouth and nose. No doubt he’s well-intentioned. But that kind of face-covering is only a hair better than no covering at all. Science shows it’s a mere 2 percent to 3 percent effective. It’s misleading.

From day one of the coronavirus outbreak, the public has gotten the run around about masks. Government officials need to be honest about what works and what doesn’t. Here’s the scientific evidence:

N95 masks, which are molded and fit tight to the face, filter out 95 percent of viral particles, even the smallest ones. These masks offer the best protection, but they are in short supply, and public officials want them reserved for health care workers on the front lines.

Surgical masks, the kind you see commonly worn in hospitals and dentists’ offices, are flat and held to the face with elastic. They’re made from a nonwoven material, polypropylene, that is a somewhat effective filter. They protect the wearer from about 56 percent of viral droplets emitted by an infected person nearby, according to research in the British Medical Journal.

Not so woven cloth masks. They allow in 97 percent of viral particles. That means almost no protection for the wearer at all.

Wearing a homemade cotton mask is a false assurance, explains epidemiologist May Chu. She says it will block only about 2 percent of airflow. Similarly, a study in Disaster Medical and Public Health Preparedness concludes that a homemade mask should be considered “only as a last resort,” better than no protection at all but not a lot better.

Surgical masks seem available in stores now, and if you can buy a supply, using them is far preferable to making your own. Don’t reuse the mask and avoid touching the outside of the mask, because it’s likely contaminated after use.

If you have to resort to homemade barriers, keep in mind that the more layers of cloth, the better the protection. Four layers likely block out 13 percent of viral droplets, compared with the 2 percent blocked with a single layer, according to a study in Aerosol and Air Quality Research.

Why are public officials suddenly urging mask use, many weeks after the Coronavirus struck? Because of mounting research pointing to the huge role of asymptomatic people spreading the disease before they feel ill. Whenever these asymptomatic carriers talk or simply exhale, they spread very small droplets of virus-laden saliva and respiratory mucous in the air. Scientists call it bioaerosols.

Getting everyone to mask up helps to protect the uninfected, and keeps the unknowingly infected from spreading the virus. As New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, announcing the mask mandate: “You don’t have a right to infect me.”

Makes sense, but Americans have had to put up with a lot of message confusion from the outset, and now they’re getting misleading advice about homemade masks.

What’s the root problem? Year after year after year, through three presidencies, federal health bureaucrats ignored warnings about inadequate supplies of masks and other equipment in the event of a pandemic. Ten federal reports sounded the alarm, even as the nation witnessed SARS, MERS, avian flu and swine flu that circled the globe. In 2009, during the swine flu outbreak, the federal Strategic National Stockpile dispersed 85 million N95 masks, as well as other protective masks. The masks were never replaced afterward.

Don’t blame any president, Democratic or Republican, for this oversight. The career officials at Health and Human Services knowingly allowed the nation to be undersupplied. They never requested enough money to adequately stock the Strategic National Stockpile. Their agenda was global, tracking down polio in Pakistan, pouring nearly $5 billion in the fight against Ebola overseas, and funding a Global Health Security Agenda serving 49 countries. But no masks for Americans.

When the coronavirus struck here, the CDC offered only mask double talk. The agency said on the one hand masks are vital to protect health care workers, and on the other hand, masks won’t make the public safer. It defies common sense. The agency should have leveled with people, admitting supplies had to be saved for front line caregivers.

The coronavirus could return next winter. Or another viral pandemic could strike from any part of the globe. The bill Congress enacted in late March allocates $16 billion to the Strategic National Stockpile, nearly 30 times its annual budget. Next time the U.S. will have enough masks.

Source: Coronavirus masks – what works, new rules and explaining the shortage

When the current pandemic dies down, I recommend that everyone purchase a box of N95's once these masks become available again and the prices return back to normal. You have a right to protect your lives and N95's or better will help accomplish that. This is especially important for those individuals that regularly use mass transit. This coronavirus may return in the fall so be prepared.

The current thinking is that if we have the technology to save lives, we should do so.
Problem is, we have only a limited number of medical professionals and equipment, so
they can only save so many people at any given time.

Suppose we let everyone get infected at once just to get it over with.
Who should we save? The highest bidder for a ventilator? Celebrities? Doctors and Nurses?
Nobody?
We don't have the leadership to make those kinds of decisions in the USA.
Not by a long shot.

The governor of Connecticut wants to save everyone. Even those who are disabled.

China moved quickly to shut down travel domestically from Wuhan to the rest of China, but did not stop international flights from Wuhan.

[Peter Navarro] added that “more importantly, we know that for a critical six-week period of time, China used its influence at the World Health Organization to hide the virus from the world. This was a time where that virus could have been contained in Wuhan; instead, 5 million Chinese people went out from Wuhan and propagated the virus around the world.”

“During that period of time, that six-week interval when they were hiding this virus from the world, China went from a net exporter of personal protective equipment, they are the largest producer of that in the world, to a large net importer,” Navarro said. “They basically went around and vacuumed up virtually all of the PPE around the world, including a lot from this country, which was for humanitarian reasons sharing our PPE with them, and what that did was leave people in New York, Milan, and everywhere in-between defenseless when it came time to have that PPE.”

“Now what's happening today, which is equally alarming, is China is sitting on that hoard of PPE where it cornered the market and is profiteering,” he continued. “I have cases that are coming across my desk where $0.50 masks made in China are being sold to hospitals here in America for as much as $8.”

Source: China 'cornered' the personal protective equipment market and 'is profiteering' during coronavirus outbreak

^ We had a video link back in this thread (I think) of a Chinese woman going around to multiple American stores and buying up all the masks and loading them into her car. This was obviously coordinated -- some kind of instruction was send from the Chinese government to expats/emigrants to do this in their respective countries. Lots of legal questions involved that I hope will be pursued -- were these people acting as unregistered foreign agents, could their actions be considered terrorism, etc.

(Also, there was a video of a Chinese woman going around a US department store and deliberately rubbing her hands over all the display items. If an action like that was done under instruction, it certainly sounds like coordinated terrorism to me.)

You don't have to take that tone towards someone who is always respectful and additionally an elder who deserves more respect.

Jimmy is not a liberal, by the way.