Yes to both points. Masks provide some protection for the wearer and for others as well. The reduction of R0 combined with reduced viral exposure would have greatly benefited all.
COVID-19 Pandemic: Transmissions, Deaths, Treatments, Vaccines, Interventions and More...
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I don't agree that the criticism is equal, I think the decisions from up top put those further down stream in some really bad spots.
But I do agree, that the R/D thing, magnified by the MSNBC/FOX thing is a significant negative for the country.
Aight gotta go to work for a couple hours.
You guys keep chopping.
You guys keep chopping.
Nope, what I said was pretty clear. There is no agree or disagree when it comes to facts.
So for example opinions on how our government or elected officials is handling this crisis or thoughts on how it should be are not welcomed in this thread? Theories of where this virus might take us down the road, shit like that as well.
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He confounded two separate issues with the guidance on masks. The decision on use of masks and the need for ample supplies for our healthcare workers are two separate issues. The guidance could have been more honest which could have further reduced the spread. I think he chose poorly.
That decision cost people their lives. How many I cannot say but it surely had an impact on transmission rates having Americans not wearing masks for a month. Just like telling at risk patients to stay home without any guidance until they are severely ill cost people their lives. How about some guidance like the Virginia Hospital protocol that suggests Vitamin D3, Zinc, Quercetin, etc to aid the bodies defenses? Just like not providing LTC workers with proper PPE which has cost many lives. This is what happens when you choose poorly.
Numbers like to suggest that SK's success is due to testing and contact tracing. I believe those approaches greatly aided SK, but they also chose very wisely on a number of other issues including masks, protecting at risk pops, early treatments, etc. We were turning away people for testing at the beginning because they had no travel to China or contact with those who did. That was a poor choice as well as most of our spread came through Europe.
I think he hedged on masks because he knew we didn't have enough for the public and because he had no support from the Task Force on it anyway - at some level he does have to be a little bit political and if came out with guns blazing on every stupid thing Trump said, he'd be gone and I think he realized that the country needed him in his position trying to guide the path forward more than it needed someone else calling out Trumps misstatements and lies.
Also, I've been saying since early March, at least, that the SK playbook is testing, tracing, isolating and mask-wearing and social distancing, not just testing, although testing is the most important first step, since there's nothing worse than flying blind into a pandemic like we did, where the first test in NY wasn't run until 3/1, when there were easily 10,000+ infected (and <200 were run by 3/7). And sadly, that "playbook" is something the US also had (and not just the one from the Obama Administration), as HHS conducted its "Crimson Tide" flu pandemic simulation in mid-2019 and the bipartisan CSIS (very influential national security think tank) issued its report on strengthening America’s health security entitled, “Ending the Cycle of Crisis and Complacency in U.S. Global Health Security: A Report,” in November 2019.
https://www.wired.com/story/an-oral-history-of-the-pandemic-warnings-trump-ignored/
Deaths fall to 98,a new low for late week reporting.New hospitalizations follow suit.
This virus is disappearing faster than did Epstein from New York State Records.
This virus is disappearing faster than did Epstein from New York State Records.
Where is the science to prove that anything is filtered out except for droplets especially at the 50% you suggest? Have not seen anything saying how actually effective they are. Just opinions.
I was told that I shouldn't expect to be back on site (KW or BRN) until next year since I'm not in mfg or R&D.
J&J already announced that all office-based employees will WFH until Jan 1. Folks in labs will go back on Sept 1. Essential personnel, well, are essential and working at facilities now.
My company, another major pharma, sent word that no office-based employees will be "mandated" to come back on site for the rest of the year. It may be voluntary, but not forced.
I think a lot of people who are able to do their job fully from home won't be coming in again for quite a while. My job is secured because I do work in R&D building in Rahway. Today I'm the only one here (testing VC system upgrades) when there should be 100s here. I feel for the many co-workers who might be losing their jobs because they're basically here to support the Merck staff that is going to be a skeleton of itself.
Have posted a link before which isn't scientific in the classic sense but was from one company that used the machine that tests n95 masks to see what kind of filtration you get from various homemade masks...from cloth to vacuum bags/furnace filter (doesn't speak to the inhalation safety of those two). One fashion company made the claim about testing about blue shop towels and then this particle testing company decided to take it a step further and test various materials that people are using. So it's not some ultra scientific test but it's something.
Even if it was 10% I would still wear a mask, anything is better than 0. Like I said herd protection and keeping germs in your own vicinity is the main protection but from a personal standpoint it's just like I take the flu shot. Some years they have a good match for the prevalent strain some years not so much like 10% or whatever...doesn't matter to me we still get the flu shot every year. Something is better than nothing IMO.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the...rticles-best-in-homemade-masks-testing-2020-4
https://www.maskfaq.com/test-results
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Yes, even surgical/cloth masks will keep in a large part of the sneeze/cough virus-laden droplets (there are videos out there on this) and will also reduce the velocity/spread distance of what gets through the mask. Keeping some or most of the virus in is the most important mask function. The masks can also prevent medium to large virus-laden droplets from reaching a recipient, but likely will do little for any very small aerosolized droplets containing virus particles.
Elegant, but simple experiment on this in the article below, with hamsters, showing up to 75% reduction in transmission. And many other papers out there demonstrating mask effectiveness. Also, note that even a ~50% reduction in transmission is huge, since social distancing will get another ~50% reduction, such that infection rates can drop just from those two practices. Throw in testing/tracing/isolating to prevent flareups (which are inevitable) from becoming outbreaks and we have South Korea with 1/100th the death rate of the worst countries (and 1/200th the death rate of NY/NJ) and a nearly fully functioning economy. It's not a coincidence that almost all of the countries doing best are mask-wearing countries, largely in Asia, but not completely.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong...onavirus-hamster-research-proof-effectiveness
Also, in answer to your other comment, the CDC did not say there was zero risk from surfaces - there's actually no new data on surface transmission - all they did was more formally put surface transmission in with other low risks under a section titled, "the virus does not spread easily in other ways." It certainly implies surfaces are less of a risk, but all it really does is show that this risk is non-zero, but far less than the risk from other people. They could've explained that better, though.
https://rutgers.forums.rivals.com/t...ocial-distancing.191275/page-121#post-4569570
Fortunately, that's mostly not correct. Most in manufacturing never stayed at home and most of R&D, if lab-based are back at work, although with a target of about 50% of former occupancy levels, which is not 50% of the people (it's closer to 75%) - it's just being creative with the space we have (and masks/SD required, along with disinfecting surfaces) - and most of the support staff are still doing what they do. Most of the non-lab based folks are staying at home most of the time, since much of their work can be done remotely, but they come in as needed. I haven't been on site since the end of February and in my new contractor role (8 hrs/wk), I likely won't ever need to be on site. Most of sales, marketing, clinical (non experimental), etc. can mostly work from home.
Glad to see Trump not putting all his vaccine eggs in the Moderna basket. Operation Warp Speed now throwing $1B at the Oxford Vaccine.
https://www.biospace.com/article/u-...eca-more-than-1-billion-for-covid-19-vaccine/
https://www.biospace.com/article/u-...eca-more-than-1-billion-for-covid-19-vaccine/
Read the other day that the Oxford vaccine didn’t work. Why are we throwing $1B at it???
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fo...covid-vaccine-work-in-monkeys-not-really/amp/
The floor my office is on in 34 it's mostly statistics and labeling (not sure if this falls under marketing), but that's reassuring that must have to come in as you said.
And based on what you're saying I'd imagine we should be opening sooner than later, especially in the labs in the 80's. So again that's good to hear.
I've seen the videos where a person sneezes or coughs without a mask. And yes the droplets are kept in the masks but everything filters through and stays close to the body. That is lab conditions. The mice are in lab conditions to. People moving through my store isn't lab conditions. First responders wearing masks is real world conditions and they certainly weren't saved by a mask.
Getting back to my original question that I have yet to find how much is actually filtered out based in the type of mask.
You read it wrong. There were some overly critical articles pointing out some issues with the results, but doesn’t mean it won’t work.
The initial reports from the UK is that the vaccine did not prevent the COVID virus but none on the tested animals got pneumonia. Lessen the impact ..yes. Still much work do be done.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-...vid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-news-us-uk-trials/
I read it wrong??
“All of the vaccinated monkeys treated with the Oxford vaccine became infected when challenged.”
What does that mean to you?
This article disagrees:
"Their vaccine has been tested in six rhesus macaque monkeys at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, that were then exposed to large volumes of the virus causing COVID-19. More than 28 days later, all six were still healthy."
Its to control us...convinced of that now. Without masks people would act as if life was normal....many of us feel we should get back to normal
You didn’t take any solace in the links I posted. It’s the same kind of machine used to test N95 masks and the company that tests them. I think .3 micron sized particles. Even if the stats for each material aren’t perfect I don’t think that means they filter out nothing and can’t reduce the viral load you intake. Take some margin of error for each material and it’s still better than zero.
Forbes provided a link to the full results of the study. Feel free to check it out.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1.full.pdf
It looks like the Oxford vaccine simply doesn’t work, sadly. I obviously hope and pray that it (or any other vaccine) does work.
Article on Sweden’s herd immunity path.
Snippets from the article:
(CNN)Sweden has revealed that despite adopting more relaxed measures to control coronavirus, only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed the antibodies needed to fight the disease by late April.
The figure, which Sweden's Public Health Authority confirmed to CNN, is roughly similar to other countries that have data and well below the 70-90% needed to create "herd immunity" in a population.
Sweden's percentage of people with antibodies is not far off that of other countries that did enforce lockdowns. In Spain, 5% of people had developed coronavirus antibodies by May 14, according to preliminary results of an epidemiological study by the government.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, estimated earlier this month on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon that between 5% and 15% of people in the US have been infected.
He said the coronavirus was going to circulate and infect at least 60% to 70% of the population before it slows down, but warned that the country had "a long ways to go" to get to a level of herd immunity. A report he wrote along with other epidemiologists and a historian estimated this would likely take 18 to 24 months.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/health/sweden-herd-immunity-coronavirus-intl/index.html
Snippets from the article:
(CNN)Sweden has revealed that despite adopting more relaxed measures to control coronavirus, only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed the antibodies needed to fight the disease by late April.
The figure, which Sweden's Public Health Authority confirmed to CNN, is roughly similar to other countries that have data and well below the 70-90% needed to create "herd immunity" in a population.
Sweden's percentage of people with antibodies is not far off that of other countries that did enforce lockdowns. In Spain, 5% of people had developed coronavirus antibodies by May 14, according to preliminary results of an epidemiological study by the government.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, estimated earlier this month on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon that between 5% and 15% of people in the US have been infected.
He said the coronavirus was going to circulate and infect at least 60% to 70% of the population before it slows down, but warned that the country had "a long ways to go" to get to a level of herd immunity. A report he wrote along with other epidemiologists and a historian estimated this would likely take 18 to 24 months.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/health/sweden-herd-immunity-coronavirus-intl/index.html
I dunno where you got that snippet from, but there are a lot of but’s to that statement, and that doesn’t mean the vaccine is not effective. Literally hundreds of articles on the topic, first one on the list.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...transmission-astrazeneca-latest-a9521241.html
I got that snippet but from the article I posted, and it wasn’t followed by a “but.” It was followed by evidence. I linked the data that the article was analyzing in the following post.
I hope the vaccine works; I’m interested in what RU#’s and wisr have to say on this topic.
Well, there isn't going to be any "real world" experimentation on humans with the virus, so we're never going to get those answers, which is why we have to rely on surrogates, like lab experiments with animals and guesstimates of mask penetration for various particle size droplets containing virus particles. We also still don't know how many virus particles it takes to infect a human and how differently some humans will respond vs. others. So we're stuck and will continue to be stuck with suboptimal data and inferential science on what works and what doesn't. I still go back to the big picture comment: as far as I know, no mask wearing culture is doing anywhere near as bad as non-mask wearing cultures, so you do the math.
Couldn't find an article but video showing precautions taken in a NYC restaurant for when things reopen. QR code scan to get menu on your phone, cups/plates/silverware saran wrapped, fixed and rolling plexiglass dividers/shields and face shielded cap in addition to masks worn by the servers.
There are infinite types of masks based in many many types of materials being used. The answer is no one knows exactly. Are you on a mission to prove masks are worthless like you were with gloves?
For anyone interested in why we test 0.3 micron filtering efficiency.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/what-is-pm0-3-why-important/
Gloves are worthless. They get as dirty as your hands. How does a glove protect you?
If you never touch your face do you need gloves? If you touch your face occasionally then the stuff on your bare hands or gloves infect you the exact same way.
You said this in the other thread about the non N95 surgical masks that you wear at work and then MrsScrew posted a pic of the box and the box said it filtered out 95%. Where as an n95 filtered 99.8 or something like that.
And then I posted a link to a manufacturer that said pretty much the same thing.
If you ask for evidence, we post the evidence you ask for, and then you ignore the evidence, why should we bother with this debate?
I don't know what you are getting at about lab conditions. Why lab conditions would show one thing but that doesn't translate to real world conditions. You will need to provide an better explanation why a mask would be effective in a lab but not in real world conditions. I wear a home made mask in real world conditions and I have no doubt it limits the travel of my breath and talking. It's painfully obvious all day long.
Now the limit of travel is different then the filtration, and maybe my mask does more of the former then the latter, but either result is a positive.
Edit: I'm just now realizing that your "show me scientific evidence" and "that works in a lab but not the real world" points are so contradictory.
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U.S. doctors call for remdesivir data to guide coronavirus treatment
BY Reuters
— 5:08 PM ET 05/21/2020
By Deena Beasley
May 21 (Reuters) - U.S. doctors and others in the scientific community are calling for the release of data that convinced health regulators to authorize emergency use of Gilead Sciences Inc's antiviral drug remdesivir to treat COVID-19, so they can direct limited supplies on the right patients.
Chief Executive Mihael Polymeropoulos on Wednesday published an open letter asking for a full download of the trial findings that led to emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
"What if the drug is best suited to people early in the infection cycle? If we give it to people with severe disease - out of natural compassion - we may have wasted the drug," the CEO told Reuters.
He said Vanda, which is developing an anti-inflammatory drug for COVID-19, is looking to "lend our expertise."
The FDA approved emergency use of remdesivir on May 1 based on preliminary results from a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) trial showing that the drug cut hospital stays by 31%, or about four days, compared with a placebo.
No other details of the 1,063-patient trial have been released. The Institute said by email that a report on the trial will be published in a few weeks. Gilead has not said when.
"We want to direct the drug to those most likely to benefit and least likely to be harmed," Dr. Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters.
There are no formally approved treatments for COVID-19 - the sometimes deadly illness caused by the novel coronavirus - and remdesivir is the first drug to show benefit in a large placebo-controlled trial.
Hospitals say they are concerned about distribution of limited supplies and are establishing ethical guidelines to ration remdesivir, without having seen the full trial data.
Katherine Perez, a pharmacy specialist in infectious disease at Houston Methodist Hospital, said her institution was prioritizing patients based on the drug trial's enrollment protocol, but needed more data to make better informed treatment decisions.
Gilead's trials close by the end of the month and the NIAID plans to study remdesivir in combination with an anti-inflammatory compound. (Reporting By Deena Beasley, editing by Peter Henderson and Bill Berkrot)
BY Reuters
— 5:08 PM ET 05/21/2020
By Deena Beasley
May 21 (Reuters) - U.S. doctors and others in the scientific community are calling for the release of data that convinced health regulators to authorize emergency use of Gilead Sciences Inc's antiviral drug remdesivir to treat COVID-19, so they can direct limited supplies on the right patients.
Chief Executive Mihael Polymeropoulos on Wednesday published an open letter asking for a full download of the trial findings that led to emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
"What if the drug is best suited to people early in the infection cycle? If we give it to people with severe disease - out of natural compassion - we may have wasted the drug," the CEO told Reuters.
He said Vanda, which is developing an anti-inflammatory drug for COVID-19, is looking to "lend our expertise."
The FDA approved emergency use of remdesivir on May 1 based on preliminary results from a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) trial showing that the drug cut hospital stays by 31%, or about four days, compared with a placebo.
No other details of the 1,063-patient trial have been released. The Institute said by email that a report on the trial will be published in a few weeks. Gilead has not said when.
"We want to direct the drug to those most likely to benefit and least likely to be harmed," Dr. Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters.
There are no formally approved treatments for COVID-19 - the sometimes deadly illness caused by the novel coronavirus - and remdesivir is the first drug to show benefit in a large placebo-controlled trial.
Hospitals say they are concerned about distribution of limited supplies and are establishing ethical guidelines to ration remdesivir, without having seen the full trial data.
Katherine Perez, a pharmacy specialist in infectious disease at Houston Methodist Hospital, said her institution was prioritizing patients based on the drug trial's enrollment protocol, but needed more data to make better informed treatment decisions.
Gilead's trials close by the end of the month and the NIAID plans to study remdesivir in combination with an anti-inflammatory compound. (Reporting By Deena Beasley, editing by Peter Henderson and Bill Berkrot)
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