Wear a mask and wash your hands folks!
Anything that can reduce my chances of a severe outcome or even coming down with it in the first place is worth it in my book.
Except for 1 or 2 outlier countries masking is over.
* Unless they are familiar with U.S. politics
Just got back from Germany yesterday, and while masks are required on most public transport (but not airplanes), you'll see a decent amount of compliance (50%?) but not anywhere else indoors.
Minimal masking in public spaces on public transport, stores, airplanes, etc in my experience in Germany/France/UK. There's absolutely more masking going on here in the Bay Area.
I’m not going to go around wearing a mask all the time to avoid a couple of days of cold symptoms every other year. Getting colds is part of the human condition.
How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a mask most of the time when in public?
I guess it’s fine if no one you hang out with cares, but that’s not the case for me.
I should also note that I don’t work with other people. I might feel differently if I had to mask at work all the time. I do keep a mask for the 2% of the time at work I interact with others. But the biggest thing is grocery stores. Not masking there you’re just asking to elevate community transmission. You’re increasing the risks for others. I’d love it if the virus was gone, but it just isn’t.
Duck bill mask clad Germans generally stay in Germany. And they look insane. Like warning signs of nature insane.
Public announcements in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, from epidemiologists and ICU doctors recently is to stay the <f**> home if you are sick. If sick dont go out wearing a mask since it protects no one and, even if immuno compromized, live like you did in 2019 you are not protected wearing a flimsy surgical facemask and you need to socialize and not lock yourself up for the rest of your days.
And once you are not sick anymore, go back to work. Don't bother the currently overloaded hospitals unless something is very wrong, you know when your cold/flu is over.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/overlakaren-restriktioner.... https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/smittskyddsla....
Use common sense.
So no , presumably democrat american internet stranger. Dont wear a mask, If sick stay at home. Dont go out, face covered, and think you have saved a life. Mask is pointless.
Hand washing still applies though.
Don't think handwashing has been controversial since dr. Ignaz Semmelweis in 1865 was declared insane and put in an asylum by the medical establishment for suggesting that hand washing prevented doctors from spreading disease between their patients.
I also don’t wear a surgical mask, I wear a KN95 because I’m not a fool.
This applies to society as a whole as well. The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself.
This seems much easier to say if you haven't been impacted by a serious case. I have friends who were similarly unconcerned, and who felt very differently after a month long battle with COVID, and as they continue to struggle with the after effects.
So yes, there's more to life than a myopic focus on avoiding one specific illness, but the actual impact of that statement and a closer look at the actual risk tradeoffs makes things a bit less obvious, and I'm not convinced that most of the behavior people are exhibiting is myopic.
> The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself
This is a statement that needs quite a bit of evidence to back it up. I think it's safe to say that no one knew what the 2nd and 3rd order effects of trying to avoid COVID itself would be, and those effects are indeed significant. But neither can we say that we should have gone back and let the first rounds overwhelm and collapse hospital systems, the impact of which is something we can't even begin to understand right now.
But saying that covid isn't causing damage is itself highly myopic.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
None of this is binary. It's not sick or not sick. There is a viral load component, where a persons body can fight off a certain amount of virus.
It's trivially easy to acquire authentic N95s today.
People just won't wear them, so, we all suffer.
Why do people like you have such anger about mask wearing?
I'm reluctantly curious what your thinking is on that.
That said, I think the seasonal wave we're anticipating is a product of when our winter hits and how hard our winter hits - other areas might have very different experiences overall.
Took the bivalent booster about 2 months ago then went on a cruise and directly after to re:invent.
Since then had multiple exposures with people around me getting week long fevers. So far I had something in my system that made me feel "slightly off" - but nothing worse.
Yay antibodies.
I'm a big believer in "more antibodies the better" - but I am also on the side of "COVID amnesty". The pandemic was an immensely scary time for everyone, and got co-opted by politics of all stripes. We need to forgive each other and move on.
I now support everyone's choice - with the standard exceptions (Childhood vaccines, don't go out when sick, respect others).
(Though that signal didn't help me in Trader Joe's the other day, when one of the few employees wearing a mask (only surgical), turned out to have a phlegmy cough. In that case, I imagine the logic might've been, "You're obviously sick and probably spreading something, maybe Covid? We don't pay you to stay home. Strap on the least effective mask you can find, which suddenly we believe in, and get out there and superspread among shoppers!" :( )
> In addition to the pathogens it tests for, WastewaterSCAN measures an extremely common, harmless plant virus that is consumed when people eat. It is called pepper mild mottle virus (or PMMoV). By measuring the concentration of PMMoV genetic markers per dry weight gram of wastewater solids, WastewaterSCAN can account for how much viral material is recovered from each sample and changes to the “fecal strength” of that sample. For example, heavy rain that drains into a wastewater system can dilute the strength of a particular day’s sample.
OK, that's pretty clever and it sounds useful, so I guess I should turn on that toggle. But then I read further and see this:
> Our analysis suggests that both the concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 genes measured as copies per gram of solid waste and those concentrations normalized by PMMoV are proportional to laboratory confirmed COVID-19 incidence rates in the sewersheds.
How can both things be proportional? Do they actually mean positively correlated?
If raw data is already proportional to lab tests, then it doesn't seem like there's any benefit from normalizing.
This is the best part of science: not knowing, but working to discover.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
It's not a "holiday gathering spike". It's literally the same respiratory pathogen pattern we've seen for as long as we've bothered to look: in the winter, as we go inside and the air becomes cool and dry, respiratory infections go up. The viruses evolved to work this way, because it's a great survival strategy when your host is a social animal that doesn't/can't live outside in the cold.
It happens in parts of the world where Christmas and Thanksgiving aren't a thing (see Japan and China and Korea right now). It happens on the opposite schedule in the lower half of the planet (even where Christmas and/or Thanksgiving are a thing).
This impulse to blame/scold people for a natural phenomenon is unnerving.
Yeah, but as far as our governments will share more information on this, this SARS-CoV-2 virus was invented by people in a lab, and it escaped from a lab, due to human error.
This winter is the cause the please explain Japan which had it's biggest spikes in summer
Covid used to be novel. Now it's endemic and mutates multiple times per year. It's looking more and more like Covid will be with us for decades if not forever, just like the flu and the common cold.
In the world of security, you grow up, leave behind the simple binary descriptions, and assess impact of event and threat you're defending against.
This applies to disease safety as well. It's not just 'inevitable' or 'preventable', but there is a difference between getting sick once a year and getting sick every month. Between working in a hospital and working from home. Between being sick by yourself and spreading it to your extended family.
There is a risk assessment to be done, and calculated measures to be taken.
However, once the disease is characterized, you have effective treatments and protocols for the most sick, and you have decent rates of vaccination and recent infection... needs shift.
The critical factor is {max hospital ICU capacity} + 1 more seriously ill person, and when you're dealing with exponential growth rates and a virgin population, that can be hit pretty easily.
The fact that we didn't (in most parts of the world, for most of the time) is a triumph of modern health policy.
And PCR tests are super sensitive.
I've been using wastewater data to adjust my behavior since official testing and reporting is down and under-reporting cases. Detected COVID goes up, I reduce my exposure and remind my vulnerable loved ones. Detected COVID goes back down, I adjust my behavior accordingly.
I wonder if the more "popular" counties are pay-walled or something?
EDIT: According to the site, "County Selection: Counties associated with each location were provided by our sampling partners, and correspond to the primary county served by each sampling location. In the county-level section we highlight a subset of counties which had at least 21 weeks of data and whose sampling locations represented at least 10,000 individuals, as well as the primary counties of our sampling partners in the Biobot Network."
So I'm curious what other factors are excluding the largest (by population) counties in Washington?
Novato: http://publichealth.verily.com/#Novato,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2
San Rafael: http://publichealth.verily.com/#San%20Rafael,%20CA:SARS-CoV-...
I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.
unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless,
and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors).
Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard...
...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem.
Sigh.
Not sure how helpful this is when huge swathes of the population aren’t represented here
Still, this is tremendously useful where there is coverage, and looks like enough data to make sampling type of conclusions. Hopefully we'll eventually see some kind of network effect.
For example, I'm in the NYC area - and Newark NJ has coverage. There is enough overlap that I expect flu and covid curves (including strains) to be close enough to be interesting.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveil...
https://globalnews.ca/news/9272293/immunity-debt-covid-19-mi...
"In fact, Furness likens the immune system to a collection of photographs. When people take photos and put them away in an album, the photos don’t fade over time just because they aren’t being looked at regularly."
By that logic I must not need my yearly flu shot because my flu "photo" hasn't faded. Clearly if I wasn't exposed to rsv (and it's most recent variants) my immune system can fight it just as strongly because I have that photo from two years ago.
Also, tetanus vaccines every 10 years, that must be bs.
