OaktownBear said:
BarcaBear said:
OaktownBear said:
Cal88 said:
OaktownBear said:
Cal88 said:
Yes Xultaif, I've got good friends in Northern Italy and in the Far East, so I know that the pandemic is real, and given the contagious nature of the virus and global mobility today, it's only a matter of time until America is hit with the same intensity as in Korea or Italy. This might be a once in a lifetime pandemic event, we've never gone through it before, so people will tend to downplay its potential gravity until it hits home.
I think there is a middle ground between recognizing a significant health crisis and accepting someone pulling a death toll of 100,000,000 out of their butt with no basis other than to compare it to a pandemic of a century ago 35 years before we had a polio vaccine. I'm very worried about coronavirus. I don't find your posts constructive. As near as I can tell you have no expertise and you should leave the predictions and recommendations to people who do. Getting people to panic isn't the best course.
You're a bit overly aggressive here, perhaps a reflection of the bitter acrimonious tone that has taken over the OT board the last couple of years. I haven't "pulled anything out of my butt", just provided info with links from reliable sources.
My philosophy here is that you hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. If anything I probably should have started the thread a bit earlier, when for instance respirator masks were still readily available online.
Really. Am I?
Really should you have started the thread earlier so more people would by masks?:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus-surgeon-general-trnd/index.html
The Surgeon General is begging people to stop buying masks saying it is putting our communities at risk. You think you are doing good here? You are doing the equivalent of telling everyone to leave their hoses running on their roof during a fire so the fire department can't get the water they need to fight the fire.
I hope you can see how absurd the surgeon general's message is.
I'd laugh if it wasn't so patently absurd. telling the public that masks do not work, but in the same sentence stating that they do work, but that they need only medical personnel to have access to them. smdh
it's clear that they do work.
it's also clear that the medical industry needs them, as will any personnel involved in a mass scale military based response.
it's also clear that the US manufacturing industry, the advent of the politics of affluence have monumentally failed us and have set this country on course for a catastrophe. globalization successfully weakened this country just so a handful of people could make obscene profits. this country needs to shift to manufacturing medical products immediately. sadly, we have a president who does not understand this and will not mobilize whatever resources this nation has to address the coming crisis.
it is just like how he intentionally bungled Puerto Rico following the Hurricane, a decision that left this country on the brink of a major healthcare crisis in 2018. Puerto Rico manufacturers a lot of IV bags, as well as medicines for diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.
Puerto Rico should have taught them to prepare, but the buffoon led us nowhere.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-so-many-medicines-arel-in-short-supply-after-hurricane-maria/
Love the people that think they know better than the health professionals or worse want to tell everyone that the health professionals are lying even when there is general consensus.
This is why I likened it to running your hose on the roof. Yes, a wet roof is less likely to catch fire. If you run the water it might give you a tiny benefit. If everyone runs the water the result is that you take the tool away from those that do the most good and thus dramatically increase the chance your house burns down.
Patients that are in the hospital are separated from society and no longer a threat EXCEPT FOR INFECTING CAREGIVERS. Caregivers are out and about so if they are infected they are a threat. Being able to stop known carriers from infecting anyone is key. So, number one, the most effective way to stop it is by putting the mask on the sick so they aren't spraying contaminated fluids everywhere. Number 2, caregivers know when they are being exposed. So they take measures before during and after the exposure to stop infection. For instance they know exactly when to wash their hands. So even if the general public had a mask that actually had significant effectiveness, they don't know when they were exposed. They don't know when to wash their hands or change their clothes because they have been contaminated. They cannot was their hands after literally every human interaction like the health care provider can. The mask is one part of the protection and you need the other measures for the mask to be effective. Further, they are in a known high exposure event. The public are walking around protecting themselves against a threat they are unlikely to be facing. It's like taking bulletproof vests away from soldiers on the front lines and randomly handing them out to people who have a small chance at being shot at.
Past studies have clearly demonstrated that masks worn by the general population barely influence the transmission rate. Again, you are taking a useful tool that could really help if used correctly and putting it to a useless purpose.
thanks for proving my point and making my arguments for me.
1) the health professional contradicted himself. anybody that has the capacity to read clearly can see that.
even your analogy admits that I was right, the surgeon general contradicted their own statement.
2) your analogy is faulty. yes, a logical fallacy. the failure, however, is not in the individual, it lies in the failure of those overseeing a national response. in this case, a proper fire analogy would be that your city is surrounded, the way Paradise, Ca was before it burnt down. everyone needed to respond and not just do nothing. the situation was so severe that when folks realized they had to evacuate the streets became clogged. in your analogy nobody should do anything until their house is burning down, not even get out of the house.
the reason why my analogy is an appropriate analogy is because the govt response was created on the fly. there was no pre-existing plan to address a catastrophe, regardless of how fast it developed. similarly, people buying up existing stocks is not a crisis in the making. the PROBLEM is that the idiots in the federal govt aka Trump had fired the Pandemic response team, had nobody in charge of it for over two years. He bungled the Puerto Rican Hurricane crisis that should have warned him what was coming if a health crisis kicked off, but the moron cared about twitter instead of paying attention. ...So when the first signals came out of China that a pandemic kicked off, nobody took steps to ensure that additional supplies were secured for a national response. why? because there was nobody there. in this analogy it would be like Paradise being surrounded by fire and no firemen or police or emergency dispatch callers showing up until everything was already burning.
the problem is not in the individuals, and trying to blame the public is asinine. this is going to be a 1-2 year crisis, long term. the supplies should have already existed to allow for a national medical crisis, but there is none.
3) Stop using faulty analogies. you keep trying to derail the issue by using really silly comparisons, and they only serve to try to hide your misunderstanding of how a response to large scale disasters works.
The virus has an incubation period between 2-24 days. not doing anything means that the infection spreads faster and overwhelms hospitals faster. China proved this by putting 60 million people on lock down. Italy, France and others are banning large gatherings, sporting events, etc.
Do you know what that means? it means that if nobody has any protection of any sort, and changes aren;t made immediately to behaviour patterns, like grocery shopping, then the medical staff will be overwhelmed in 2-3 months, so no number of masks is going to help medical personnel. China, even with resources beyond anything available in the US is proof of this. They had to lock down 60 million people because nobody was wearing masks, or doing anything to prevent infection until the govt started arresting people in the streets for not wearing masks. yes, that started mid way through January.
and, no, past studies have not shown that respirators do work. past studies have shown that they do cut down on infection rates. Respirators do work. that is exactly why the Surgeon General made his statement. It is an attempt to secure supplies for medical staff because national leaders failed to do so. The Surgeon General is trying to address a logistical problem and not a medical crisis.
Chinese factories are shutting down. 25% drop in Chinese shipping has been cited by the LA Port. we are not going to be getting more masks. the world wide demand is too high. the US needs to start manufacturing these immediately.
the Tool works prefectly well, within its parameters which do not insist on additional things like obsessively washing your hands. all the other hygiene recommendations work to further increase the effectiveness of respirators. also, stop saying masks, they are respirators, not masks. masks do not have anywhere near the effectiveness of N95 respirators.
