To wear a mask or not wear a mask?

A lot of what is being suggested in addition masks is pointless too. Temperature checks do nothing really. We're being told to be fearful of all these supposedly asymptomatic carriers out there. A fever is a symptom, so they won't have one and anyone who does wake up with a fever the day they were planning to go will just take two Tylenol before they leave home and by the time they get to the park they don't have a fever anymore. Parents who don't want to keep their sick kids home use that little trick at our school and think none of us are smart enough to figure it out.

Paisley said:

A lot of what is being suggested in addition masks is pointless too. Temperature checks do nothing really. We're being told to be fearful of all these supposedly asymptomatic carriers out there. A fever is a symptom, so they won't have one and anyone who does wake up with a fever the day they were planning to go will just take two Tylenol before they leave home and by the time they get to the park they don't have a fever anymore. Parents who don't want to keep their sick kids home use that little trick at our school and think none of us are smart enough to figure it out.

There was a story on the news a week or so ago about this.

According to the story,a significant percentage,I don't remember the exact number,of people who tested positive fro Covid,never had a fever.

Early on, I was trying to keep track of cases in order to know what to expect. Because the only thing we got from CDC or the Ohio site was fever, cough, shortness of breath.

Here's one article I saved on the trajectory.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-covid19-day-by-day-symp...nts-2020-2

Now, Rep McAdams did get progressively worse and needed treatment, but then you have Sen Paul, who did test positive but I don't think got sick and is now cleared. What about those basketball players that were positive? Did they get sick with it?

So what about these asymptomatic positives? How did their course go? Did they eventually worsen or nothing came of it? It would be nice to find out so we can all get some idea as well as the numbers.

Testing is not 100% either, I heard of false positives, false negatives, contaminated tests, I guess that's what stalled the CDC tests early on.

Be careful of masks shipped from China, too, read about them sending contaminated masks to Netherlands and such. Wouldn't that be a heck of a note, breathing in a Covid mask. Perhaps there's a danger now here with USA made, but I hope we have better quality control.

And then there's what's classified as "mild" What we define as mild vs what I've seen written. CP4's course would be considered "mild" although he felt like death through it. Apparently anything short of needing a vent is considered mild so it would run the gamut from that to a low grade and perhaps minor cough, too, what I would deem as mild.

I've basically given up trying to figure out various case progression as a whole.

rpbobcat said:

She said virtually all of the people she sees walking around with an N-95 mask don't have a clue how it should be worn.

You should see my governor.

The whole idea behind getting people to wear masks is a fear of the spread of the disease by asymptomatic carriers. This all comes from a single incident in which a traveler spread the disease to a bunch of people, I think in traveling from Germany to China or some such. Anyway, it has since been revealed that the person was not, in fact, asymptomatic...the person had taken a fever reducer to treat a fever, which means the person had symptoms.
We have seen examples where a single infected person was able to infect a large number of people in an enclosed setting (the infamous choir practice, for instance) but again it seems in these cases the infections are being traced to people who were showing symptoms at the time of the contact and infection.
I think the State of Ohio missed a great opportunity when they tested all the prison inmates and discovered that most of them tested positive for coronavirus but all but a few never developed symptoms. Okay; then why did the State not begin taking daily saliva samples from these inmates and testing those samples for live virus? Let's find out for certain whether asymptomatic people are actually carrying infectious doses of coronavirus in their "respiratory droplets". Some conclusive information in this area might give us a much better idea of just how hazardous this virus really is. Because without that information we have to assume that anybody might have it AND be contagious, when in fact that might not truly be the case. If we were to find out that truly asymptomatic carriers are not contagious or not as contagious as feared, it could make an enormous difference in the way that we respond to the virus. At the very least it might reduce the current mask fetish.
Trouble is, I haven't seen any information indicating that anybody is really investigating the issue of asymptomatic contagion...instead we have made a cultural assumption that it is happening on a gigantic scale, even as we have no evidence either way.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I guess I fall into the antimask camp. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but here is the basis for my position.

---

Fact #1: The physical size of a Coronavirus is 125 nanometers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

Fact #2: The effective pore size of 4 layers of cotton cloth is 20 micrometers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloth_filter

Fact #3: The size of a golf ball is 42.67 mm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_ball

Computation: If a Coronavirus was the size of a golfball, the pore size of the cloth would be 5.7 meters (18.75 feet)

Question: How effective is a sieve with 18.75 foot holes against golf balls?

---

I know using Wikipedia for research is a faux pas, but in my defense, I am not using particularly hot-button, highly edited entries. Plus, I could be off by a factor of 10 without changing the fundamentals of my results. Viruses are just too small to be mechanically filtered by cloth.

True. But viruses do not travel much on their own; in fact they tend to be fragile and will fall apart on their own which is why hand washing with plain soap and water is so effective. Viruses attach and envelop themselves in carrier media, especially fats and other liquids. Darn near nothing will stop the progress of a virus, but a particulate carrier is much larger and can be stopped or at least impeded somewhat. The question is, do those carrier fluids really contain enough live virus to infect anyone?

And using your analogy, the enveloped golf ball sized virus is now a basketball sized droplet. The hole in the cloth is still 15’ across.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

RideMan said:

This all comes from a single incident in which a traveler spread the disease to a bunch of people, I think in traveling from Germany to China or some such.

That's not true at all, Dave. There was no single incident, it's the general science around limiting the spread of airborne pathogens, made particularly concerning by those who are asymptomatic. It's the reason that surgeons have been wearing masks for all of modern medicine.

^^ As for viruses being fragile there was the article published everywhere about how they found the Covid-19 virus on surfaces in the cruise ship 17 days after the passengers had left and so many people freaked out about it I think lots of people never read that article all the way through they just saw the headline. Near the end of the article it was stated that the virus they found had degraded and was no longer viable. It was still there and recognizable but no longer able to infect at that point. So we can get it from surfaces but some people are under the impression this will happen a lot longer after the surface was contaminated than what is likely. Like if you wiped a booger on or coughed on the doorknob and I come by and touch it and rub my eyes 20 minutes later decent chance but not a week and a half later.

Probably still needs peer reviewed, but researchers at UC Berkeley and Hong Kong University have concluded that if everyone wore masks in public, it could cut the spread by roughly 80%. Here's a link to the Forbes article about it.

It sounds like the amount of time you spend exposed to an infected person is really what determines the risk of catching it. Unless they're coughing and sneezing, breathing and talking don't emit enough of the virus to be contagious over short encounters. You need to be exposed to an infected person for a longer period of time to catch it through breathing and talking. If masks can reduce at least a certain percentage of virus particles from being emitted, I can see how they would lower the risk in situations with longer term exposure.

Time is important. And when I look back on the exchanges I have had with people recently...well, today I was in five different retail stores (three of them didn't have the part I needed) and didn't spend five minutes with anybody. And that's fairly normal in a non-coronavirus world. Brevity of contact at least among people who aren't coughing or sneezing may be as important as or more important than physical distance when we're trying to figure out whether it's safe to go to a park.

The bit about surfaces is interesting; perhaps you have seen the US Government work that exposed the novel coronavirus on stainless steel to simulated sunlight and determined that the half life of the virus under those conditions drops from several hours to just a few minutes. Which I'm sure sounds really good if you are thinking about a place with many high-touch stainless steel surfaces in bright sunlight. I do wonder what happens to the potency of the virus as it degrades...does it go from 'infectious' to 'non-infectious' at some point, or does it just become less potent or less able to infect? And if one receives a, for lack of a better term, sub-critical dose, that is, you've been exposed to the virus but not enough to cause a measurable infection, will that cause your body to start making the antibodies to fight it off, much like a vaccine would? And will that then increase your critical dosage level, that is make it so you would require a larger amount of virus to start an infection?

Well, they're the questions I am asking. I just think if we could nail down some details about the *actual* risks (not just the *anticipated* ones) we just might find that fighting this virus isn't as difficult as we think...that is, we could more carefully target our efforts and make life easier for everybody.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Computation: If a Coronavirus was the size of a golfball, the pore size of the cloth would be 5.7 meters (18.75 feet)

Question: How effective is a sieve with 18.75 foot holes against golf balls?

The way I look at this is if you put on a mask and sneeze there will be a whole bunch o' sludge that is left on the inside of the mask. Yeah, something might have gotten through, but a whole bunch of gunk didn't. So, while I am not an expert it seems like the mask can't be for nuthin'.

It's just the dynamics of pushing air around. If you put a piece of fabric over a fan, you're not going to feel the air moving toward you more than a few inches from it. But remove the fabric, and you can feel it across the room. It's about dispersing the energy of the stuff launching from your head.

Length of exposure seems to be critical in the transmission of many diseases. Now the tricky part in the case of a ride-op is how cumulative those short but likely multiple exposures are over a shift.

It seems the influenze* of length of exposure has to do with the cumulative increase in dosage. If you spend more than a few minutes with a contagious person, you will receive a larger dose of the virus than if you only spend a few seconds. It's not clear to me if that dosage buildup is from repeated exposure over a short period of time, or from the general buildup in the amount of virus in the local atmosphere making a poorly timed whiff of stale air a more dangerous proposition.

From a ride operator's perspective, occupational exposure should be a series of extremely brief encounters in an exceptionally well ventilated environment. Add to that, I have to think the prevalence of contagion among the general population is actually quite low...but it isn't zero, which means in a large population the typical attendant is likely to have multiple viral exposures over the course of the day. But again, these encounters will be extremely brief, and hopefully don't involve any coughing or sneezing.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
* Yes, I did that on purpose... (then originally forgot to include this footnote!)

mallman said:

The way I look at this is if you put on a mask and sneeze ...

Stop right there.

Sneezes almost never come without warning, and are almost always preceded by a rapid, deep intake of air.

I think I can assure you that for a huge proportion of people out there, in the split second that rapid breath is being drawn, a free hand will also be almost reflexively yanking that mask clear of the face. Probably the hand that *should* be heading for the opposite shoulder instead.

It took me *years* to overcome my reflex to reach out for falling objects instead of letting them hit the floor. I'm sure there are medical folks out there who have likewise had to *learn* to cough and sneeze behind a mask. That is a learned behavior, and most of us haven't learned it.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I was reacting to the golf ball through some giant hole analogy. The point wasn't the sneeze, per se, but that masks can clearly catch some things---even though for sure particles that hit just right can make it through.

mallman said:

... So, while I am not an expert it seems like the mask can't be for nuthin'.

But because it isn't nothing, it doesn't mean it is something effective. The raw overwhelming numbers and scale mismatches are exactly why I call a mask as a solution to this problem pure security theater.

Here is an XKCD from a few years ago...

Are you suggesting that if a prophylactic measure is not 100% effective it is not worth using? Because that is an absurd argument, quite frankly. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Wearing a mask does not guarantee you will not transmit the virus. But it reduces the likelihood.

Washing your hands does not guarantee you will not transmit/contract the virus. But it reduces the likelihood.

Keeping some distance from others does not guarantee you will not transmit/contract the virus. But it reduces the likelihood.

Using hand sanitizer does not guarantee you will not transmit/contract the virus. But it reduces the likelihood.

And so on.

Sure, some people cannot tolerate masks. And maybe some people have adverse reactions to hand sanitizer or common soaps. And some people will march on their state capitol instead of being socially responsible. But so long as the majority of folks embrace the measures prescribed by the overwhelming majority of subject matter experts, things will go back to something resembling normal sooner rather than later. Taking the obtuse position of "welp, hand sanitizer is "only" 99.99% effective, so screw it all" is dangerously counterproductive.

^"BuT mY RiGhTs AnD FrEeDomS......"