I’d wager we’re closer to 70-80% compliance down in “the big city”. I’d guess many folks are doing it just avoid having to speak with anyone about the matter.
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There is, for now, no consensus. This is an ongoing epidemic, and waiting for hundreds of peer-reviewed studies to show that, “Hey masks work/don’t work!” is not an option.
This is not my field, so my reasoning is not backed by my own expertise.
Masks are (were) in short/limited supply, so people were advised not to buy them as they were of limited importance, and had to be reserved for the most vulnerable. This refers to the special N95 masks which do stop most of the droplets.
Masks are not very effective if people do not use them properly (touching the face while adjusting them, reusing unsafe masks, etc); But hand washing, social distancing, and avoiding facial contact are indisputably helpful, so these were emphasized.
It has now emerged that many places where mask use is common and carries no stigma have maintained lower levels of transmission. Probably because there is a multiplicative effect if nearly everyone wears masks - the infected are less likely to infect others, the mild-symptom and no-symptom carriers do not get to infect as many people. Do look at the difference in numbers you get after simulating 3 weeks with R0 = 1.3 and R0 = 2; the difference is enormous, and that difference isn’t just a number, it’s more health workers and more healthcare resources and more dead people and a deeper hole for the economy to climb out of.
True, there is no consensus. It has not been established whether masks stop the virus, or by how much. But reducing the probability of transmission by a little bit each time you are near other people matters. It really, really adds up.
@NickViar
CDC Recommends Cloth Face Coverings for Use by the General Public: The CDC recommends that members of the public use simple cloth face coverings when in a public setting to slow the spread of the virus, since this will help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others.
The CDC writes that since many people with coronavirus may be “asymptomatic,” meaning that they don’t show any symptoms, wearing a cloth mask can prevent these contagious individuals from unknowingly spreading the disease.
It seems to me to be a safe bet that you’ll prefer the US CDC to the WHO, given your earlier-stated positions on…well, just about everything.
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Shit, of all the stupid things to resist against, why masks? Just wear them. At the very least, it’s common courtesy in the middle of a global pandemic(fuck I can’t even believe I just typed this statement). You think the CDC are a couple of nerds trolling all the jocks who beat them up in school by making them dress up like cosplay characters lol?
There are lots of things to resist against. Big tech and data; contact tracing. What do you think is going to happen? Save your energy for the real shit about to come.
Also, fuck the WHO, fuck the CCP and fuck Jimmy Fallon.
Fuck.
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They? It’s always they.
People need to appear edgy. Appearing intelligent, caring, mature, etc., are not priorities. People that refuse to wear masks are basically no different than Instagram models.
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@thunderbolt23 addressed this very odd mindset above. Many seem to believe that the guidelines and directives have been chosen for no discernible reason whatsoever, that the masks and the restrictions on people and businesses have been made on the basis of nefarious, secret motivations. It’s really quite absurd.
Everyone knows that masks aren’t a hundred percent effective, and everyone knows that, at the very least, they cannot hurt. Everyone can figure out that a mask could reduce the number of people infected by one carrier, even if by a little bit. Yet lots of people continue to talk as if self-important bureaucrats are just flexing their unconstitutional muscles for no good reason at all.
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There is the possibility of opting not to wear a mask, but not sniggering at people who are wearing masks like a bratty child. Then again, if one feels they can compare a coronavirus to HIV in terms of contagiousness, one may have a child’s understanding of all of this.
That’s my thought as well, but I think they did a poor job of communicating the purpose. I’m certain the earlier “masks don’t work” public position was intended as a noble lie to keep as much PPE flowing to health care as well, but it poisoned the public trust.
I just had a conversation about this with my ex-girlfriend this morning. She wears one at the grocery store but nowhere else. She didn’t even consider the real social benefit is protecting others from you on a large scale. This possibility had not entered her mind. I think a certain percentage of people feel similarly, that they’re only increasing their own risk. That’s why I think the authorities did a really bad job of hammering home the point that you’re wearing a mask for everyone else, not for yourself.
I’m just glad I’m at a point in my life where I don’t give a fuck about the bizarre feeling of a store full of eyes on me, or the opinions of strangers in general. Fuck you if you don’t like my mask. Nobody will do shit about it except stare.
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I’m not surprised by that, especially since that’s where most of the cases are. I’d expect compliance to scale back the further north and the further away from I-95 you go.
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I’m sure everyone has seen this or one of these, but just in case there’s that one person who has yet to grasp how infectious diseases can overwhelm populations, I’ll post it here. As with all models/simulations/projections, the graphs here should come with hefty error bars, but the main idea behind it is quite simple. Even small reductions in transmission can have a huge effect in reducing the number of people needing hospital care, ceteris paribus.
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Because it is inconvenient (sarcasm).
I haven’t seen any data on the specific distance aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 can spread either, or I would have pointed it out. But then my literature searches have been more focused on the genetics and structural biology than spread factors.
Not to mention mask utility varies by virus type. So it’s not a given for all viruses.
For those interested in the stats, there are now
well over 1500 prints and pre-prints on cov-2. This is by far the fastest anyone has worked.
Would like to emphasize “IF nearly everyone wears masks”…
This is a difference of 0.7 in R0. Now, couple this with the current estimates that cov-2 is between 3.8 - 5+ on the scale… Current flu sits around 2 depending on method.
Neither can I.
I get it, if you’re out for a walk in the country or on a trail, no mask needed. If you’re heading to a grocery store or something…just be considerate.
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This absolutely bears repeating. I think this is 100% correct–it was a terrible stance that didn’t stand up to the common sense smell test, and I’m sure it’s goal was to avoid panic hoarding (which is a legit goal). But it 10000% poisoned the public’s trust and now that “they” want us to masks, people get pissed and jump to some conspiracy mindset.
I also think the mindset You describe in your ex-girlfriend is very widespread. For that matter I know that I am vulnerable to that mindset in certain areas myself. The communication was EXTREMELY bad.
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At least twice as contagious as the flu…just nuts. This has never been at the same level as the flu.
Having lived (add: in NYC, with a surgeon friend in SF) through the HIV thing (no homo lol), I admit that it has colored my “fear” wrt The Virus.
I’m pretty, pretty sure doctors and nurses back then were deservedly a LOT more fearful then than they are today. Not that the general public these days would be able to understand.
Also, can someone explain to me how The Virus is aerosolized? That’s one powerful sneeze. Even w/o The Virus, you’d better be covering your germ spewing mouth before sneezing like that.
How accurate is the “current estimate”?
Like the initial death rate “estimates”?
Serious question.
Apparently R0 determination is a bit of a headache in the best of cases, because of how much it varies based on method and other variables. This is probably a case of some data being better than none, as CoV-2 is much too novel to have much confidence in the estimates.
Anecdotal evidence would put it much higher than the flu, at the very least, but that conclusion again comes with a lot of caveats.
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We know more about this virus after 3 months than doctors knew years into the advent of HIV, plus a lot of the fear around HIV was based in bigotry. I’m sure you got what I meant - there’s no rational parallel to be drawn between wearing a condom all day and wearing a mask. He’ll obviously justify it all with the fact that it was a joke, but it was still a method of ridiculing mask-wearing.
The initial death rate had a low estimate of 100,000. We were told by Trump, not long after, that it would be much, much less than that. We’re at 80,000 in may. Not too far off the low end of the spectrum at this point.
Although true, the true fear was the death sentence aspect.
My neurotype…is that I think this is a reason to be less fearful.
Waste of time “conversing” with people mostly interested in one liners, and being clever.
We were told lots of stuff by lots of people. Most rational people were being “guided” by Fauci saying that the death rate would be at least 10X the flu. (that’s my recollection of Fauci, I could be wrong) The number of deaths needs the denominator of number of infected to get an actual death rate.
(Fauci “famously” also being the one telling everyone not to wear masks. Does “mask science” really change that much in a month’s time?)
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I lol’d.
This isn’t necessarily true though. I’ll draw a parallel that actually makes sense - in the '40s, women smoked while pregnant, all the time. No biggie. Nobody knew about the harmful effects of smoke. Now, would you consider it irrational fear for a pregnant woman to not even stand around someone who’s smoking, because of the secondhand effects that we now know about?
Knowing about the dangers of something further compels you to act on it, not the opposite.
I honestly should not have said ‘we were told by Trump’, but the point is, the death rate estimate was 100K-240K. We’re creeping up on 100K before the year is half over. Obviously the deaths have leveled off, but there’s still plenty of time to hit well over 100K, so the death rate estimate turns out to have been accurate.
Oh, also
If you look earlier in this thread, I posted an email my family was sent from a virologist friend of ours who was among the first to work on coronaviruses in the 70s, when they were discovered. He mentioned that masks wouldn’t necessarily stop the spread, only that they would prevent you from touching your face, which is what a lot of people said in the beginning. Then we found out the virus could be airborne. So the “mask science” didn’t change in a month’s time, our understanding of the virus changed overnight, and the mask science was able to be applied.