Haha I might come across that way, but it’s not the intention. Totally calm. But I didn’t quite like the tone of his response to begin with, so that’s probably why my post was like that.
I don’t know about that. But apparently, it’s a specific brand that is being sought out. It’s called amuchina. Don’t know if it exists outside of Italy. I’ve seen other brands of hand sanitizers being still sold for their normal price though. Maybe they don’t trust them, lol
Yes it protects the wearer as well. No idea where you got the opposite idea from. Talk about spreading falsehoods. Even if it did only prevent an infected person from spreading the virus, that’s not a bad thing. The incubation period (where you’d be contagious) prior to symptoms presenting is something like 10-14 days.
Some people would rather prepare for the worst. It’s why folks have earthquake food/water prepared where I live. Apparently, restricted transport and travel already affects a few towns in Italy, right? I agree it’s probably an overreaction though depending on how close you are to the outbreak.
If a highly infectious disease kills 4 out of every 2000 healthy young adults it infects, I’d be pretty concerned and not as laid back as you about possibly contracting it. But, to each their own.
Might want to take your own advice about the last part, if you think it’s good advice.
Yes, also known as 0.2%, which is what I stated in my post. I don’t know how saying that another way makes the concept any different.
Here’s a few common death causes we are several orders of magnitude more exposed to every day:
In particular, I’d like you to notice that influenza, which people don’t generally worry about, and doesn’t qualify as a common cause of death, kills up to 650,000 people yearly all over the world. You don’t see people stocking up on food when flu season comes round, do you?
If you are going to spend some time informing yourself, which you sound like you might be in need of doing, you’ll see that there is twenty-something other causes of death, including very common disease, which people don’t seem to care about (and rightfully so) which still kill, on average, 500-1000% more people than coronavirus has.
If it’s a regular surgical face mask, the answer is “no,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Live Science.
Another source
But a surgical mask does not protect against “airborne” infectious agents so it will not prevent the wearer from being potentially contaminated by a virus such as the coronavirus.
This one is funny because it denies your claim using the same words you used.
Another source
There’s little harm in it," Eric Toner, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Business Insider. "But it’s not likely to be very effective in preventing it.
There you have it. Do you have anything to back up your claims? If not, I’d suggest you buy a one way ticket to STFUville. They’ll have surgeon masks for your ignorant ass there.
Still way too angry 'bro…
…but Holy Shit, I confess you made me laugh because I do enjoy epic ranting!
Obligado. It’s cathartic sometimes.
Oh boy. If you don’t understsnd why a highly infectious pandemic killing 0.2% of the young and healthy is more concerning than heart disease, auto accidents, etc, then I can’t help you.
The first link you posted in regards to masks says it has a modest effect preventing the user from getting sick.
This link also explains (with studies to back it up) the benefits to the user. Fulll proof? Far from it. But certainly a brnefit. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/do-face-masks-prevent-virus_l_5e304a13c5b6ce51a4ec0a09/amp
But hey, you do you. You seem like a tough guy intent on showing machismo so ain’t nobody telling you nothing. Good luck, and I sincerely hope you and yours stay happy and healthy.
The article you linked failed to quote the study properly. You only read the article, not the study they linked, didn’t you?
Here’s the study
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(08)01008-4/full text
I’ll quote the relevant parts
So basically the study was inconclusive and they had to manipulate the data to make it look like the difference was significant (which they admit it wasn’t and clearly make a conjecture, here:
But unfortunately conjectures aren’t proofs).
That’s actually not true, but there is no value in me arguing with you about this. I totally, 100% believe everybody is entitled to their opinion, and I totally, 100% believe that doesn’t mean everybody should state it just because they can.
And it kinda ticks me off when someone that doesn’t know what they’re talking about still insists on wanting to speak their mind just because they can. Sure, it’s freedom of speech. But just like you have the right to speak your mind, I have the right to tell you that you should shut the fuck up because you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s equality of rights.
I am so sorry that you dismiss rigor and consistency as machismo. That should be called common sense.
Thanks, same to you.
The problem with this particular pandemic is that it’s basically a dress rehearsal for something way, way more lethal that will eventually make its way from the viral Petri dish that is China.
This strain of the corona virus family seems very contagious, more that seasonal influenza, and it doesn’t bode well for the future, taking into account the inability of an authoritarian regime that is China to contain the spread.
Actually, it’s 4 out of 2000 for the entire cohort, not taking into account preexisting conditions. So far all the victims in Italy were people in their seventies and eighties.
But regardless of the false bravado, the problem lies in much touted false equivalency in terms of risk management, the same false equivalency formulated in that famous quip “furniture kills more people every year that islamic terrorism”. Furniture deaths, much like texting when driving is not massively scalable in terms of mortality, unless there’s a mass epidemic of faulty lectrocuting microwaves. Terrorism and pandemics are - you need just one act of terrorism or one super spreader to have a dramatic effect, either in terms of victims or other types of damage.
One individual, probably infused with a false sense of bravado, brought the virus to Italy, causing (so far) ten deaths and billions and billions of dollars in economic damage. So the risk is scalable, unlike getting Type II diabetes or texting and driving.
I stocked up on all perishable goods (and protein powder) and not moving anywhere. Fortunately for me I work from home and exercise in my backyard. I’m glad I didn’t take the offer to drive to Milan and watch La Dea play Valencia.
Great game though.
How does this prove that masks are not effective? Am I missing something?
The point is not to use that conclusion to prove the masks are ineffective. That thing was accomplished via the sources that I posted. That study was brought up by him, and what I said in my last post are the reasons why the conclusion in that study isn’t strong enough to disprove my own evidence. In other words, since I have already backed up my claims against his point, I don’t need his own sources to disprove his point. All we need is to verify that his sources aren’t sufficient to counteract mine. That’s basically how a logical argument works, hope I was clear. Lemme know if otherwise.
But you quoted something that said the masks are over 80% effective, what you are saying makes no sense.
How can masks not be effective against an airborne virus? It defies logic.
Agreed.
Valid point. I do realize that coronavirus and other causes of death are very different phenomena and you can’t really compare orange to apples. By statistics help us put things into perspective. The death rate we had initially observed when the number of infected people was still pretty low hasn’t increased now that there are more than 100k infected individuals. If anything, it has dropped. This doesn’t mean that the virus is dangerous, but rather that we have a pretty concrete understanding of how fatal it is. And luckily enough, the answer is “very little.”
I also want to make it clear that my original post was more of a rant about how people seem to be only talking about this, and was not to say that I’m not worried to some degree too.
A few hours ago they reported a case of someone who got infected in the small city I live in. So chances are either I or someone that I’m close with will catch it over the next period of time. Death rate is one thing, but when it comes to being infected, chances are pretty much stacked against me (and my family, friends, etc.). I hope everybody around me won’t start panicking now.
Go back to the results and conclusions paragraphs of the study linked in the post you quoted to read the full text.
They had to manipulate the data because originally subjects hadn’t complied with the instructions and no meaningful results had come out of that. Only after they did some magic tricks, did that 80% thing pop out (and there’s still an explicit conjecture over there in the text). You can’t just perform a study, not get anywhere, then alter the initial set of subjects, and pull numbers out. To my judgment, that’s not a reliable result and seems biased.
If anybody can articulate a counterpoint I’m more than willing to stand corrected, if that’s the case. But let’s not forget about my own sources.
Do you know how viruses work? Have you got an idea of the scale of size we are dealing with? That’s something we should get out of the way before starting a logical argument.
Edit:
I’d also like you to read these
which are two more sources (the first one also happens to mention a study that seemed to prove masks’ effectiveness against airborne viruses, claiming that the conclusions aren’t strong enough just like I said previously) that back up my point.
The bottom line is viruses are small enough that you can’t get rid of them without filtering air (and even then, it’s sketchy). And, I mean, you can still breath with a mask on, right? So air still gets in your system and that air carries… yeah, you guessed it.
You know, there are a few things that trigger me, and one of the highest on the scale is when someone tells me that I don’t make sense. Even more so when the argument is “something defies logic” when it clearly doesn’t, so you didn’t even put in effort to show that I “don’t make sense.” And back we go to my previous point of not necessarily having to state your opinion all the time…
The whole point of these types of masks is to filter air. You can breathe with the mask on because you breathe through the mask. I work in a nursing home, and every 2 years we have to be fitted for masks in case of a respiratory illness outbreak. The masks work, but not 100%, and it requires that the mask fits properly. 80%+ sounds very effective, when the alternative is nothing at all.
You are the one who quoted this:
“masks as a group had protective efficacy in excess of 80% against clinical influenza-like illness.”
I think maybe you misunderstood the part you quoted before it:
“Using intention to treat analysis, we found no significant difference in the relative risk of respiratory illness in the mask groups compared to control group.”
The way it’s worded could be interpreted in different ways, but seeing as these people found masks are 80%+ effective it looks like what this means is that both groups had the same risk of being infected. If one group all lived in isolated areas and the other lived in cities then the group in cities would likely be at a higher risk, or if one group had compromised immune systems, but that was not the case in this instance.
The masks you see people wearing around don’t filter air. They don’t have a built-in filter. And you don’t breathe through them anyway. They aren’t tight enough on your face to prevent air from entering from sideways or from wherever, and anything that’s contained within that air gets through too.
There are masks that have a built-in filter that uses a carbon-based material that filters out some of the particles in the air. My father is a police officer and has one of them. I am not 100% convinced those would be able to keep a virus out either.
Reality check. Say instead of a virus, there’s some lethal gas in the air. If you breathe it in, you’re dead. Would you trust a surgeon mask to “filter” the air well enough to prevent the gas from entering your system?
If the answer is (hopefully) no, explain why you would consider such a mask any better at “filtering” viruses out (which, may I remind you, are the size of a few nanometers at best).
Absolutely not. Such a claim would have been put at the beginning, maybe in the abstract, of the study. It wouldn’t be under the section conclusion and it surely wouldn’t be something they “found,” but rather a criterion used to pick the subjects. Now what you are saying doesn’t make much sense.
What that reads as is they didn’t found any statistically significant difference between the mask wearing group and the control (no mask) group. However, after adjusting the data according to whatever they deemed appropriate, that number 80% came out. That is why it’s not reliable. They had to change the data sample, which in turn means that they were applying calculations meant to be used on a sample that was originally obtained with some methods (which are explained in the study), but later changed.
Once again, this does not prove the opposite of their findings. This only takes credibility away from their findings. In other words: you can get to a correct conclusion via incorrect logic, if the conclusion was true to begin with. But you cannot prove truth using falsehood, as soon as you do, there is no guarantee that what you are after proving is actually true.
This is logic 101 and I wish everybody understood it.
The mask itself is a filter.
The masks filter out particles, not gases. Not the same thing.
I quoted your own post. I’m not trying to start some pointless argument with you, I think you misunderstood what you were reading. Sometimes things get lost in translation.
I might start wearing a mask when I go out soon, this virus isn’t worse than the flu yet but it might just be getting started. See how most of China is shut down and flights to and from there are being cancelled? Italy could be next.
I wouldn’t be surprised if France suddenly has an outbreak too, this was from 2 weeks ago and apparently the incubation period can be up to a month:
"the patient, who had been treated at the Bichat hospital in northern Paris since Jan. 25, died of a lung infection due to the coronavirus.
…
the Chinese man, originally from Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak, arrived in France on Jan. 16. "
That’s 9 days walking around in France.
This virus doesn’t have a very high death rate, but it can infect a lot of people and symptoms take a while to show up. They say you can spread it before you even have symptoms too. It’s not a small thing.
I think we can drop this here.
I honestly don’t even know how to answer such a statement, seeing as gases are made up of particles, the “only” difference being size.
No, the difference is that gases are gases and masks filter SOLID particles. Otherwise you would need a gas mask, and they aren’t meant to filter liquids either.
Why don’t you just buy a gas mask since you don’t trust regular surgical masks? It would save you a lot of trouble and mental anguish.