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| This is what a cannonball dive looks like in a swimming pool. To see what it looks like into a septic tank, read the linked Daily Mail article, or the chuckleheaded "study" it's based on. |
479th time in the last 2 years:
Cloth face masks do not, nor were they ever intended to protect the wearer from other people's germs. This has only been common knowledge since about 1870 or so, so we can totally understand how the baby ducks who did the Bristol "study", the Daily Mail, or anything-but-random* fuckwits on the internet may not have heard about it after only about 150 years of common medical usage.
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| Dumbfuck Pop Quiz: given the works of Louis Pasteur, Ignaz Semmelweis, and Joseph Lister, are the masks being worn by the surgery staff intended to a) keep their germs out of the patient, or b) to keep the patient's germs out of the surgical team? Grading will be on a scale of Pass/Fucktard. |
Cloth face masks are there to keep your snot in your bubble, and preventing it from flying outward at 200-300mph every time you cough or sneeze, and entering anyone else's piehole.
If anyone out there still cannot grasp this basic reality, you are literally too fucking stupid to have internet access without adult supervision, and a baby monitor should be in place on you, to make sure you remember how to breathe without being prompted by a punch to the solar plexus 12-20 times per minute.
If any of this is news to you, you're making Emperor Poopypants' mental abilities look like Stephen F. (for "Fucking") Hawking by comparison.
And with this latest "study" determining, yet again, that wet streets cause rain, we remind those who still haven't read it to peruse the -AFAIK- only recent study to actually test the effectiveness of cloth masks to prevent snot blasted viral loads from travelling OUT, rather than the recockulous idea that they're worn to stop viral particles from getting IN, is this one.
TL;DR?
(Ask me how I knew.)
Measuring from 6' away, wearing no mask, while coughing and sneezing, delivered between 10² and 10³ viral particles from people with actual Kung Flu to a viral collector. (For Common Core Grads, that means 100 to 1000 individual virus particles flew that far. You're welcome.)
Conducting the same test under the same conditions, with any variety of face covering, reduced the number of viral particles hitting the collector to 10°. (Common Core grads: that would be a total of one.) Not two. Not three. Not 11. Not 100. Not 1000. Just one.
I apologize for throwing this much math at people, but that means a cloth mask is between 99% and 99.9% effective at keeping your COVID viral snotstorm in your piehole, and out of everyone else's, at a range of 6'.
Don't believe me: Take off your shoes and socks, or get a calculator, and Do. The. Math.
If anyone out there is still too stupid to grasp the utter worthlessness of the alleged "study" that triggered this rant for use as anything other than lining your cat's litter box, bird's cage, or wiping your own ass when the outhouse runs out of Charmin, I would suggest cutting lead paint chips out of your diet, and cutting back to something less than two jugs of moonshine per night.
And before anyone attempts to kneejerk regurgitate "masks don't work" in Comments, define "mask", and define "work", before you climb onto the diving board over the septic tank for the next cannonball.
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OTOH, for COVID news you can actually use and profit from, I suggest going to Herschel's summary of Kung Flu revelatory notes you might have seen at Peter's BRM blog, WRSA, and elsewhere, all in one handy post. Read it while you knead bread dough by hand, or clean your firearms, and perhaps as you knot a handy length of rope into a serviceable noose.
UPDATE: And today, one day later, Burning Platform* (which name should be changed to Burning Horseshit if this is the best he can do), published rent-seeking jackass Steve Kirsch's asinine look at a study which noted that increasing mask compliance that showed a 9% decrease in infection, and an 11% decrease in symptoms, from a 30% increase in mask-wearing, shows that "masks don't do anything".
Leaving that level of retardation to fend for itself, what was wholly overlooked was that the final compliance rate change was from 13% to 42%, meaning the entire study was conducted amongst people where 58% of them never masked at all. Imagine studying the effects of kevlar vests in a 10' x 10' room where 58 out of 100 people drop live hand grenades with the pins pulled, and then telling me that obviously, kevlar has no effect on stopping fragments among the 42 people in that room who had one on.
This is a level of "science" grasp last seen from Sir Bedevere in Quest For the Holy Grail: "That, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped."
What this demonstrates is that, exactly as my father frequently suggested whilst reading the newspaper, that "Shit'll do for brains, in a pinch."
*[Sorry to point and use WP marking rounds, but our patience for this level of dipshittery and bag-of-hammers stupidity has worn through the boot and all the way to the raw blister. You Were Fucking Wrong. If this could have been you, we suggest you try turning up the dial on your computer marked "brightness". It can't hurt, at this point.]
At a fast glance the study seems OK but the Daily Fail article is not.
ReplyDeleteIt's okay in the sense that it's probably exactly correct about their conclusions, if you first overlook that they were essentially testing to see if parachutes prevent plane crashes, or if kevlar vests prevent shootings. Which means they're functional idiots.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, no problem.
I don't know if you have spent time in the academic research game, the idea is to get grant money not really make meaningful research.
ReplyDeleteThere is the fine line: vest might prevent death from shootings while not shootings. For practical reasons that is good enough. The anti-gun people of course do not get even that. ;)
Extracted from the "Spartacus" letter, suggesting that while what you say is true about the face masks, it is virtually irrelevant to the actual virus transmission which may NOT be from aerosols. (Numbers are from the footnotes)
ReplyDeleteCOVID-19 Transmission
COVID-19 is airborne. Initially, the WHO carried water for China by claiming that the virus was only droplet-borne. Our own CDC absurdly claimed that it was mostly transmitted by fomite-to-face contact, which, given its rapid spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, would have been physically impossible.319–322
The ridiculous belief in fomite-to-face being a primary mode of transmission led to the use of surface disinfection protocols that wasted time, energy, productivity, and disinfectant.323 The 6-foot guidelines are absolutely useless. The minimum safe distance to protect oneself from an
aerosolized virus is to be 15+ feet away from an infected person, no closer. Realistically, no public transit is safe.324–326
Surgical masks and cloth masks do not protect you from aerosols. The virus is too small and the filter media has too large of gaps to filter it out. They may catch respiratory droplets and keep the virus from being expelled by someone who is sick, but they do not filter a cloud of infectious aerosols if someone were to walk into said cloud.327,328 The minimum level of protection against this virus is quite literally a full-face P100 respirator, a PAPR/CAPR, or a 40mm NATO CBRN respirator, ideally paired with a full-body tyvek or tychem suit, gloves, and booties, with all the holes and gaps taped.329–332
Live SARS-CoV-2 may potentially be detected in sewage outflows, and there may be oral-fecal transmission.333–335 During the SARS outbreak in 2003, in the Amoy Gardens incident, hundreds of people were infected by aerosolized fecal matter rising from floor drains in their apartments.336–338
Section Summary: SARS-CoV-2 is a highly transmissible pathogen with very troubling sequelae, and every precaution should be taken to avoid getting infected.
Just so...I've taught 8yo kids who could figure this out...
ReplyDeleteThat's nice, but unfortunately I've got 2 years' firsthand experience in a heavily-COVID-impacted 50-bed ER that contradicts every bit of that nonsense. So do 10,000 other hospitals around the world. Droplet precautions have been entirely sufficient for that entire time, and the people yelling "airborne!" can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground.
ReplyDeleteEvery ER and hospital on the planet would've been overwhelmed with provider cases and rampant staff-member infections if COVID were, in fact, airborne. If the people who wrote that were non-healthcare or non-science amateurs, they should learn the difference, and STFU until they do.
If they're supposed scientists and healthcare professionals, they should have their licenses and degrees revoked until they go back to school, repeat the curriculum, and learn the difference between the two modes, which they have clearly failed to do.
So I can believe that utter hogwash, or my lying eyes, and that of 1000+ firsthand colleagues, over two solid years of dealing with this enormous PITA, with thousands of COVID patients, and dealing with the sickest at literal halitosis range, using droplet precautions, not airborne precautions.
If that's what the Spartacus letter alleges, they're quite simply full of shit.
And as for "Surgical masks and cloth masks do not protect you from aerosols. The virus is too small and the filter media has too large of gaps to filter it out. They may catch respiratory droplets and keep the virus from being expelled by someone who is sick, but they do not filter a cloud of infectious aerosols if someone were to walk into said cloud." can be filed under "No SHIT, Sherlock!" which is why I just spent the time to tell dumbasses for the 479th time, cloth and surgical masks are not worn to protect the wearer, ever; they're worn to protect everyone else FROM the wearer, as has been the case for 150 years.
Was my Sledgehammer Of Obviousness too subtle? Did I stutter? Was I unclear on this point? Should I drop an entire building on it?
As for the Kung Flu virus, it doesn't travel by itself, demonstrates no such airborne transmission behavior, and isn't trying to sneak into masks bare, naked, and alone. It's flying out of mucous membranes in saliva, etc., just like every coronavirus in recorded history, which is why it didn't spread worldwide in about 15 minutes, and kill 2-3% of everyone on the planet in the initial iteration.
"Airborne" has specific guidelines and requirements, and the level of amateur misuse of the term has only exacerbated the whole pandemic, and taught people just enough wrong information to be five-star flaming asshole idiot savants, thinking they know just enough to be dangerous, but without, say, going through so much as a basic intro microbiology course to actually get this right.
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ReplyDeleteThe assholes trying to redefine what "airborne" transmission means have FUBARed the science so hard it'll probably never walk straight again, and anything written down after January 2020 is de facto suspect agenda-driven bullshit, having little, if anything, to do with medical science.
Aerosol droplets ≠ airborne.
That's the (everyone's manifestly) mental malfunction here.
To be airborne, they have to float, suspended in air.
TB is airborne transmission.
COVID, like Ebola, is droplet. Their particles do NOT float suspended in air for hours.
If you can point out the raft of studies that contradict that pivotal fact, do so, and have at it.
Put two monkeys (or whatever other animal floats one's boat) into a totally sealed room, caged 20' apart, with sealed-system recirculating air handling, and all interaction and feeding performed through a glove box outside each cage and the room itself, and demonstrate one infects the other with COVID. If airborne is true, you could publish within 30 days.
It'd cost maybe $20,000, tops. You could do it in a standard 2-car garage, FFS.
It's epidemiology 101 stuff. Undergraduates could do it.
And yet, a bare 2 years later, there is no such study. Just internet bullshit.
QED
As for fecal-oral, that's not surprising, but gloves and handwashing solve that problem in the time it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" while lathering up and rinsing. Ditto for any surface contamination.
What I said was, in fact, wholly relevant to COVID precautions, but underlines that the people who could most benefit are the ones too stupid to pour piss out of a boot, even if one stamps the instructions on the sole of the heel, so it's tilting at windmills.
If COVID were, in fact, airborne, it would be entirely rational and responsible to lock all of society down, without exception, for 3 months solid, under complete house arrest, and potentially until a month after the last known infection.
No "essential personnel" bullshit. No leaving the home for anything.
No food? Toughski shitski.
Arrest and imprisonment in isolation for any violation, by soldiers in full MOPP IV gear, with deadly force authorized. Barbed wire quarantines and armed guards on known infectees.
As if what we actually had going on wasn't peak stupid enough, people should be careful what nonsense they shill for.
You don't want to get that wish fulfilled.
When I was saying almost two years ago that the masks only prevent you spreading it, I got called all sorts of names.
ReplyDeleteHow many problems would never have happened if management just listened to the engineers?
-b