Coronavirus thread

[Leress]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mi ... sfSqWUlCFE

Michigan loves taking L's apparently

[Maj]

Is it legal for a state to block people from another state? Ie: Can Washington say that people from South Dakota can't come here?

[phlapjackage]

Is it legal for a state to block people from another state? Ie: Can Washington say that people from South Dakota can't come here?

IANAL, but I think there's a freedom of movement clause somewhere in the Constitution (quick google shows it's part of the Privileges and Immunities Clause). So unless there's some other extenuating circumstances (declaring a natl/state emergency suspends that? idk), I think it's not legal.

[hyzmarca]

Is it legal for a state to block people from another state? Ie: Can Washington say that people from South Dakota can't come here?

Generally, unconstitutional. But for specific public health emergencies, precedent says yes, it's legal. Last time it was done was in 1900, though. Texas closed its border with Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic.

[phlapjackage]

With all the bullshit "Free XX" stuff from Trump and the "movements" to open states up, it seems there is/was a massive astroturfing campaign to build support for these movements. So powerful forces are sowing chaos and unrest in a country wracked by a pandemic. And Trump et al are aligned with them. Hmmmm.

https://www.reddit.com/r/maryland/comme ... e/fnstpyl/

[virgil]

How long is it going to take for sufficient medical research to create a good consensus on how Covid-19 moves around? We're still at the stage of "t-shirt masks help some, probably" when it comes to safety measures.

[hyzmarca]

How long is it going to take for sufficient medical research to create a good consensus on how Covid-19 moves around? We're still at the stage of "t-shirt masks help some, probably" when it comes to safety measures.

We have a decent understanding right now, droplets of respiratory fluids expelled while speaking being the biggest danger, which is why cloth masks help. When you talk you expel microscopic droplets of fluid from your lungs every time you speak or exhale. Without a mask, these droplets spread out in a cloud that can be inhaled by others, not unlike a green dragon's breath weapon, then fall to the earth and linger on surfaces.


The virus can remain alive on surfaces for a rather long time, and can moves from surfaces to hands on contact, so hand washing or sanitizing is also necessary. It's also found in blood, urine, and stool, so don't inhale any of those from other people and keep yours to yourself, wash hands after using the restroom.

The big question was spreading during the asymptomatic period. If asymptomatic spreading wasn't a thing, then widespread mask use wouldn't have been necessary, and might have made things worse due to improper mask use (and also by diverting PPE from medical professionals who actually need it). Once it was found that it is contagious during the asymptomatic period, and that completely asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic carriers are not uncommon, it became imperative for everyone to wear masks to avoid spreading droplets of respiratory fluids to other people.

The question of how much masks help is really one of how much do they stop invisible droplets from spewing out of your mouth. Masks that are too thin slow them down a little, but don't stop them. They also soak through quickly. Slowing them down helps a little, prevents them from going as far, but it's not as good as stopping them. Soaking though is pretty bad, and can potentially make transmission easier instead of more difficult. You want a mask that won't become saturated with fluid easily, and you want to change it when it does.

T-shirt masks are iffy basically because they have no standards. There's no way to universally tell you if your random T-shirt is thick enough to actually stop you from spewing a viral cloud in front of you every time you exhale. Surgical masks are preferred because they're made to established standards and are designed to do just that.

[Maj]

The reason why we are supposed to wear cloth masks isn't really to prevent us from catching it from someone else. It's working on the fundamental assumption that we are asymptomatic carriers and this will prevent it from spreading from us to others.

Edit: And then I finished reading hyzmarca's post. Oh, well.

[Username17]

How long is it going to take for sufficient medical research to create a good consensus on how Covid-19 moves around? We're still at the stage of "t-shirt masks help some, probably" when it comes to safety measures.

The news gets all kinds of messed around about this, and the incredible incompetence of American and British government in distributing information is also a real big thing.

Yes, obviously masks help. Masks help more to prevent you from spreading the disease to other people than they do to keep you from getting it. Because you breathe all the time and cough out little water droplets and those carry the virus and they stick to things for fucking hours, but if you have a piece of cloth on your face mostly the virus gets caught in the cloth because the water droplets stop there.

There's a lot of technical shit about what the amount of reduction is for catching and transmitting with various kinds of masks. But at the end of the day the rubric is very simple: wear a mask in public and fucking avoid anyone who isn't wearing one.

-Username17

[Grek]

To expand on this a little, the FDA (and many organizations like it) maintains a strict policy of treating all proposed medical interventions as pure quackery until someone has proven it to work in a randomized, controlled and peer-reviewed trial. Even if the treatment is obviously beneficial to anyone with common sense. This is because about twice a decade, the medical establishment does in fact get taken in by a treatment that seems like it should obviously work, but is in fact either useless or actively harmful. Autologous bone marrow transplants. Vertebroplasty. Mammograms. Thalidomide. Doctors use their common sense, confirmation bias sets in, they praise and popularize the new treatment and then years down the line they find out they've been killing their patients based on bunk research. Thus the requirement for trials.

For obvious reasons, there's no satisfactory trials for face masks vs Covid-19, let alone for homemade t-shirt masks. If you think face masks help, telling 50% of your patients to NOT use face masks in the middle of a fucking pandemic is monstrous. And yet without those trials, the FDA assumes that wearing t-shirt masks is useless at best or actively harmful at worst, because it hasn't been proven to be effective. Someone could have researched it before the pandemic (it was an issue back with SARS, so this isn't exactly a new concern), but the medical research funding wasn't there and no corporation has a profit motive to investigate the topic (you can't patent a t-shirt face mask) which means nobody has the ability to investigate the topic, even if they could get approval.

Now, you might say that this sort of mindless conservatism isn't doing anyone any favours, and doctors should be more willing (and less restricted) in using their good judgement to offer medical advice. Even if a couple bad ideas slip through every decade, that is outweighed by all of the useful discoveries that never get discovered or never get popularized because nobody can afford to jump through the regulatory hoops required to convince the FDA that there will be no public opinion backlash down the line and no legal challenges from the big corporations who want to SLAPP Suit all new competitors out of existence. And you would be right. In terms of physics and biology, there is every reason to think that face masks are essential to preventing the spread of Covid-19. But the parts of our government which are supposed to make these sorts of decisions only make good choices by accident or when bribed to do so.

[LR]

To my knowledge there hasn't really been a question of whether or not masks help in the medical field for at least a century. There have been extensive studies on what materials are the best, how to wear them, and probably even what shape of mask minimizes nose-itch desire. The question is about how much they help compared to how little your average US citizen is going to practice proper donning and doffing. While out shopping today, I saw somebody remove their face mask to wipe their nose with their hand and put it back on with their now-contaminated hand, so this is a legitimate concern and needs actual metrics of numbers of That Guy, people that merely wear and remove them improperly, and people who actually don't manage to contaminate themselves with their masks. And if we had an actual national government response, they'd be focusing on informing people on how to actually use a mask rather than spending time on the Two Minute Hate against Eastasia who we have always been at war with.

[virgil]

Should I be bringing three cloth masks to the office so I can have a replacement after drinking a cup of tea and having lunch?

[Username17]

Should I be bringing three cloth masks to the office so I can have a replacement after drinking a cup of tea and having lunch?

Probably.

Having a single mask that you reuse is better than no mask. Donning and doffing masks without ever touching the front with unwashed hands and using a new mask for every interaction is better still, but you don't work in a hospital so doing something in between is probably what you're going to do.

Depending on how you can store masks between use, it might be better to just have one mask you use repeatedly through the day.

The key is that you don't want potentially contaminated things to be touching uncontaminated things that might touch you or someone else before they get washed. Think about the potential chain of custody and imagine that there's a little ball of sticky poop on pretty much everything that faces the public in any way.

-Username17

-Username17

[Maj]

What are the chances that the US breaks up because of this?

[Koumei]

I just keep my mouth suitably sterilised with roku-gin so nothing I exhale can possibly be contaminated.

[Grek]

What are the chances that the US breaks up because of this?

Given that the Spanish Flu didn't manage it, very low.

[Chamomile]

The Spanish Flu comparison doesn't entirely hold, because the administration of Woodrow Wilson didn't have such a spectacularly incompetent response to the crisis that the general population of certain states might decide they'd rather their governor be the supreme executive. A comparison to the American Civil War is pretty instructive as to how that's gonna turn out, though, and I'm guessing the state governments know that. So, the odds of America breaking up over this are significantly higher than before, but a significant increase in a tiny number is still tiny.

[Orca]

There have been some relevant studies done on wearing non-medical facemasks, and some people did an analysis of them. The effect seems to be very small.

[deaddmwalking]

So wearing a mask probably makes you safer, but being safer also makes you take more risks because people. Taking more risks makes you less safe.

So knowing that people feel invincible because they're wearing a mask and they'll get way too close to each other, it's hard to know what the net impact will be.

For YOU, wearing a mask is better, and remember that it isn't super-armor and that you're still not safe and act appropriately and you'll be better off.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's been some protests in Austin this weekend demanding that people be able to return to work. Nothing too huge for the time being (about a few hundred people) but the pictures showed very of them wearing face masks. We have about 80,000 acute care beds in the entire state of Texas for 30 million people, so people really are taking their lives into their own hands here.

That said: God help me, but I sympathize with them despite making things worse from a health perspective. Rent and bills aren't being suspended so I absolutely understand people deciding the roll the dice on a pandemic. Having your lungs turn to pudding is bad, but so is not being able to eat.

[Username17]

What are the chances that the US breaks up because of this?

Higher than it's been at any point in my life.



But still pretty low.

The thing is that like the mandate of heaven, there's not much reason for anyone to allow the United States to dissolve without immediately replacing it with a new empire called "The United States."

[hyzmarca]

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That said: God help me, but I sympathize with them despite making things worse from a health perspective. Rent and bills aren't being suspended so I absolutely understand people deciding the roll the dice on a pandemic. Having your lungs turn to pudding is bad, but so is not being able to eat.

Rent and bills aren't being suspended, but evictions and cutoffs are, so the simple solution is to just not pay them and say "tough" if your landlord complains. Not great, but better than destroying the healthcare system.

[Kaelik]

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That said: God help me, but I sympathize with them despite making things worse from a health perspective. Rent and bills aren't being suspended so I absolutely understand people deciding the roll the dice on a pandemic. Having your lungs turn to pudding is bad, but so is not being able to eat.

Rent and bills aren't being suspended, but evictions and cutoffs are, so the simple solution is to just not pay them and say "tough" if your landlord complains. Not great, but better than destroying the healthcare system.

The people protesting are small business owners and landlords who want people to go back to work FOR them not that they themselves will be going back to work.

Just like how actual poor people don't spend a lot of time doing protests about unfair tax cuts for the rich they are also mostly too busy working the variety of service jobs that are still open, and the unemployed are certainly not going to waste time and money driving in circles.

But suspending evictions and not rent isn't very helpful because you have to be extremely fucking nice to your landlord when you tell them to shove it or else they will make your life a living hell, and on November 1st or whatever when you owe $7000 in rent or whatever depending on where you live and evictions are back on but you didn't make any money you are pretty fucked.

Meanwhile, democrats in the Senate are just lining up to pass another bill that doesn't have mail in voting or payments to individuals but will provide another few hundred billion to the banks again and Pelosi still doesn't care about setting up remote voting or going back to work or doing literally anything to use her power to set the terms.

She might be back soon though because oil prices are collapsing and unlike poor people that is an important constituency for the democratic leadership.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The people protesting are small business owners and landlords who want people to go back to work FOR them

This is what I get for feeling for my fellow man.

[Maj]

I keep seeing the US split. I hope the chances of that are way smaller than what my imagination is creating. There are going to be states (South Dakota, Florida) that suck at this. And they're going to have cases long after the west coast slows way down. Which is why I asked my first question because I can see states that smashed it not wanting traffic from states that didn't. And if we get to that point, wouldn't all hell break loose just like the stupid people protesting?