To Mask or Not to Mask?

[SheepDog4Life]

Are we in the COVID ward now?
Those goalposts are on a truck doing 90 mph! 
And yes, until you have a pertinent risk assessment study, whatever you said is no more than opinion and conjecture.
But then again, since you affirm a study is "poorly designed and populated" simply because it yields statistically insignificant results (and lack of significance does not automatically imply results are "meaningless" -- especially if it happens in several studies), this conversation suddenly becomes even more pointless.

Ummm... yeah it does... take McIntyre for example. Does wearing a mask and washing your hands reduce you risk by 99% to just a 1% relative risk of infection? Or does it increase your risk 8-fold over not wearing a mask and washing your hands making you 8 time more likely to be infected than doing nothing?

The answer, according to McIntyre is probably (to a 95% degree of confidence) somewhere in that range. (see McIntyre in the table above from the meta-analysis under A for mask and hand-washing)

Also take the Aeillo 2012 study... It found that wearing a mask BUT NOT WASHING YOUR HANDS (part B of the table) was more protective than wearing a mask AND washing your hands (part A of the table).

So wear a mask, but what ever you do, don't wash your hands!!!

ETA: Or look at Barasheed - mask plus hand-washing is either 67% protective (RR = 0.33) OR 169 times (RR=169.47) more likely to get you infected! Lol!

On a new page, so here it is again:

 

[dusty88]

For anyone lurking who is interested in 3-ply masks and wondering what to look for, whether their any good or not since they are all marked non-medical... here's a resource I found useful:

https://medium.com/@jayaone12345/ho...it-before-you-place-large-orders-332c4231a897

It's good to have some standards, because when my medical suppliers are still on allocation I do wonder about the quality of what is ending up elsewhere on the shelves.

As long as we are talking about quality masks ,I will share a couple of brands I ordered for my son. He's (supposedly) going back to Ball State next month so he'll probably need to change or launder masks frequently. One of my colleagues, who is a nerd for research details picked out these 2 brands for their fit and (probable) function.
They have filter pockets, nose bridges and are either sized or adjusted. She thinks, because of the combination of fit and filter they are better than surgical masks (but not as good as N95 of course).

https://halolife.io/

https://iedm.com/collections/rave-face-masks

If you are going to the trouble of wearing a good mask, also consider some type of glasses. Only goggles really seal out the virus but any barrier that helps is perhaps a reduced chance of transmission.
Wrap-around sunglasses are probably better than standard glasses.

 

[JCSR]

Lots of folding today

"CNN — Walmart and other major retailers made headlines last week with a new requirement for customers to wear masks in its US stores. But the new rules only go so far.

List: Major retailers requiring customers to wear masks amid coronavirus pandemic
Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walgreens, CVS and others say they still won't prohibit customers who refuse to wear a mash from shopping in stores. The issue, they say, is they want to avoid confrontations between angry customers and employees.

 

[dusty88]

Guy folded like a cheap facemask...

Still, anybody that would think that was a good idea and try to implement it is not fit to govern.

F.O.

I'll most likely vote for Rainwater. However, I don't see it as a bad thing that a guy changes his mind or listens to his constituents.

 

[Rookie]

Lots of folding today

"CNN — Walmart and other major retailers made headlines last week with a new requirement for customers to wear masks in its US stores. But the new rules only go so far.

List: Major retailers requiring customers to wear masks amid coronavirus pandemic
Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walgreens, CVS and others say they still won't prohibit customers who refuse to wear a mash from shopping in stores. The issue, they say, is they want to avoid confrontations between angry customers and employees.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/business/masks-walmart-home-depot-lowes-cvs/index.html

 

[dusty88]

I don’t care if it is real or not, I’m going for least compliance as I can. Those boxes also say destroy after single use, I’m going to reuse it for 3 days plus. I haven’t wore a mask other then recently to date a majority of the time and haven’t had an issue, no reason to think just faking it to say won’t now. If meijers didn’t charge for shopping service, I wouldn’t worry.

There have been some quick and informal studies this year on re-using surgical or N95 masks and really, we had no choice. In March and April, the hospitals were desperate for supplies so I gave my surgery masks to the hospital and kept just a few for any urgent surgical procedures. That's one of the reasons we weren't doing electives in March or April: masks were one of the things we don't have a good reuse/sterilization technique for unlike gowns.

The plethora of information is that the surgical masks filter pretty well for about 30 minutes (this is primarily in reference to wearing it untouched, doing surgery, and not breathing bacteria on to your patient). We've always known the function may diminish with longer procedures but it's generally considered to be more beneficial to the patient to get the job done then to step out, put on a new mask, rescrub etc. There are other methods at work for protecting the surgery field of course.
So if you breathe through them briefly and/or you let them dry between use, how much function do you regain in terms of controlling droplets? I don't think anyone knows. There's been some work done on using a low heat oven (180).
Some of us hang them in the sun. But we're working on the assumption they still have some ability to protect from droplets through multiple uses, especially worn briefly.
Most of the time I put them in a brown paper bag which will keep out other contaminants but also let them dry so they shouldn't be growing bacteria, fungus, etc.
We have enough of a slow trickle of a supply coming in the office that each employee gets a new one per week, leaving them a couple to rotate and some to take out on the town with them if they want.

 

[Hatin Since 87]

Lots of folding today

"CNN — Walmart and other major retailers made headlines last week with a new requirement for customers to wear masks in its US stores. But the new rules only go so far.

List: Major retailers requiring customers to wear masks amid coronavirus pandemic
Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walgreens, CVS and others say they still won't prohibit customers who refuse to wear a mash from shopping in stores. The issue, they say, is they want to avoid confrontations between angry customers and employees.

Lol, in other words, “we did something without doing anything”

Love it

 

[dusty88]

Narcissists and Psychopaths Are More Likely to Refuse to Wear Masks, Says New Research https://www.newsweek.com/narcissist...65EhVx0ezeU89JAnRGRGVpCEGpCbDzvVDAxXU8SuLMTWM "






So the title could be a bit misleading. "However, the study also found that individual perceptions of the coronavirus pandemic situation accounted for the most variance. Using certain statistical methods, individual personality traits became almost negligible in measuring responses, while perception of the situation more substantially predicted the likelihood of complying with restrictions like face-mask and social-distancing mandates"

 

[SheepDog4Life]

 

[Hatin Since 87]

Meh. I stopped caring about their name calling. Everyone who disagrees with me is a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, narcissistic, fascist psycho who is uneducated and loves hitler.


Ok. I guess I am

 

[Tombs]

Narcissists and Psychopaths Are More Likely to Refuse to Wear Masks, Says New ResearchView attachment 89320 https://www.newsweek.com/narcissist...65EhVx0ezeU89JAnRGRGVpCEGpCbDzvVDAxXU8SuLMTWM "






So the title could be a bit misleading. "However, the study also found that individual perceptions of the coronavirus pandemic situation accounted for the most variance. Using certain statistical methods, individual personality traits became almost negligible in measuring responses, while perception of the situation more substantially predicted the likelihood of complying with restrictions like face-mask and social-distancing mandates"

"I disagree with you, therefor you're a narcissist and a psychopath."

 

[JCSR]

 

[Rookie]

photo sharing

 

[Flingarrows]

Dude, you are wound too tight about this.


You could appreciate that he has a pragmatic, and not dogmatic, approach to this. You should appreciate that the health dictator has some common sense and realizes when masks are appropriate and when they are unnecessary.

That’s not common sense. Using his own logic, he doesn’t know if he is infecting people or nor unless he has been in quarantine


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[chipbennett]

Trump doesn't wear one and it is good. Even respectable.

Fauci doesn't wear one and it is morally corrupt.

Nice straw man.

The issue is that Fauci has publicly declared support for wearing masks, yet displays behavior of wearing masks when on camera and not wearing masks when off-camera.

 

[chipbennett]

First hint was the bottle of water in his lap... so for the mask critics, is it wear a mask 24x7 otherwise why bother?

You mean the bottle of water that clearly has a cap on it, sitting either in his lap or in the cupholder - in either case, nowhere near his hands, which are not being used to hold the bottle or to manipulate his mask for drinking water from said bottle, but are instead being used to steeple?

In the picture in question, he is nowhere near the act of drinking from that bottle.

That dog won't hunt.

 

[chipbennett]

You apparently haven't read any of my posts... I think masks are a good idea, like seat belts... no mandate/law needed for either, but Darwin, like karma, can be a b*tch.

So, again wear a mask 24/7 or it does no good at all?

This line of thinking is illogical. If masks are intended to protect those around the mask-wearer (and NOT to protect the mask-wearer from infection), how could failure to wear masks invoke a Darwinian outcome for the non-mask-wearer?

 

[chipbennett]

Narcissists and Psychopaths Are More Likely to Refuse to Wear Masks, Says New ResearchView attachment 89320 https://www.newsweek.com/narcissist...65EhVx0ezeU89JAnRGRGVpCEGpCbDzvVDAxXU8SuLMTWM "






So the title could be a bit misleading. "However, the study also found that individual perceptions of the coronavirus pandemic situation accounted for the most variance. Using certain statistical methods, individual personality traits became almost negligible in measuring responses, while perception of the situation more substantially predicted the likelihood of complying with restrictions like face-mask and social-distancing mandates"

Why the micro-font? Burying the lede, just like the article?

 

[chipbennett]

That’s not common sense. Using his own logic, he doesn’t know if he is infecting people or nor unless he has been in quarantine


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Bull.

A non-symptomatic person has a roughly 1-in-500 chance (possibly as high as 1-in-100) of being an asymptomatic carrier (roughly 1% of population is positive, and somewhere around 25 - 40% of positive are pre- or asymptomatic). The default position is "healthy".

Feel free to prove me wrong, with empirical data.

 

[dusty88]

Why the micro-font? Burying the lede, just like the article?

If I wanted to bury it I wouldn't have typed it at all.

I thought the pot stirring picture made it clear I was messing around