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nrashkind

More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-coronavirus-face-masks.html

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Experts have started to question whether masks may offer at least some protection to healthy individuals and essential workers.
  • As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, experts have started to question official guidance about whether ordinary, healthy people should protect themselves with a regular surgical mask,
  • or even a scarf.
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  • The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to state that masks don’t necessarily protect healthy individuals from getting infected as they go about their daily lives.
  • While wearing a mask may not necessarily prevent healthy people from getting sick, and it certainly doesn’t replace important measures such as hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing, Dr. Atmar said.
  • the recent surge in infections in the United States, which has put the country at the center of the epidemic, with more confirmed cases than China,
  • “The swift increase in cases to these levels in the U.S. highlights to an even greater degree the importance of implementing and adhering to public health measures,”
  • The official guidance continues to recommend that masks should be reserved for people who are already sick,
  • But studies of influenza pandemics have shown that when high-grade N95 masks are not available, surgical masks do protect people a bit more than not wearing masks at all.
  • With the current coronavirus, researchers are also finding that there are more asymptomatic cases than were known early on in the pandemic.
  • “It’s still hard to tell what percentage of people are truly asymptomatic because many go on to develop symptoms a few days later,” said Dr. Neil Fishman, the chief medical officer of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, the Coronavirus Is in the Air - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-aerosols.html

Covid-19 transmission research

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization has now formally recognized that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is airborne and that it can be carried by tiny aerosols.
  • until earlier this month, the W.H.O. — like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Public Health England — had warned mostly about the transmission of the new coronavirus through direct contact and droplets released at close range.
  • After several months of pressure from scientists, on July 9, the W.H.O. changed its position — going from denial to grudging partial acceptance: “Further studies are needed to determine whether it is possible to detect viable SARS-CoV-2 in air samples from settings where no procedures that generate aerosols are performed and what role aerosols might play in transmission.”
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  • A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date.
  • This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer-reviewed) in which Covid-19 patients were found to release SARS-CoV-2 simply by exhaling — without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission “plays a major role” in spreading the virus.
  • Accepting these conclusions wouldn’t much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS-CoV-2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks.
  • Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too.
  • here is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point — at 5 microns or any other size — between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic.
  • Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours.
  • The practical implications are plain:Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people’s respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least — though farther is safer.
  • “The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.”
  • Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.
  • Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn’t been established.
  • another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that “aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid-19 transmission” among the ship’s passengers.
  • It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols — but they don’t.
  • The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found “a predominance of pathogens in small particles” (under 5 microns). “There is no evidence,” the study also concluded, “that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets.”
  • I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close-range transmission by aerosols is significant — possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray.
  • But basic physics also says that a 5-micron droplet takes about a half-hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height — and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter.
  • Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them.
  • When it comes to masks, size does matter.
  • My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin.
  • Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air-conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air.
  • Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate.
  • We also found that especially with very small aerosols — smaller than 1 micron — it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps).
  • One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask’s design).A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air.To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS-CoV-2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure.
  • What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected.
  • Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.Droplets can’t account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person’s: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant — including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner’s airstream — became infected.
rerobinson03

Pandemic Reaches Grim Milestone as Biden Moves to Take Charge - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-pandemic-biden.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 10 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As the number of infected Americans passed 10 million and governors struggled to manage the pandemic, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. tried on Monday to use his bully pulpit — the only tool at his disposal until he replaces President Trump in 72 days — to plead for Americans to set aside the bitterness of the 2020 election and wear a mask.
  • “It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives — American lives.”
  • Hours before Mr. Biden’s remarks, the drug maker Pfizer announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19,
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  • The average daily death toll in the United States is inching back toward 1,000, and hospitals nationwide are strained with patients. The president-elect said that Americans would need to rely on basic precautions, like wearing masks, to “get back to normal as fast as possibl
  • The country now averages 900 deaths each day, and 28 states added more cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday than in any other weeklong stretch of the pandemic. No states are reporting sustained reductions in cases.
  • Coronavirus hospitalizations, perhaps the clearest measure of how many people are severely ill, are approaching record levels set during earlier surges of the pandemic, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project
  • At the White House, which has been the site of several high-profile outbreaks in recent months, Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday, according to a spokesman for the agency. He became the latest in a long list of administration officials, including Mr. Trump himself, to contract the virus.
  • At least three people who attended an election party at the White House last week, including Mr. Carson, have tested positive for the virus. At the event, several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns.
  • Beyond the impact of the virus itself, when Mr. Biden takes office, he will face a sobering economic reality.
  • More than half of the states issued mask mandates at some point this year, and some officials have tried targeted shutdowns on bars and indoor dining. But public health officials acknowledge that there is little public appetite for a return to full lockdowns.
  • Mr. Biden, moving to signal to Americans that he is prepared to take charge after a chaotic year, named a new coronavirus task force headed by a former commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. David Kessler; a former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy; and a Yale public health expert, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
  • The president-elect vowed to “spare no effort” in fighting the virus, with the goal of getting the economy “running at full speed again.”
  • His comments contrasted Mr. Trump’s. The president has spent the past eight months dismissing or playing down the need for Americans to wear masks, saying frequently — and falsely — that public health experts disagree about masks’ effectiveness.
  • Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the chairman of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force, convened the group on Monday after meeting about once a week over the past several months. But Mr. Trump, who remains in office until January, is openly at odds with his own virus advisers, including about mask wearing.
  • There were 10 million fewer Americans working in October than in February, according to the Labor Department, and the pace of job growth has slowed every month since June.
  • “The virus is winning the war by now,” Mr. Pritzker said, urging the public to wear masks. “The situation has worsened considerably in certain areas of the state.”
  • In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned on Monday that the city was “getting dangerously close” to a second wave and said that further lockdowns were possible if New Yorkers did not regain control of the virus. “Unfortunately, it could mean even having to shut down parts of our economy again,” he said.At Mr. Biden’s closed-door briefing with his Covid advisory board, which took place remotely over a video conference call on Monday, three leaders of the panel provided updates on the pandemic while others members of the group introduced themselves, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
  • He told lawmakers that officials in the government had failed to heed his warnings about acquiring masks and other supplies
hannahcarter11

House GOP fights back against mask, metal detector fines | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...inst-mask-metal-detector-fines

mask safety house gop vaccine

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • GOP lawmakers are doing everything they can to avoid paying fines for running afoul of rules imposed by Democrats that require masks and security screenings before entering the House chamber.
  • At least six Republicans have been fined in recent days for protesting the House floor mask requirement, adding to five others since February who were penalized for failing to complete security screenings.
  • Lawmakers can appeal the fines to the House Ethics Committee, which so far has upheld metal detector penalties against two Republicans and dropped two others against Rep. Hal RogersHarold (Hal) Dallas RogersHouse GOP fights back against mask, metal detector fines Sixth House member issued ,000 security screening fine House Ethics panel to drop K metal detector fines against Clyburn, Rogers MORE (R-Ky.) and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.).
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  • he hefty monetary enforcements are yet another example of the distrust that has deepened since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Democrats say they can't count on certain Republicans to abide by safety measures, while GOP lawmakers argue the fines are an unnecessary power grab by the House majority.
  • The rules state that the fines will be deducted from the offending lawmaker’s salary and can’t be paid for with office budget or campaign funds
  • Mast further argued that the fine was unconstitutional and “unenforceable,” citing in part the Constitution’s 27th Amendment that prohibits any change in the salary of members of Congress from taking effect until after the next election.
  • While Mast, Miller-Meeks and Norman have all confirmed they are fully vaccinated, the other Republicans fined for going maskless have either declined to disclose their vaccination status or openly said they aren’t vaccinated.
  • The Capitol’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, explained in a memo that masks are still required in the House chamber unless members are recognized to speak during debate because it is “the only location where the entire Membership gathers periodically throughout the day in an interior space.” 
  • A recent CNN survey found that all Democrats in the House and Senate confirmed they are vaccinated.
  • Democrats also felt they had to impose fines to compel enforcement of security screenings enacted in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot after several Republicans refused to go through newly installed metal detectors outside the House chamber.
  • Democrats defending the penalties argue that rules enforcing metal detector screenings or masks enforce what they believe is ultimately a minor inconvenience.
martinelligi

How Joe Biden Might Try To Make Masks A Less Partisan Issue : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...m-to-depoliticize-mask-wearing

biden masks

shared by martinelligi on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In the months since Memorial Day, face masks have become a potent symbol of the political polarization over the coronavirus in the United States. The division shows up in polling. Gallup found that while a clear majority of Americans say they're "highly likely" to wear masks in public indoor spaces, Republicans are less likely to do so.
  • "Some straight talk: There are two extreme and distinct camps out there," said Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, as he announced new COVID-19 restrictions last week. "Most of the public isn't part of either camp. And by the way, neither am I. Masks work. Please wear them."
  • For his part, Biden has consistently worn a mask and has stuck to a consistent message. He tweeted last week: "Wearing a mask isn't a political statement — it's a patriotic duty."
Javier E

No masks allowed: stores turn customers away in US culture war | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-stores-against-face-masks

culture war freedom crisis public health

shared by Javier E on 23 May 20 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, Vice reported on a Kentucky convenience store that put up a sign reading: “NO Face Masks allowed in store. Lower your mask or go somewhere else. Stop listening to [Kentucky governor Andy] Beshear, he’s a dumbass.”
  • Another sign was posted by a Californian construction store earlier this month encouraging hugs but not masks. In Illinois, a gas station employee who put up a similar sign has since defended herself, arguing that mask-wearing made it hard to differentiate between adults and children when selling booze and cigarettes.
  • “I work for Costco and I am asking this customer to put on a mask because that is company policy,” says a Costco employee in one video. “And I’m not doing it because I woke up in a free country,” replies the man filming him.
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  • “A warped freedom obsession is killing us,” said the writer Anand Giridharadas, in reference to those coughing in the faces of others in the name of freedom
  • It is, of course, a minority of people willfully misinterpreting what freedom means – freedom to choose, until the choice is one that they do not like
  • In Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech, he detailed that, yes, Americans are owed a right to freedom of speech and expression and to worship whom they please – but he also mentioned the freedom from fear
Javier E

Opinion | On Masks and Covid, I Finally Found Common Ground. In Germany. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...id-germany-masks-vaccines.html

germany response pandemic crisis Culture politics history policy

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • You see it everywhere here in Germany, day in and day out: People taking the subway or bus or train put masks on as they prepare to board. And when they arrive at their stop or station and disembark, nearly all of them take the mask off, almost in unison.
  • For someone who arrived here after spending the first year and a quarter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, it is a remarkable sight: a communal, matter-of-fact approach to mitigation, turning what has become such an intensely charged symbol for Americans into a mere practicality.
  • Throughout 2020 and the first part of 2021, I traveled across the United States reporting stories, and wondered why it was so hard for the country to arrive at a sensible middle ground on Covid-19 measures.
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  • All or nothing, nothing or all.
  • it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.
  • No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.
  • It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following
  • The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed
  • The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.
  • Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.
hannahcarter11

Fauci: Texas inviting another virus surge by lifting mask mandate | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-surge-by-lifting-mask-mandate

texas virus mask Fauci

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Texas officially repealed its mask mandate on Wednesday and allowed businesses to reopen at full capacity. The changes came even as public health experts cautioned against reopening too soon, despite declining cases.
  • “We understand people’s need to get back to normal, and we’re going in that direction. But when you start doing things like completely putting aside all public health measures as if you’re turning a light switch off, that's quite risky,”
  • Fauci last week called the states’ moves “inexplicable” and suggested that it could lead to another surge.
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  • More than a dozen states currently do not have a mask mandate in effect, though Texas is now the largest without rules for face coverings.
  • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) defended his decision against bipartisan criticism last week, saying that lifting the mask mandate “isn’t going to make that big of a change in the state of Texas.”
lmunch

Dr. Wu Lien-teh: The trailblazing doctor who invented the face mask - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Pandemic history Culture Policy

shared by lmunch on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A century has passed since Dr. Wu's groundbreaking research laid down some of the earliest blueprints for the control of deadly disease outbreaks -- work for which he received a nomination for a Nobel Prize in medicine -- but his life and legacy are more important than ever today, in a time of rising anti-Asian bigotry and the defiant rejection by many of evidence-based public health guidelines.
  • Dr. Wu certainly isn't a household name in the US, or even in China, the nation he adopted as his home. But he should be, especially now: The groundbreaking work he conducted in fighting an outbreak of the deadly pneumonic plague in 1910 -- a pandemic that killed a stunning 99.9% of its victims, and had already led to over 60,000 deaths in the months before Dr. Wu took charge -- likely saved millions of lives, and established many of the basic public health procedures and innovations that have been used around the world to fight pandemics ever since, including our present one, Covid-19.
  • Dr. Wu added air-filtering layers of gauze and cloth to the mask, which would intercept and absorb pathogen-laden airborne microdroplets before they were inhaled, turning the mask into a two-way disease defense for the first time. Over time, his invention evolved into the N95 mask, the personal protective equipment most commonly used by health professionals to prevent airborne infection today -- among people who see masks as vital protection against a deadly illness, as opposed to offensive infringements on what they erroneously deem "personal freedom."
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  • And the filtering face mask, Dr. Wu's most important legacy, has somehow emerged as the most despised symbol of the so-called oppression faced by those who bristle under the tyranny of science-based public health.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
Javier E

Asymptomatic people with coronavirus may hold the key to ending the pandemic - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...asymptomatic-coronavirus-covid

research pandemic asymptomatic

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • People were wearing masks in the settings with the highest percentage of asymptomatic cases.
  • The numbers on two cruise ships were especially striking. In the Diamond Princess, where masks weren’t used and the virus was likely to have roamed free, 47 percent of those tested were asymptomatic. But in the Antarctic-bound Argentine cruise ship, where an outbreak hit in mid-March and surgical masks were given to all passengers and N95 masks to the crew, 81 percent were asymptomatic.
  • being exposed to one copy of a virus is more easily overcome than being exposed to a billion copies. Researchers refer to the infectious dose as ID50 — or the dose at which 50 percent of the population would become infected.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “They got cases,” she noted, “but fewer deaths.”
  • work on other nonlethal viruses showed that people tend to get less sick with lower doses and more sick with higher doses. A study published in late May involving hamsters, masks and SARS-CoV-2 found those given coverings had milder cases than those who did not get them.
  • In an article published this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Gandhi noted that in some outbreaks early in the pandemic in which most people did not wear masks, 15 percent of the infected were asymptomatic. But later on, when people began wearing masks, the rate of asymptomatic people was 40 to 45 percent.
  • She said the evidence points to masks not just protecting others — as U.S. health officials emphasize — but protecting the wearer as well.
Javier E

Masks and school dress codes: If you can punish a teenage girl for spaghetti straps, yo... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html

school dress code pandemic mask requirement culture abortion choice

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.
  • After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.
  • Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.
  • In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.
  • You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion.
  • public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.
  • But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.
  • I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life.
  • The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.”
  • The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group
  • — and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.
Javier E

Face mask study shows neck gaiter may be worse than no covering at all - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html

mask pandemic Covid-19 protection research

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • “We’re not as a society going to be having everybody wear disposable N95 face masks,” he said. “It’s not affordable, and it’s not reasonable.” The researchers specifically made note of the effectiveness of common cotton cloth masks, finding that several of the ones tested performed about as well as surgical masks, which come in second to the N95. Experts with the World Health Organization have recommended that fabric masks should ideally have three layers.
martinelligi

Coronavirus in the U.S: How Did the Pandemic Get So Bad? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...onavirus-united-states-failure

pandemic crisis

shared by martinelligi on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • If, early in the spring, the U.S. had mobilized its ample resources and expertise in a coherent national effort to prepare for the virus, things might have turned out differently. If, in midsummer, the country had doubled down on the measures (masks, social-distancing rules, restricted indoor activities and public gatherings) that seemed to be working, instead of prematurely declaring victory, things might have turned out differently. The tragedy is that if science and common sense solutions were united in a national, coordinated response, the U.S. could have avoided many thousands of more deaths this summer.
  • Among the world’s wealthy nations, only the U.S. has an outbreak that continues to spin out of control. Of the 10 worst-hit countries, the U.S. has the seventh-highest number of deaths per 100,000 population; the other nine countries in the top 10 have an average per capita GDP of $10,195, compared to $65,281 for the U.S. Some countries, like New Zealand, have even come close to eradicating COVID-19 entirely.
  • t this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Common-sense solutions like face masks were undercut or ignored. Research shows that wearing a facial covering significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19, and a pre-existing culture of mask wearing in East Asia is often cited as one reason countries in that region were able to control their outbreaks. In the U.S., Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, more than three months after the CDC recommended facial coverings, transforming what ought to have been a scientific issue into a partisan one.
  • Testing is key to a pandemic response—the more data officials have about an outbreak, the better equipped they are to respond. Rather than call for more testing, Trump has instead suggested that maybe the U.S. should be testing less. He has repeatedly, and incorrectly, blamed increases in new cases on more testing. “If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases,” the President said in June, later suggesting he was being sarcastic.
  • Seven months after the coronavirus was found on American soil, we’re still suffering hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, deaths every day. An American Nurses Association survey from late July and early August found that of 21,000 U.S. nurses polled, 42% reported either widespread or intermittent shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, gloves and medical gowns.
  • . More than 13 million Americans remain unemployed as of August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Sept. 4.
  • The coronavirus has laid bare the inequalities of American public health. Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to get COVID-19, nearly five times as likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes, being Black in the U.S. is a marker of risk for underlying conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous, “including socioeconomic status, access to health care and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential and critical infrastructure workers).” In other words, COVID-19 is more dangerous for Black Americans because of generations of systemic racism and discrimination. The same is true to a lesser extent for Native American and Latino communities, according to CDC data.
  • Americans today tend to value the individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew survey found that 58% of Americans said “freedom to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state” is more important than the state guaranteeing “nobody is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a root cause of the country’s struggles with COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to make temporary sacrifices for the benefit of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask or skipping a visit to their local bar.
  • ut at least some Americans still refuse to take such a simple step as wearing a mask. Why? Because we’re also in the midst of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and Democrats today don’t just disagree on issues; they disagree on the basic truths that structure their respective realities.
  • There’s another disturbing undercurrent to Americans’ attitude toward the pandemic thus far: a seeming willingness to accept mass death. As a nation we may have become dull to horrors that come our way as news, from gun violence to the seemingly never-ending incidents of police brutality to the water crises in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. Americans seem to have already been inured to the idea that other Americans will die regularly, when they do not need to.
  • Our leaders need to listen to experts and let policy be driven by science. And for the time being, all of us need to accept that there are certain things we cannot, or should not, do, like go to the movies or host an indoor wedding.
  • The U.S. is no longer the epicenter of the global pandemic; that unfortunate torch has been passed to countries like India, Argentina and Brazil. And in the coming months there might yet be a vaccine, or more likely a cadre of vaccines, that finally halts the march of COVID-19 through the country.
kaylynfreeman

Trump May Have Covid, but Many of His Supporters Still Scoff at Masks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-voters-face-masks.html

pandemic trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • “I have my own business and I don’t have anybody wear a mask in my business,” said Mr. Girvin, a used-car dealer. “I don’t buy into it. When you look at the facts, with how many people die of influenza every year. Obesity kills more people than the Wuhan virus does.”
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      I don't understand how people think this way
  • “Joe Biden has enough nerve to say Donald Trump’s killing people? No. The far-left liberals are causing this. The Pelosis, the Soroses and all these people, that’s who caused it. And I wish them all the worst.”
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      How does this make any sense?
  • “Younger people’s more safe,” said Mr. Dechert, 31. “Older people have an issue. Nobody batted an eye for the flu. Now all of a sudden, it’s an election year — Covid.” #styln-signup .styln-signup-wrapper { max-width: calc(100% - 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; padding-bottom: 20px; }
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      That's because there isn't a vaccine for covid
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “I like my freedom” on leaving the store, and pronounced Covid-19 as “nothing more than a flu, really.’’
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      How can someone be so stupid and inconsiderate?
  • Scoffing at masks, social distancing and crowd avoidance — all measures recommended by health experts, including in the Trump administration — has become a test of loyalty for fervent supporters of the president, who mocked Mr. Biden’s masks during their debate last week and, on returning to the White House on Monday from the hospital, ripped his off, despite being highly contagious.
  • “Say I have it and I get tested five times, that’s five new cases,” he said. “I know for sure, through E.M.T.s, they count it separately.” (This misconception, spread on social media, has been rebutted; the C.D.C. reports total cases and total tests separately.)
  • In a Quinnipiac University national poll last month, four out of five likely voters said they believed masks to be effective at slowing the spread of the virus. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., told Congress that wide use of face masks would bring the pandemic under control and might offer more protection than a vaccine.
  • Doubts about the C.D.C. figures trace back at least to August, when Mr. Trump retweeted a post by a follower of the QAnon conspiracy. Twitter later removed the president’s retweet for violating its rules about sharing disinformation. The false claim arose because doubters of the C.D.C. argued that deaths in people with underlying health problems, such as diabetes or heart disease, were not deaths from Covid-19 — whereas experts said they were.
hannahcarter11

'It's every man for himself': The Texans defying end of mask mandate | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...texas-defy-end-of-mask-mandate

mask texas

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Governor Greg Abbott announced an end to the statewide mask mandate he issued over the summer on 2 March, and on Wednesday, the new rules took effect. This means that not only are Texans no longer required to wear a mask, but stores, restaurants, and even bars are fully open at maximum capacity despite the fact that only 16% of adults in the state are fully vaccinated.
  • Mahak Ahsan is a student pharmacist in the city. She expressed frustration that the state government is impeding the work she and her colleagues are doing to administer vaccines, and educate people about the benefits of immunizations and wearing masks
lmunch

Opinion: The key thing you should know about the new mask rules - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Vaccine crisis Culture Policy pandemic

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance on mask-wearing. While the guidelines cover a variety of scenarios, there are two key changes. First, it is now perfectly safe to be unmasked outdoors, regardless of vaccination status, if you are with members of your household or attending a small gathering where everyone else is fully vaccinated. Second, and more importantly, these new guidelines reaffirm that people who are fully vaccinated can safely go unmasked in almost any outdoor scenario -- the exception being crowded events like live performances or parades. The guidance for everything else (including recommendations to continue wearing masks indoors) has essentially stayed the same.
  • I will tell you what I have told each of my friends and colleagues: These recommendations are scientifically sound, absolutely safe and unsurprising to those of us in public health. They accord not only with the latest research, but also with the guidance being followed by the rest of the world.
  • The vaccines that are approved in the United States work amazingly well. If you're fully vaccinated, and you're around other vaccinated people, the chance of being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is almost nil. This is why the CDC's new recommendations are more relaxed for people who are fully vaccinated than for those who aren't. I can't emphasize this strongly enough: These vaccines are our ticket to normality.
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  • Of course, as I told my friends on Tuesday, even if you are no longer required to wear a mask, you still can choose to wear one. In Hong Kong and Japan, for example, mask-wearing on public transportation and in crowded public spaces has been a norm -- not a requirement -- for years. For people who are immunosuppressed (for whom the vaccines may not be as effective) or otherwise high-risk, it might be a good idea to choose to continue wearing a mask, especially indoors, regardless of the regulations.
mattrenz16

Live Covid News Updates: India, Vaccines, Masks and Reopening - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask

shared by mattrenz16 on 19 May 21 - No Cached
  • New York City’s reopening — a milestone longed for over the last 14 months — arrived at last on Wednesday. It was less a grand gala than a soft opening, a finish line at the end of a long race that no one wanted to be the first to cross.
  • Masks, no longer a hard requirement for the vaccinated in most situations, remained firmly in place by the majority of people, whether in the big-box stores and tiny boutiques of Manhattan or the shaded paths of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
  • “It’s still store policy,” said Raj Lalbatchan, 23, a worker at Victoria, a store selling clothing in the Bronx. Nearby, Elisabeth Ocasio, 51, a server at the restaurant La Isla, said it is standing firm with the status quo. “We don’t know who’s vaccinated and who’s not,” she said. “We’re doing everything the same here.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As the virus was crushing New York City last year, testing was limited, hospitals were full and thousands were dying every day. The living retreated to their apartments and the city, almost overnight, transformed into a shadow of itself. The city’s known death toll sits at more than 33,000 people.
  • But on Wednesday, scenes of joy alongside those of caution played out throughout the city. The owner of du Pont dry cleaners on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side, Byong Min, 64, spent 90 days in a hospital suffering from Covid last year, the scar from his tracheotomy visible above his collar. On Wednesday morning, a customer arrived and asked tentatively: Could she enter without a mask?
  • In Red Hook in Brooklyn, the Chelsea Garden Center, a bustling nursery, considered removing its 2-customer indoor limit, but stopped short. “It’s a little scary to change things,” said Bethany Perkins, an employee. “We’re so used to the rules right now.”
  • “When you’re not sure, my personal advice is wear a mask,” the mayor said, adding “we’ve done it, for god’s sakes, for a year, we can do it a little bit longer to finish the job.”
kaylynfreeman

Six Takeaways From Thursday's Dueling Trump and Biden Town Halls - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-biden-town-hall-talk.html

trump politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Trump stomped on his own message with his refusal to denounce QAnon.
  • Biden finally addressed court packing — sort of.
  • “I just don’t know about QAnon,” Mr. Trump claimed, despite having amplified a discredited claim by the theory’s proponents just days ago.
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  • Biden suggested making masks and vaccines mandatory.
  • Mr. Trump minimized the danger of the virus, despite having been hospitalized after falling ill with it. He has poked fun at Mr. Biden for wearing a mask and has resisted the idea of making masks mandatory. Mr. Trump has theatrically removed his mask at his campaign rallies; Mr. Biden disclosed that before walking onstage, he had been wearing two masks, a preventive measure that some doctors say is effective.
  • Trump clung to an unpopular posture on masks and the pandemic.
  • He tried to twist the position of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, on masks. And he dismissed the scientific consensus.
  • refusal to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate
  • Election Day whether he supports expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. But he said he wanted to wait until after the Senate had acted on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Mr. Biden has made it clear in the past that he did not support the idea. He has avoided the question during the campaign by saying he didn’t want to play into Mr. Trump’s hands and turn attention away from what Republicans were doing with the Ginsburg vacancy. But he agreed with the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, that voters had a right to know his views, and he set out a schedule for disclosing them.
  • “So, he says that the voters should know his position on this issue, but not until the confirmation process has concluded. By that time, a majority of voters will have already voted, including this voter.”
  • Still M.I.A.: a second-term Trump agenda.
  • But the lack of a vision for the next four years — and for navigating the remaining months and years of the pandemic — is a glaring and unaddressed weakness for Mr. Trump. When Ms. Guthrie gave him a chance to make his closing pitch for another four years, he began, “Because I’ve done a great job.” There were few other specifics beyond the classic Trumpian boast. “Next year,” he promised, “is going to be better than ever before.”
  • What if Biden loses?
Javier E

Opinion | America and the Coronavirus: 'A Colossal Failure of Leadership' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html

us failure pandemic response leadership trump history policy

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found
  • “We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”
  • “I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.
  • As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.
  • Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.
  • “It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”
  • in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.
  • the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.
  • Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.
  • The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.
  • It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.
  • Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”
  • When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.
  • If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.
  • In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.
  • That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.
  • the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.
  • It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.
  • t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.
  • In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.
  • Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.
  • Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.
  • Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.
  • The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.
  • A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach
  • Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”
  • A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.
  • A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.
  • Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics
  • It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.
  • Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.
  • This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.
  • Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.
  • Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks
  • More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide
  • So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.
  • The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism
  • An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.
  • During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization
  • More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found
  • Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
  • It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives
  • And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
  • “It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.
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