The WHO has been urging everybody to get prepared for 10 weeks now, while constantly giving the same good advice (test, trace, lockdown, social distance).
People are pretending this is all WHO's fault because they said some wrong stuff in early January, when the correct conclusions were not at all obvious. And they've been completely correct and transparent since late January. It's almost April now. At this point, it's just a worn out excuse.
WHO are still (1) telling people that they don't need to wear protection on their faces unless they're having overt symptoms of the disease or caring for someone who is, and (2) downplaying aerosols as a possible factor in transmission, despite known superspreading events associated with e.g. people singing in a choir (where, last I checked, you don't have a lot of coughing or sneezing). This sort of stuff has real consequences.
They literally just posted this a few days ago https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024 when we know it's false and that masks do offer some level of personal protection on top of making everyone around you safer, given that you can infect others while asymptomatic.
Okay, yeah, the mask thing absolutely blows my mind. I have absolutely no idea what their motivation for saying this is, when just about every expert in every east Asian country disagrees.
That tweet and the attached video are entirely true. It's just that individual people may wish to not chance it, and wear a mask nonetheless, and masks will end up allocated by luck and purchasing power instead of need and risk profile.
There's also some evidence that widespread usage of masks may be effective in lowering the risk for such a disease, but deploying widespread usage of masks equitably on a global scale is nigh-impossible right now, so it's counterproductive to focus on it. Distancing is achievable instead, and leads to a similar result.
> deploying widespread usage of masks equitably on a global scale is nigh-impossible right now
You don't need high grade medical masks to significantly reduce the amount of transmission. Any sort of fabric-based covering on your face can help, just make sure you can comfortably breathe through it. Fabric is cheap and ubiquitous, it's literally everywhere.
That doesn't seem right. If the mask doesn't prevent droplets from penetrating doesn't it actually act as more of a trap for potentially viral-laced droplets to gather and get inhaled?
So I think I inferred that PC was referring to wearing a mask to prevent getting infected, which may have not been the case, but in a way needs to have clarification. 100% mask usage would be great, then the particles never get into the air from the infected. I think it's important to not let people think that wearing a simple cloth mask will prevent you from being infected.
The math. We had the fatality rate and r0. As soon as it was obvious that it spread out of control on China, it was just a matter of time. You didn’t need to be an epidemiologist, you just needed a high school maths education.
The thing is, it didn't quite spread out of control on China. There were a heck of a lot of cases in Wuhan and Hubei, and markedly fewer cases elsewhere. We might guess that this is perhaps just a side-effect of exponential dynamics, but I'm not quite sure about that.
At a guess, this is perhaps a consequence of the fact that the entire rest of China has been treating everyone from Hubei like a plague carrier since January regardless of whether they've even been there in years. Any country that didn't, at the very least, quarantine people who'd been in Hubei plus their close contacts back then probably can't expect the same results, and even that plus contract tracing and testing plus social distancing only seems to hve delayed the inevitable.
