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[Il Palazzo]

I really don't think anyone was lying when they did not recommend the use of masks. It would have to be some coordinated effort or an odd coincidence (coincidence? don't think so!) to have all those organisations and individuals from all around the world decide people must be lied to in the same manner, because that's the only way to combat mask scarcity. As far as I'm aware, the message has been the same all along and it never involved telling people that masks can't stop droplets.

The message I saw was: If you're medical staff caring for the sick then you're likely to be coughed on and you're likely to be highly compliant with procedures regarding mask use, so please do wear them. If you're sick, then you'll be coughing all around you so, likewise, please wear them. If you're thinking of wearing them in public where you're not likely to be in close contact with other people and coughed on (assuming you comply with distancing recommendations), while you're likely to contaminate the mask from surfaces, then why bother - you're just wasting the material needed elsewhere.
If there's a shift in recommendations, it's because new information regarding asymptomatics and droplet range/production has been coming in, not because the jig is up.

I don't entirely understand why people keep taking that and insisting it's internally inconsistent so must be a lie.

[wierd]

While there is some logic there, the virus seems unusually resilient on surfaces.

Indoors, this can combine with dust particles, to create a persistent inhalation hazard.  (assuming you have enough human traffic and virus aerosols)


After a certain threshold, everyone obeying standard precautions starts to make sense, even if the precautions they can take are not hospital grade, which is what Poo is really stating here.

[Max™]

Yeah, I do know that our government is full of stupid cunts at the top and can't be relied on for any sort of good advice.

Similarly I would hate for people to think they should go grab N95 masks to wear while walking in an empty park, those full protection types are sadly too rare and too goddamn important for people who literally have to be around infectious cases to save their lives so I could see an argument for lying to keep civilians from acting like they're the next toilet paper but it's not going to work out as well as simple information and honest discussion of risk factors and sane preventative measures.

Insane: licking turnstiles at a subway stop near a heavily hit hospital and frenching strangers who cough
Sane: not touching your face and washing your hands for long enough often enough to work

Insane: running your groceries through an autoclave before soaking them in alcohol for a week
Sane: mixing up a suitable bleach/water dilution to wipe down anything you're really worried has been coughed on

Insane: rolling around in a plastic bubble with airlocks while wearing full PPE
Sane: sparing the N95 supplies for doctors and nurses while wearing whichever level of protection you can reliably obtain/clean

Insane: listening to your racist boomer uncle justify nonsense Trump vomits during his press briefings
Sane: making sure your headphones are working any time you walk past a stupid old cunt like that

[Trekkin]

I don't entirely understand why people keep taking that and insisting it's internally inconsistent so must be a lie.

In a word, it's bikeshedding. Nobody likes to feel useless, but we're facing a crisis where the best thing most people can do is hide at home and wait while the boffins get to work. There's no voting or activism into which they can channel their energies and feel like part of the solution, in sharp contrast to the political problems of the past four years. Plus which, this is a very abstruse crisis for most people; why the virus does what it does and how is difficult to understand to a satisfactory degree without a background in biology. The mask thing is a comprehensible, human facet of things onto which they can bring all their understanding of "the real world" to bear, and through which they can vent some of their anxiety at being faced with an urgent problem they can do nothing significant to solve.

There are other elements too, like our cultural conflation of reflexive disbelief with skepticism and a social media void that demands hot takes on everything, but I think the core of it is simply that catching the government in a lie is about the only thing that can make most people feel relevant.

[Reelya]

My landlord was just over to collect the rent, wearing gloves and wanting me to stay 2 metres away, and he started going on about the "5G". 5G is barely available in this country yet. But my landlord is also a cretin.

[ChairmanPoo]

I really don't think anyone was lying when they did not recommend the use of masks. It would have to be some coordinated effort or an odd coincidence (coincidence? don't think so!) to have all those organisations and individuals from all around the world decide people must be lied to in the same manner, because that's the only way to combat mask scarcity. As far as I'm aware, the message has been the same all along and it never involved telling people that masks can't stop droplets.

The message I saw was: If you're medical staff caring for the sick then you're likely to be coughed on and you're likely to be highly compliant with procedures regarding mask use, so please do wear them. If you're sick, then you'll be coughing all around you so, likewise, please wear them. If you're thinking of wearing them in public where you're not likely to be in close contact with other people and coughed on (assuming you comply with distancing recommendations), while you're likely to contaminate the mask from surfaces, then why bother - you're just wasting the material needed elsewhere.
If there's a shift in recommendations, it's because new information regarding asymptomatics and droplet range/production has been coming in, not because the jig is up.

I don't entirely understand why people keep taking that and insisting it's internally inconsistent so must be a lie.

I've caught them in way more lies. I'm talking about my goverment of course. It's not just the face masks. It's that, plus the supposed PPE availability that isn't happening (PPE has been "about to arrive" for two weeks. It's not there. I have enough friends in the biz to be able to run an impromptu survey of the whole country), the claims about healthcare personnel being able to get tested even if they were asymptomatic contacts (ditto. I know of people with mild symptoms who WERENT tested at all and were required to keep working). Claiming there wouldn't be local spread when there were already several people dead. Claiming that we wouldn't go the way of Italy when the numbers clearly stated that we were doing WORSE than Italy. And the list goes on and on. I could spend the whole morning commenting on the utter bullshit the goverment has been spouting during the last two weeks' press conferences.

Heck, even the bit about silent carriers isnt particularily new. I learned about it on the 14th of March as someone linked an italian article on the subject. Even more stuff from China was published a few days later. And friends of mine who work on micro tell me that it was already openly discussed in the profession in late february.

[martinuzz]

In Japan, infection rates are rising. Where at first it was thought that relatively mild measures had been effective at keeping the virus under control, Japan is now facing 4000 infections, and a daily increase of 300.
If this number rises, the government will consider a lockdown.

In other news, the corona death toll in North America is now higher than the death toll in all of Asia combined.

[McTraveller]

Weekly grocery store trip this morning.  Stocks almost back to normal - only thing on the list I couldn't find was toilet paper. We are not critically low, but my mother-in-law told us to get some if it was available.

Also, I'd say at least 50% of the people in the store were wearing masks of various types.  So way more than last week.  So maybe the population of MI is "Doing something."

Also, I filled up my car's gas tank. Only $1.20 a US gallon... wow.  Haven't seen prices that low in literally 20 years.

[Starver]

It also helps prevent touching your face, and has a fairly low but real % chance of preventing stuff you breathe out from spreading as far.

Arguable. In a supermarket queue the other day, the two ladies behind me (usually by at least a couple of metres, naturally) were wearing blue gloves and simple but probably fairly effective ear-loop mask clothes, all well and good[1] except they kept adjusting the masks while chatting on their respective phones[2].

Yes, still with gloves, but that just means that they were potentially cross-infecting with whatever they had put the gloves on to not touch directly. Or, if they were infective themselves, they were probably infecting their gloves from their pathogen-riddled masks, less heedfully touching other things with them and (given the evidence of the many already seen littering in and around that supermarket car-park) then stripping them off[3] and dropping them on the floor to be blown and kicked around until someone (hopefully with a grabber!) goes round with a binbag at some point.


[1] - Though incongruous as accessories to their open-toed faux-furred sandals, a brief furry and differently luridly coloured 'dressing gown'-type jacket (think Health Spa staff member, but the logos were fashion retailers not anything Spa-like) over ”Oh, this old thing..?" dressed-up-to-dress-down two-piece outfits that could have been bed-wear just modest enough to also go shopping in...

[2] - In that "hold flat, talk to them like you're playing a flute" style that appraises even me, 2m away, of both ends of each dialogue being had, if I'd care to try to tune my ears in.

[3] I doubt with the care that is necessary, at least on removing the second glove with the first bared hand.

[Starver]

Insane: running your groceries, through an autoclave before soaking them in alcohol for a week

FTFY *hic*

[Starver]

(Sorry, didn't think I'd be making multiple replies. Bunching these two together to stop it getting much worse.)

My landlord [...] started going on about the "5G". 5G is barely available in this country yet. But my landlord is also a cretin.

It must be the 5G. Why else would masks labelled 3M be so common? It's all Math(s), biyatch!

Weekly grocery store trip this morning.  Stocks almost back to normal -
[...]
Also, I filled up my car's gas tank. Only $1.20 a US gallon... wow.  Haven't seen prices that low in literally 20 years.

A week or so ago, I got some discounted bread (sell-by on day of purchase) and took that as a sign that things were getting 'better'. That was before the shop concerned even switched to the queueueueueue-¾-of-the-way-round-the-carpark (not that many people, just spread out a lot) with a tallyman or two on the singly-opened door to ensure an N-out/N-in rule was enforced, since when it may have been a long wait to get in but, apart from TP (still?[1]) there's a lot of most things that was maybe depleted before.

Most annoying is the reduction in ranges. Already last year they stopped doing the bread I like (not fancy, just not "supermarket brown") and now the particular type of Tortellini I like is absent from the (otherwise well-stocked) shelves. #FirstWorldProblem? I did note that there weren't as many brands of 'margarine', either, I usually can get a Kilo tub reduced to £2 (whatever brand - not fussy) but I had to get two 500g tubs each reduced to £1 instead. Plenty of them, so no guilt attached to my compulsion there.

Fuel at the attached petrol station was something like £1.04p(.9) for Unleaded, £1.11.9 for diesel. Which (I'll check later) isn't a price-range I've seen/bought-at since the Noughties. Maybe slightly earlier. Need to find the prior car's fuel book to track down what I was paying when. (On the web, I'm told average prices in this and nearby areas are around 120 & 122p, plus fractions, and the minimums are 114 & 115.  So that's wring.). I'll leave it to you to convert our GB£/litre to your US$/gallon, or any other local equivalent.


[1] - I haven't bought any packs since the middle of last year, for two households, and I can probably last for a couple more months before I have to consider seeing if the less-used house could 'donate' a roll or two to the busier one.

[Iduno]

Why no demin? I assume most people have jeans that are worn out enough to be repurposed, and the material is dense enough that it should work. Maybe too thick, and hard to breathe through?

My landlord was just over to collect the rent, wearing gloves and wanting me to stay 2 metres away, and he started going on about the "5G". 5G is barely available in this country yet. But my landlord is also a cretin.

Never open the door without your phone in your hand. I assume it would work like a vampire and a crucifix.

Insane: running your groceries: through an autoclave before soaking them in alcohol for a week

FTFY *hic*

[3] I doubt with the care that is necessary, at least on removing the second glove with the first bared hand.

https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/poster-how-to-remove-gloves.pdf

(Sorry, didn't think I'd be making multiple replies. Bunching these two together to stop it getting much worse.)

As long as nobody else has posted yet, nobody minds you just editing to add stuff.

[Starver]

Insane: running your groceries: through an autoclave before soaking them in alcohol for a week

FTFY *hic*

Well sozzled played, that man!

As long as nobody else has posted yet, nobody minds you just editing to add stuff.

But the moment one does that, someone else does post, and you have to decide to re-de-edit the first back to what it was to legitimately enact the additional point it in a virginal follow-up that even your follow-upper now can't help but notice!

(I was just surprised that it hadn't moved in, intersticial to me. And it's awkwarder than it should be to multiquote via this interface than on a sensible machine. So I went with the wrong choice, and then refrained from deleting and rolling them all back into the first, which may now have been read even if not replied to, causing... 'edge conditions'. Maybe next time, though...)

[feelotraveller]

Also, I filled up my car's gas tank. Only $1.20 a US gallon... wow.  Haven't seen prices that low in literally 20 years.

Absolutely nothing to do with the Saudi-Russia oil price war, no sirree.

[Frumple]

Checked florida's dashboard for the first time in a few days. We're now at 62 out of 67 counties with confirmed cases. Commonalities between the five without: Fairly shitty testing. Not that testing doesn't continue to be shitty pretty much everywhere, they've just been "lucky" to have managed to fail to test one of their actually positive folks.

You can comfortably say the entire fucking state is infected with the crow plague now

I guess another, what, two, three weeks for the first round of deaths to peak? Then we might get something of a respite for a little while...