On the topic of masks: as of Wednesday, Austria will require everyone to wear a mask while shopping in a supermarket. Apparently the masks will be distributed freely on entry, Taking a leaf out of Japan (and other Asian) countries’ book.
Peter if you use the mask you indicated for 2k, and it is appropriately rated for it, you still have an issue. In the small print it will say that the isocyanate will populate and eventually saturate the filter media and cause a breach.
Yes indeed, the filters have a limited life. Commercial (full time) 2K work needs a pressure fed mask. And you are of course right about what to do after taking a mask off. That’s why it is hard to re-use surgical masks. At a push, one could develop a regime for sterilising them using say UV+ozone. For these sorts of reasons I wipe the various bits inside the car with IPA after arriving back home… our office is clean enough (due to other precautions) but it is hard to get to the car from there in that way. One solution is disposable gloves…
EDIT: When I am spraying 2K it is usually outdoors, when the vapour concentration is tiny. Indoors I would do it only very briefly (minutes).
Rwy20 wrote:
Some more required reading: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300972
Let say 3m/year die of respiratory infections is “the acceptable benchmark”, SARS-CoV-2 has a 1% death rate (from that article), I conclude if 3% of earth population get infected then SARS-CoV-2 would have ticked that box, doing nothing I think we are just 20 days from getting there, so the concerns are well explained no? (hint: I don’t think heard immunity or vaccines will be around when we are at 3% and unlike other bugs this is a “new” virus)
You have to compare like for like. You can’t extrapolate from their sample to the whole world. They have just compared “normal” Coronavirus with this one and found no significant difference in mortality.
Rwy20 wrote:
You have to compare like for like. You can’t extrapolate from their sample to the whole world. They have just compared “normal” Coronavirus with this one and found no significant difference in mortality.
The mortality rate for SARS was 800 out of 8000(10%) and MERS was 800 out of 3000 (30%) whereas COVID-19 is less deadly at 1%-3% but it seems to infect everybody and has 700k infected already and surely more than 800 deaths, I don’t think they are anywhere comparable?
There are probably zillions of “corona virus” probably 20 in each flying bat but none of them is a concern to humans (yet) as does COVID19 today, which one of these (apart from SARS/MERS) is “normal” and comparable to SARS-COV-2?
Ps: that study draft was circulated mid-Feb, the world has changed since…(two of the authors have completely different opinions today)
but it seems to infect everybody
That’s the key. The others were nastier but just died out…
This one has just the right combination of being highly infectious and killing just enough people to overwhelm the hospitals while not wiping out all the carriers (like Ebola does but does so only in poor countries with negligible travel).
1% or so dying would not be a “problem” in the 3rd World or somewhere where there is no public order / law enforcement anyway, and it would be more than 1% with no medical care except perhaps in a country where there are no “old” people, and Africa has had so many wars in which millions died… but over here you can’t take the risk of loss of govt / police / armed forces control of the population. We are all just one lunch away from anarchy (in modern middle class terms, Ocado delivering a day late and deleting the 20 bog rolls from the order) as they say.
Everyone should at least listen to this.
I totally agree with his comments on the disgraceful police conduct but I think more time is needed before the scientific evidence supports the view that the current govt action is excessive.
I increasingly feel – especially after listening to Lord Sumption – that the “how many will it kill” debate is no longer the right debate.
It is obvious at this point that this causes a significant number of deaths, somewhere between 0.1-1% of the population seems to be the range, highly concentrated in the elderly.
What is the price we are willing to pay to give those over 65 around one extra year of life on average? [just a guesstimate; no real calculation behind the one year, but 10% of 70-year old people dying with a life expectancy of 15 years would be 1.5 years lost on average, and the deaths will be concentrated in those with shorter life expectancy)
This sounds very callous, and I don’t know the answer. It is very hard to view human life in such stark terms.
And I know this falls well short of the true effects (health system collapse will affect much younger people, but so will economic collapse)
Portsmouth sea front today and the police went along the parked cars telling them to move!
People may not have had any intention of getting out of their car, just wanted a change of enviroment and some sun.
Those that did, a walk along the prom. – keeping their distance.
As Lord Sumpton comments, this is the direction we are headed.
