We don’t have kids in school yet in the northeast. We won’t until September.
We have not had one study in the US of school age children.
Plus, we have cases surging cases in many, many states, so, we are not anywhere close to being in the same situation as Denmark or Finland.
@emilybee Our botched reopenings? What’s the source of that conclusion ?
The ever hyped German covid efficiencies are now faced with a 1300 person outbreak in one food processing site and think it’s going to spread a bit from there.
Countries that had a lot of travel following Chinese New Year and for business in general got hammered. Italy with the returning Chinese workers and our ongoing and regular interaction with China at an incredibly high level.
Those who didn’t get hit hard either got a bit lucky, are smaller isolated spots or had a SARS history.
The virus doesn’t care who your president is or isnt.
@Nrdsb4 so funny that you mentioned prosopagnosia. I have been thinking about that too. My daughter always says things like “Oh, he is the one with the left eyebrow bushier than the right.”
Some forms of pneumonia are not contagious. Others are quite contagious, even before symptoms show. I had mycoplasma pneumonia - caught it from my daughter. My husband and other daughter were not affected. D1 was sick for a couple of weeks. I was sick for a couple of months.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319581#is-pneumonia-contagious
If we assume that we never get a vaccine, and we never figure out better treatments for this disease than we have today, and we never figure out pharmaceutical interventions like prophylactics, and we never have better PPE for health workers than we have today, then mask-wearing delays deaths rather than reducing the eventual total.
Why on earth would we make these assumptions? They’ve already been falsified. We’ve already come up with three new treatments that (apparently) make a significant difference: proning, steroids, remdesivir. We know that remdesivir is in short supply, but eventually will be more available, so that’s one thing we know for sure will be better next year than this year.
Should we assume that as of today we’ve stopped figuring things out? None of the vaccine candidates will work out, no monoclonal antibodies, no more drugs, nothing, we can do no better in six months or a year or two years than we can do now? Is that what you believe?
PPE is once again in short supply in hard-hit hospitals, this time in Dallas. Should we assume that we will never be able to protect health care workers better than we can protect them today?
I’m often accused, with reason, of being a pessimist. But I’m not that pessimistic.
“Quietly.” Because public health advisories should be made without much fanfare.
“Florida’s surgeon general quietly advises everyone to wear masks in public spaces”
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article243713847.html
Yes, botched reopenings in those states which didn’t pay any attention to the guidelines for reopening and went ahead before their Rt numbers were low enough and with minimal guidelines in place and a slipshod method on a plan to reopen.
Florida, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, SC, NC, Georgia…
Oh never mind, I’ll just post a link to the graphs of which states are surging.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
@emilybee I see your point. I think it’s just a really lousy situation all around.
It’s a lousy situation because people in positions of influence chose to willfully ignore science.
It did not have to end up like this at all.
Ohio…
“It’s unclear to what extent the recent increase may be attributed to increases in testing. A total of 656,318 tests have been conducted, up 102,190 in the last week in comparison to 80,140 and 75,922 the previous two weeks.”
“The daily increase in total cases continued under under 2% since May 23 and under 3% since May 9. In March the daily increases were often above 20%, and sometimes above 40%.”
“The number of coronavirus deaths by day in Ohio peaked at 63 on April 28. The number of deaths has not topped 40 since May 23.”
On the latest TWIV episode, the three mentioned were steroids (as needed, usually second week), proning (also realizing that some patients simply need oxygen not a ventilator), & anti-coagulants (as needed, sometimes as a preventative, usually third or forth week).
The guest doctor recommended that if you find you are sick, confirm C19, and dial in to your doctor & keep in touch. The situation can change quickly, if it goes south.
Up until last week, not everyone in Ohio who wanted a test could get a test. Now that the testing capacity has increased, the case numbers will increase. The hospitalization number is still declining, which many believe is a better metric than the increase in cases.
There is a lot of good news, too. COVID death rates have plummeted in the US. Whether that is due to new treatments or the average age of infection sinking from age 80 to age 30 or whatever, surely this is a hopeful development.
This is a low quality study. It’s not a meta-analysis or systematic review. It’s purely observational, not a randomized control trial.
I’m a big believer in masks. I think they probably work. But wow, the scholarship around masks has been terrible.
The public health authorities have been a disaster. How can we not know, 6 months into this, whether/how well masks or their alternatives work, whether kids are spreaders, what level we need to achieve herd immunity, whether it matters if students all have single room dorms (bowdoin) or not (notre dame)?
That, I agree with.
Every step of the way, starting with the early papers and WHO guidance out of China, this has been a sad, sorry rodeo.
I agree that public health authorities have been a disaster, at least at the federal level, but how do you propose to learn these things? I do think the CDC has been remiss at looking at and explicating spreader events, but finding out whether masks work is hard if you want to do it quickly and ethically.
We’ve got pretty good data now about “household” spreading. Infected people spread the disease to those in their household at about a rate of 20%. There’s a lot of scholarship on this for those who choose to look it up.
Frankly, I would have thought much of this research could predate COVID 19. Can’t we test masks and shields now, and determine how effective they are against what size particles, so for the next pandemic we will be aware? Even if we don’t know much about this virus, what is the general level of infection needed to achieve herd immunity against any corona virus? Or any disease? At what level of in home transmission of disease should household members move out-greater than 10%, less than 100%? These seem like basic questions not Covid 19 specific which would be helpful