#covid19 #mask #elastomeric #respirator #vax #vaccine #masks #respirators #covid #pandemic #prep
A properly worn respirator is the most effective way to prevent infection and spread of COVID-19 disease.
The most effective respirator at a reasonable price is an elastomeric respirator with detachable filters. The best filter is N100 or P100. These filters are at least 99.97% efficient at filtering out the tiny particles that carry the virus.
Respirators are effective against all variants of the virus. They are also effective against other respiratory viruses and pollen.
The respirator should be NIOSH-approved.
Make sure you do a seal check each time you wear the respirator so that no air leaks around the mask.
Make sure the filter material doesn’t get wet because it won't work as well when it is wet.
Don't ever remove the respirator when you are around other people or are where other people have been recently. Don't even remove it to eat. Find a safe place to eat away from other people who might be infected.
(Image: A cop wearing an elastomeric respirator, lic. CC-BY-AT-2.5. Attribution: Ryssby at en.wikipedia)
If I get COVID-19, I'm mostly likely dead, so yes all those fuckheads who can't be bothered to wear a fucking mask in order to save the lives of million people are causing of all us who are old or immuniocomprised to have to continue to wear protection.
So what, exactly, is your motivation to want cause more people to die from COVID-19? Are you just sadistic? Does your Pfiser stock go up a half point every time a million more people die? Why do you want to kill more people?
Don't answer right now. Think about it. Talk it over with your priest or your rabbi or your therapist or your accountant first.
Then come back explain why it is so important to you to cause more people to die.
🇳🇱
@Pat You could argue tthat about flu and other common diseases... there are always a rare few people who will be at high risk.
But again my question is, knowing what you said to be true, what is your end game here.. is the proposal that no 2 humans should ever interact again without a resperator? If the risk is so dire that means even sleeping with one if your married... is that the end game?
@Pat And for the record i didnt argue for anything. I asked you a question.
We've had this convo a dozen times now. If just a majority of peolpe wore a respirator, the epidmeic would end and we wouldn't have to wear masks anymore.
But because of greed or graspingness or ignorance, those who control public health policy and the media want the pandemic to continue, even if millions more die.
@Pat But thats not how it works... if every last person wore resperators the virus would slow to minimal numbers, but then they would immediately spike again when people wore them... Compound that with the fact that we arent likely to get everyone tto wear them anyway the fact will remain no matter what we do you will always have the virus and always need the resperator.
So my question is this... if we all played along and you found out that what i said was right... the virus never goes away... whats the next step, take them off and let people die, or where them forever?
We've already gone over this. With the original variant just 40% compliance would end the pandemic. With the current variants it would require a substantial majority, but not everyone. Once the virus is eliminated in the country, then masks off, and contact-trace any localized outbreaks, and when necessary masks back on again if it gets out of control again.
Asia has been doing that ever since SARS I.
@Pat I know and im saying your wrong... you dont "end" them.. just just reduce them enough that they arent noticable until you unmask and then they come right back...
Regardless imnot asking to debate if you think it will end it or not... im saying **if** im right and it doesnt end and comes right back and it never disappears entirely... then what?
>"and it never disappears entirely... then what?"
What I said. We deal with it. Use respirators when necessary until we can science the shit out of it and then do a smallpox on it.
@Pat You are still assuming you can "do a smallpox on it"... not all diseases can be eradicated, some can.. smallpox could be, COVID-19 cant, not an option, it works different... There is no getting around the fact that it will be here forever. So your only option is to wear masks forever, and every generation to come to do the same.
I guess I have more hope in science than you do. But I'm afraid I haven't much hope in humanity, which is the real problem here, not a disease.
@Pat its not so much about science, its just the nature of various... COVID mutates too quickly to eradicate and exists in non-human hosts... so its just not possible even with perfect vaccines.
I do what @mikmaqpeek asks of me to the best I can for her sake, wearing a mask as best as I am able where it is reasonable to do so.
Baring that, I go with what is in my comfort zone, which is usually in public, enclosed spaces. At work, I overheat, and my relative risk is low, so I don't if it impacts my ability to perform.
Beyond all that, if I'm made to feel I'm wrong no matter what I do, I'll damn well do as I please. Don't make me feel wrong no matter what I do. Nobody will be happy.
@Pat @freemo @mikmaqpeek I've taken a risk at living. The one best for my own best interests. It's called "living." Don't put me in the position where I'm wrong no matter what I do.
@mathlover @Pat I am head of the entire company working on COVID... we have hundreds of samples in our lab and work with COVID daily, my career is centered around COVID... trust me when i say, you dont "get rid of" a virus like this... you can reduce it to the pointt where it will be background noise and then it will resurge again later, but it never goes away.
Having read further I can see you brought up reducing it to the background. I'm still not good at finding everything in a thread of responses here! So take what I said about comparing it to measles and pretend I was agreeing with this statement :)
In the end, even a flu-like amount of infection(2 infections a decade on average) might not be so bad for your health. The jury's still out on that. Getting it multiple times a year is simply not a viable way forward. Agree to disagree there, but I'm near 100% certain that the issues with that path forward will continue to bring about unfortunate health events for the majority of people, not a minority.
This is actually not exactly true. Let's take the case of measles because it's spread through coughing/sneezing and has a similar R0 to current strains of COVID.
You don't go around seeing people with measles every day, right? That's because the baseline number of infections wasn't astronomically high as people were being vaccinated. There's breakthrough cases of measles, just like COVID post-vaccination, but it's not newsworthy and life changing because of the numbers.
Insert polio for measles if you'd like. It's quite a similar case study.
So, yes, as has been proven with many viruses previously, if the circulating number of cases were quite low, and a reasonable percent of people were vaccinated, it would be just like measles. It would still exist, but you wouldn't be surrounded by it constantly.
Now, will we ever get enough people to wear them and get vaccinated to test this out? Seems kind of doubtful.
Nuance!
Polio is much different than measles because it's not a respiratory virus, so it's much easier to control the spread with proper hygiene. The vaccines for each of those is much different because in nearly all cases the immunity lasts a lifetime.
fremo is right that COVID-19 is much harder to develop a vax for because it mutates so much. (But it mutates more slowly when there are fewer infections.) There is also the problem of zoonotic transmission, so eliminating it entirely in the human population is only temporary. But zoonotic transmission to humans is relatively rare so outbreaks from zoonotic sources after elimination would be more infrequent than outbreaks due to human recondite transmission.
Compliance to wearing respirators varies from country to country, but in the US, we have precedents for behavioral change, e.g., seatbelt wearing.
The problem we have is ultimately a problem with our culture and morals, not a disease problem. No matter what we do, if we don't change the culture, there will be a significant number of people who want to perpetuate the pandemic.
(FYI, you're much more likely to die from not wearing a respirator than you are from not wearing a seatbelt.)
I'd like to touch on a part of that. I'm never afraid to say when something is out of my scientific comfort zone. I included Polio because, traditionally, droplet transmission from sneezes and coughs are listed as a method of transmission. I know there's been a lot of work done, a lot by someone who's dipped his toes into qoto.org here and is recognized as an expert, into aerosols vs droplets. I've read a lot of his work and unfortunately I don't think he's active here at the moment, but perhaps he'd weigh in with his academic expertise.
Also, yes, less infections = less mutations. This is a real part of the problem.
The whole problem is that everyone trusted the "experts" and they let us down. They mislead us. And they failed to inform us.
If you want to understand how airborne particles circulate and how viruses survive on those particles and how respirators prevent those particles and virus from entering the respiratory tract, I'd suggest you read about the high-quality studies that have been done on those subjects and the physics of electrostatic filtration. Do this yourself rather than trusting what I or any other experts say on the matter.
I definitely do my own research whenever I'm interested in a new topic. I absolutely understand how masks work(and, yes, they do) and would still recommend @jljcolorado and his work. He's one of the first "COVID is airborne" scientists and is a renown aerosols expert.
You can see links to his work on his page at that bird site if you would like. Same username as here.
As to experts letting us down, yes, that's largely why we're here, *but* not all experts. Largely just the ones who were, and still are, platformed the most and given the loudest voice. You should still listen to the ones who are telling the unvarnished truth to us.
You previous post was not clear that you were recommending @jljcolorado specifically or that he was an expert. It looked like you were just copying him as a previous participant in this thread. So my comments were not directed at him or anyone else in particular.
If you go back over what has been said by all those government officials on the COVID-19 task force, and nearly every "expert" that has appeared in old media, you'd be hard pressed to find any of them who have even used the word "respirator", let alone explained what they are or which ones are the most effective, or how to properly wear them.
Out of the hundreds of times that I've seen experts in government hearings or on old media news shows talking about the pandemic, I've only heard maybe 3-4 that have even mentioned the word "respirators", and I can only remember once (on a local TV station) that an expert explained how to properly don and seal-check a respirator.
@Pat @jljcolorado @freemo I understand what you're saying and my : autocorrected to a .
I haven't turned on a local TV news station in well over a decade, so I can't really comment, but I can see exactly who gets platformed online and gets the loudest voice and I bet they're the same cohort of "experts"
@Pat @freemo Covid will not "end". It has a long asymptomatic period, several animal reservoirs, and like all coronavirus has the ability to mutate fast enough that reinfection is always possible.
This winter will hopefully be the last big surge, but by next spring we will need good faith conversations about how we live with Covid for the next 100 years a la the 1918 influenza which still crops up every so often.
Annual boosters seem to be one step as does improving ventilation in public spaces. Masks and social distancing however are not going to be solutions that can last decades.
I don't think it's the tech. Starting next week, my wife will be away on a very recently planned stay away from home for family reasons. It's the first time we've been separated for nearly 20 years of our marriage.
I'm not worried about the open-source nature of the platform. We'll be out of the comforting, physical contact we've had for nearly 2 decades. The far-future is the far-future. The next month is going to be a big ball of suck. And if people express dismay over lack of human contact and having masks in the way of seeing that smile... I can't dismiss that.
@Pat @freemo Here's what I do:
1. I wear a mask and practice social distancing whenever I go out in public during a surge or other high-COVID time, or if I am sick or possibly exposed with *anything*.
2. If someone is immunocompromised, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable, or if they request so, I will try to not meet with them in person, but over some remote means like Zoom or Discord or whatever. If that is somehow not possible, I will wear a mask and practice social distancing.
3. I get whatever boosters are recommended as soon as they are available.
4. With regards to other people: there is so much misinformation and disinformation by antivaxxers and antimaskers that I try to withhold my anger at people who have fallen for that stuff. The exception of course is healthcare professionals, who have no excuse at all not to know better, and the people willfully promoting it (Del Bigtree, Natural News, Andrew Wakefield, etc. etc.)
@Pat you can stop 100% of MVA and deaths caused by them if we outlaw cars.
Also, have you ever been fit tested for a respirator? The average person can't do it themselves. Also, no facial hair is a requirement for seal. So beards should be made illegal as well. N-95 is about 95% effective one way, vs estimated 92% for two way surgical. N-95 is a reasonable solution for those who want protection.
>"you can stop 100% of MVA and deaths caused by them if we outlaw cars. "
I don't think that is correct.
>"have you ever been fit tested for a respirator?"
I don't remember if I have or not. I haven't been fit tested since the pandemic started. I just do a seal check after I don the respirator and periodically while I wear it. I use a model that makes it easy to do a reliable seal check without risk of contamination.
>" N-95 is about 95% effective one way, vs estimated 92% for two way surgical"
N95 is AT LEAST 95% efficient at filtering .3u neutrally charged particles (per NIOSH). They are more efficient at filtering larger and smaller particles than .3u. The filter material in surgical masks is about 50-60% efficient, but those masks don't usually make an airtight seal, so in practice they should not worn when there is threat of an airborne, highly contagious, potentially fatal virus, and respirators should be used instead.
If just 40% of people had worn N95s at the beginning of the pandemic, the epidemic would not have taken hold in the US. But now the virus has mutated to a much more contagious strain, so I'm not sure if N95s alone would stop it.
Everyone needs to assess their own risk, but I think anyone who is at higher risk for bad outcomes or people who are around sick COVID-19 patients should wear N100 or P100s.
Yes, people with facial hair around the points where the respirator makes contact with the skin will not get a good fit and should do something else -- shave, isolate, or wear a PAPR, for example.
You don't agree that if we outlawed motor vehicles, then motor vehicle accidents and deaths from motor vehicles would end? That's strange. It was to a larger point. We don't hermetically seal cities to accommodate bubble boys. It's unfortunate, but impractical. I just don't believe we should force every single person to wear masks/respirators to accommodate the few % of pop that are immuno-compromised. Maybe you aren't saying to do that. I think if someone is compromised, they kind find a very good solution in the N-95.
Fit testing is more than just checking a seal. I used to do them. To take full advantage of a respirator like that requires gas testing the seals. Most people that do it themselves do it incorrectly and lose the advantages of the respirators. That's all I was saying.
You said, "you can stop 100% of MVA and deaths caused by them if we outlaw cars. "
"cars"
If you read this thread, you will see that I specifically said I was not calling for mandates.
Yes, I know I know the difference between a fit test and seal check. I thought that was clear in what I said.
@Pat I think we can agree at this point covid is here to stay forever... so whats the game plan for you personally, just wear a resperator for the rest of your life anything you interact with someone?