#covid19 #cold #biden #respirator
#faucci #respiratorsarebetter
If President Biden had worn a respirator instead of a cloth mask, he would not have caught bad cold from his grandson.
Where is the Secret Service????
🇳🇱
@Pat masks to prevent colds is well into hypocohondria territory. I can understand (albeit disagree) with using it for COVID and all ... but a cold, thats a stretch
Its important to note outside of any covid concerns it also puts your health at risk. A healthy immune system requires regular exposure to diseases, when this isnt present we see a large rise of risk of autoimmune diseases. Getting the occasional cold is more or less good for you.
It's not he got a cold, or that he should have worn it to prevent the cold, it's that it could have very well been the COVID-19 virus instead of a cold virus.
The Secret Service is putting POTUS at risk by not making him wear a respirator.
@Pat Ok thats fair then.
> "Healthy people get sick from cold viruses all the time."
Old people who are healthy don't get colds as often as young people because their immune system has already seen most of the cold viruses, and although the antibodies wane with time for some of the cold viruses, there is still more immunity than with young people who have never got those viruses.
Biden especially, as a gregarious politician, has certain been exposed to all or nearly all of the cold viruses multiple times, so the fact that he got sick from a very young person (who was most likely infected with a common species of cold virus) means he is not so healthy.
So he should be taking extra precautions with regard to COVID-19.
@Pat Thats a bit of a misnomer It actually levels off by about age 10 at which point the mean number of colds per year is the same throughout ones life.
The reason is that the model of immunity most people think of is actually a far cry from the truth for many types of viruses, particularly the types of viruses that cause the cold. Itws not just that immunity wanes over time, but also the fact that most cold viruses mutate fairly rapidly and entierly new types of colds emerge every year.
I wasn't aware of those stats. Yes, mutations are probably the main factor.
Anecdotally, I'm kind of old and I haven't had a cold in at least two decades.
@Pat A graph for some actual numbers. Source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673603121629/fulltext
Thank you for looking that up. The slight decline in later years is probably due to a reduced number of contacts as people get older (less partying, etc.).
ps - Hope you have a speedy recovery.
@Pat
Yea te decline is likely a number of factors. Less contact, some immunity, etc. But its not a huge dip
FWIW the ultimate source is https://sci-hub.se/10.1001/jama.1974.03230150016004
They recruited families and asked them every week for a year whether anyone's sick. This nicely removes some kinds of selection bias, but probably leaves the selection bias where among people living alone they see more of the healthier ones.
This paper cites something for more information about their selection approach, but the scan is bad enough that I can't tell which reference it is, and I couldn't easily find the reference I suspect it is.
@Pat You may simply have an excellent immune system genetically speaking, I can only speculate on your case. But yea rather interestingly the relationship is a inverted logarithm.