Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

Interesting new paper out recently about the effectiveness of wearing masks indoors in public settings. This is real data, finally!

Cloth mask: 56% lower odds of catching the virus
Surgical mask: 66% lower odds of catching the virus
N95 or KN95 mask: 83% lower odds of catching the virus

Note that this is not about protecting other people from you. This about you protecting your self. So your odds of shopping for food unscathed are much better if you wear a tight-fitting quality mask, covering your mouth and nose. Your nose is your most susceptible part, so wearing a mask with your nose exposed is completely worthless. This kind of effectiveness almost rivals vaccination, so keep wearing those masks folks, even if a store does not require it.

This is for indoor public spaces. Outdoors, with some distance and good hand hygiene they really don't do much.

Ever since March 2021 when Dr. Fauci said to double-mask, I've been doing the blue surgical mask with a black Adidas mask over it, every, single day. When the guy in the vanpool turned out to be C19+, I was only 3' from him for 35 minutes. I was the driver and he was next to me in the passenger seat.

There may be some confounders that were not taken into account in that mask study. First one is it's all based on asking people about their mask-wearing habits. The other is that people using N95s are probably a lot more careful than people wearing cloth masks, and certainly a lot more careful than people who do not wear any mask. So the numbers probably are not just for the masks. But they do reflect the total picture of being careful versus being reckless.

So it would be better to say you can lower your odds of catching the virus by being careful, which includes wearing high-quality masks in indoor public spaces.

The latest salvo directed against public health measures is a "report" by some economists and Libertarians claiming that none of the non-drug interventions work.

Economists Are Fueling the War Against Public Health


Laurie Garrett is a science writer of some renown, a very good writer, and calls it like she sees it. (Unlike some journalists who sacrifice truth to "fairness", presenting nonsense and reality as equally valid viewpoints.)

As I've previously said here, some athletes are going to find it difficult to compete at their pre-Covid levels:

Cross-Country Skier's Wrong Turn

Why wasn't there an advertising budget built into the COVID vaccines?
I know, I know...you're going to say,
"They're FREE! Why do they need to be advertised when Uncle Sam picked up the tab?"
So what?

Every other vaccine is marketed, every MAB is marketed. Every pet rock and pimple cream is marketed to the public.
Geez whiz, we're mumbling drug names that sound like absolute toddler gobbledygook in our sleep!...adalimumab, keysimpta, keytruda,
oingo boingo...

Okay, that last one is a band, but you get the point. Think of all the stupid s*** people are convinced to buy and tell me advertising doesn't work.
My God, forty years ago the first of my gay friends died of AIDS and now I'm watching happy pretty gay people eating barbecue in slow-mo while pretty ladies stick flowers in their shirt pocket.

Madison Avenue managed to PUT A HAPPY FACE ON AIDS!!
Can you imagine what would have happened if the government had begun distributing free AIDS medications, and the Moral Majority had decided to pour millions into some scary denier coalition instead?
They spent money on full page ads with families wearing masks, so don't say they wouldn't have...they almost did.

So, if the "Mad Men" were able to soothe public hysteria with a few cute ad spots for lifesaving AIDS medications, why didn't they do the same thing for the Rona shots? Instead we ended up spending untold BILLIONS more mitigating the consequences of the monster-sized anti-vaccine
movement, when it would have been cheaper to hand Pfizer, Moderna and Jannsen a few hundred million to produce attractive commercial spots for their vaccines with extra money for the airtime purchases.
FFS, they could have started advertising the moment the FDA granted approval.

Just because something is free doesn't mean you don't have to market it to people.
You HAVE to market it to them, because most Americans are conditioned to look at a free shot from the government with suspicion.

I'm not saying everyone would have responded in a positive fashion but I bet we could have picked up a lot of people who were just on the fence and a little too hesitant, which would be about 25-30 percent of the unvaccinated population.
And that would be enough to put a large dent in the anti-vax movement, and enough to put us closer to a good majority of vaccinated persons.

It's no secret the Dems are super bad on messaging.

Rightwingers have NO IDEA that an infastructure bill was signed into law. No joke! They're asking: What legislation has Joe signed? And they're serious!

It's our turn in the barrel: Wife and I both have Covid, and I'm happy to report the vaccines are working exactly as advertised. We were never shedding enough viral protein to get a positive on a Binax home test, but she did manage to shed enough to infect me before I got the tests. I'm about three days behind her. It's about like a bad cold. Totally respiratory, nose throat and lungs. No gastric problems to mention.

Timing and general lack of contact with anyone else says she caught it at Costco, which is ironic because that's where we got our boosters.

Dr. Been on Youtube reports on a paper from Malaysia. N = about 900, half on Ivermectin and half not. Results showed no statistically significant benefit from IVM. It was a decent dose and schedule for the IVM, according to it's promoters. There was a trend in one of their endpoints that was a bit pro-IVM, but for another endpoint anti-IVM. This is why we set significance at p = 0.05. It could be that if N was 9000, they would have got some results, but in the bigger picture I think IVM is minimally effective. Vaccines and Paxlovid, on the other hand, are highly effective.

Just as a reference point, Dr. Been has been a strong IVM promoter and user for his patients, his family, and himself. Looks like clinging to IVM is beating a dead horse at this point.

Not all the way there yet, but we are getting better. Managed 9 hours of sleep last night. Having to wake up constantly to cough and clear out your airway is the worst. Interesting that wife and I have different strategies: I sleep with my nose lower than my lungs so it all drains out. She sleeps sitting up so it all stays down in her lungs. She coughs a lot more through the night.