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

Another comedian said, Pence just wanted to be able to tell barefaced lies.

Oh wow. I admire Singapore as a rational country in which the government listens to scientists... and they still managed to screw up royally. Darn!

Hopefully we will emerge from this a bit better prepared for the next one (and hopefully with a better president).

That is actually not true. It is what was said when the pandemic was starting, and in my opinion it was a calculated lie, to avoid a run to masks, so that healthcare workers would have them. Masks that are not N95 still deliver some significant protection. Procedure masks (a.k.a. surgical masks when they are sterile, or simply the hospital-grade facemasks, those usually yellow or blue with ear loops), if they are properly fit, that is, worn tight and with the nose clip well-positioned, confer above 90% of protection to the healthy individual wearing them. It still doesn't compare to the N95 which with a proper seal, exceeds 99% of protection. But it's not like the facemask is useless for the healthy person like officials initially insisted. Cloth homemade masks, though, offer a lot less protection than procedure masks. They depend on the material (high thread count bed sheets being the best one). The ones with pouches for a filter help more if you insert a HEPA vacuum cleaner filter, but still, the protection drops significantly from the one provided by a procedure mask, especially for small particles like the SARS-CoV-2 (better for large particles like the influenza virus). Apparently shop towels are second best after vacuum cleaner filters, but again, better for large particles. Scarves deliver almost no protection whatsoever (unlike Trump said), like 2%. This information comes from a study of some 20 different masks and materials all the way up to hospital-grade procedure masks and N95 masks, with small and large particles, which I linked to in another site (sorry, currently I don't have the link on me).

Anyway, the take home lesson is, if you don't have an N95 mask (with a proper seal), at least try to get hospital-grade procedure masks and wear them tightly. If you can't get them, then make homemade masks with high thread count bed sheets, double-layered with a pocket, and insert a HEPA vacuum filter. That's the best you can do.

Me, I do have both N95s and procedure masks, so I'm not wearing homemade masks, but that's the best advice I can give, based on that study. That was an industry study using a device to blow particles of different size onto the various masks. I also saw a real scientific study blowing actual viruses into simulated faces (mannequins) and comparing procedure masks poorly fit, procedure masks tightly fit, N95 masks poorly fit without a seal, and N95 masks tightly fit with a seal. While, again, obviously the N95 with a seal beat all other options, a procedure mask tightly fit still beat an N95 poorly fit. So, no, they are absolutely not useless like health officials wanted the population to believe, at first.

Agreed, 100%, except for one thing: if the spontaneous R0 (without containment measures) of this virus is 5.7 like some updated estimates propose, then the percentage of the population necessary for herd immunity is 82.5%. That would increase the number of dead people in Georgia above what you calculated, if they didn't exercise any containment measure whatsoever.

I don't see an advantage in doing that if you have a few masks to rotate. Put each of then in a separate, labeled paper bag. If you have 5 masks, use one a day and repeat mask #1 in day 6, and no SARS-CoV-2 will be active and infectious on the surface of the mask 5 days later.

I've been using a UV-C light to sanitize them.
It's a fairly strong unit. That plus we have about a dozen of them, so there's always at least four available at any given time.


Waiting on a 100 pack to arrive, so we won't have to do this much longer. What I am fed up with is the fact that alcohol, simple alcohol, is now unobtanium. I will not pay 20 bucks for a liter of isopropyl, I refuse on principle.
So I am about to embark on trying to make my own ethanol.

I see the R0 anywhere from 1.4 to 5.7. However the WHO is using the number span from 2.0 to 2.7. One of the cruise ships had a rate of 2.2.

The variability is apparently tied to testing and definitive confirmations.

Here's a question:
Donald Trump is a huge admirer of Brazil's hardcore right wing president, Javier Bolsonaro, yes?
Brazil’s total 2019 ethanol production is estimated at 34.45 billion liters, an increase of four percent compared to the revised figure for 2018. Total domestic demand for ethanol (fuel and other uses) for calendar year 2019 is estimated at 33.93 billion liters.
That's 9,100,727,203 gallons, a little bit over 9 billion gallons.
Clearly Brazil has the ability to produce a lot of ethanol and...you'd think Trump would want to strike some kind of a deal with Brazil so we could pay them to produce some surplus.

So...why no deal, from the guy who published "The Art of the Deal"? Why aren't we sourcing extra ethanol from Brazil to make up for the drastic domestic shortfall?
(REPORT: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service)

His name is Jair, not Javier (which would be a Hispanic name; Brazilians are of Lusitanian culture and speak Portuguese).

Regarding your point, I'd suppose that if we want the alcohol to use for hand sanitizers, Brazil would probably not be highly interested in selling it to foreign countries, given that they have a huge epicenter of the pandemic, themselves.