Hide Ya Wives, Hide Ya Kids: Worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic!

calibeebee · Jan 28, 2023

Just got my updated boostie. Pfizer gang still going skrong #gangganggang

kungfu koala · Jan 31, 2023

You going super saiyan fr fr. Got me a couple monkeypoxxx shots though.

Fozz · Feb 17, 2023

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are still being safe and fully vaccinated.

Everyone in the home got sick this week and all had this stomach bug that's been going around. (Vomitting, fever, congestion) Odd thing is, everyone tested negative and the symptoms last about two days.

kdawg · Feb 17, 2023

It's the season for that sort of thing - doesn't mean it can't be covid - but there are other illnesses out there with similar symptoms.

mplsdunk · Feb 17, 2023

Everybody I know has some congestion right now but not nausea or anything.

maq25060 · Feb 17, 2023

Stomach flu hit about 12 people I know including myself.

frink85 · Feb 17, 2023

mplsdunk said:
Everybody I know has some congestion right now but not nausea or anything.

allergy szn came early over here

mplsdunk · Feb 17, 2023

Same here. I think because all the

melted and exposed all the grass and dirt.

Canadian Destroyer · Feb 17, 2023

Pa

shibadekobe said:

Pardon my ignorance but is Avian flu and Bird flu the same thing? Neither has been passed on to humans yet?

biggie62 · Feb 18, 2023

John Laurinaitis said:
Pa

Pardon my ignorance but is Avian flu and Bird flu the same thing? Neither has been passed on to humans yet?

They can jump to humans and are very deadly when they do. However it’s ultra rare from what I read. The Times had a piece in it I think 2 or 3 weeks ago. Stating specifically that it’s the next virus we really need to fear as humans because of the high mortality.

htg designs · Feb 18, 2023

I fear the folks cooking some of this **** up.

DB Cooper · Feb 18, 2023

Welp, my undefeated streak is over. I officially tested positive today for the first time.

Trying to keep the fever at bay. Just feeling very achy and cold.

Raji Lowenthal · Feb 19, 2023

Whole fam was suffering from allergies last week and turns out it was COVID. So glad the symptoms were allergy like and not COVID like. All have recovered elderly and young alike.

Nike Jordan · Feb 19, 2023

A friend of mine who I use to work with thinks she has POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) from getting covid twice.

Apparently, a lot of people have been diagnosed with POTS since covid became a thing.

She's supposed to get checked up this week and find out for sure.

Mark Antony · Feb 19, 2023

Felt like crap and been sick a couple times this season but none of it was Covid. I guess 20-21 will be the only winter season where I don’t get sick.

americangenius · Feb 23, 2023

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned? (Published 2023)

“Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy.

www.nytimes.com

kdawg · Feb 23, 2023

americangenius said:
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned? (Published 2023)

“Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy.

www.nytimes.com

Lot of cherry picking going on there.

RustyShackleford · Feb 23, 2023

americangenius said:
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned? (Published 2023)

“Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy.

www.nytimes.com

The new scientific review on masks and Covid isn’t what you think

A meta-analysis seeks to be the last word on the effectiveness of masks, but finding answers in science isn’t that easy.

www.google.com

The review includes 78 studies. Only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, so the bulk of the evidence the Cochrane team took into account wasn’t able to tell us much about what was specifically happening during the worst pandemic in a century.

Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing. Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular.

Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers. If telling people to wear masks doesn’t lead to reduced infections, it may be because masks just don’t work, or it could be because people don’t wear masks when they’re told, or aren’t wearing them correctly.

There’s no clear way to distinguish between those possibilities without more original research — which is not what a meta-analysis of existing work can do.

blackcease · Feb 23, 2023

americangenius said:
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”

Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned? (Published 2023)

“Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy.

www.nytimes.com

The new scientific review on masks and Covid isn’t what you think

Digging into the research on masks and Covid

Those studies that did take on Covid and masks directly often painted a different picture than the broader conclusions from the meta-analysis.

One of the largest studies of mask-wearing during the Covid pandemic was conducted in Bangladesh, with more than 170,000 people in the intervention group and similar numbers in the control group. The authors studied a series of public announcements and mask distributions which raised the frequency of mask-wearing. In the end, around 40 percent of the experimental group wore masks, compared to around 10 percent in the control group.

The result, the study found, was a substantial reduction in the share of people with Covid-19-like symptoms, and in antibodies that would suggest a Covid-19 infection: “In surgical mask villages, we observe a 35.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence among individuals ≥60 years old ... We see larger reductions in symptoms and symptomatic seropositivity in villages that experienced larger increases in mask use.”

That looks like pretty substantial evidence that mask-wearing reduces Covid-19! And this article is one of only two studies of mask-wearing included in the Cochrane review which happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. The other, a study in Denmark, assigned people to wear masks (though, of course, not all of the people told to wear masks did so consistently or correctly) and had a control group that generally did not wear masks. The group that was told to wear masks had slightly lower infection rates than the group that didn’t wear masks, but the sample was too small for the effect to be significant.

Given that — one study finding very solid evidence for the benefits of masks, and one finding limited but encouraging evidence — how did Cochrane arrive at its conclusion that mask wearing “probably makes little or no difference?” Because their meta-analysis mixes these studies with many more pieces of research that were conducted before Covid-19 and found little effect of masks on the transmission of other illnesses like influenza.

Science is full of judgment calls

The new Cochrane review paper strikes me, and may strike you, as something of a scientifically irresponsible way to represent these findings. It gets at one of the core challenges of science: There is no methodology that can straightforwardly find answers in messy study data without many judgment calls by scientists, who are humans with their own strength, weaknesses, and eccentricities. A meta-analysis, after all, can’t meta-analyze itself.

“I was really surprised that the Cochrane group let this go through,” Jake Eaton, a public policy and global health researcher who was the lead researcher on a Cochrane review of childhood nutrition, told me. “The fact it’s looking at masks across different settings and with different diseases makes it really tricky. Cochrane reviews are very good if you really want to assemble the most rigorous evidence and say, ‘Do we have a conclusive signal that this works?’ This is something of a perverse use of a Cochrane review.”

The big problem is the sheer scope of the question: not “does masking reduce Covid transmission during a pandemic?” but “does masking help against all respiratory illness across contexts?” Because of the questions it chooses to consider and the ways it chooses to aggregate its evidence, it has arrived at a mask-skeptical conclusion with limited applicability to the hot-button question we all care about: whether there’s evidence for masking during high-transmission periods in the Covid-19 pandemic.

I'm far from an expert on this stuff but this response to the NY Times article and Cochrane review seems reasonable. Any thoughts?

From a complete layman's perspective, I'd expect wearing an N95 or KN95 would at the very least reduce the viral load you're exposed to, right?

RustyShackleford · Feb 23, 2023

As a life rule, be skeptical of all claims and framing of issues said by Bret Stephens

heelsandeers · Feb 23, 2023

The same Bret Stephens clamoring the science behind climate change isn't real?

And yet pretty much every medical facility in the US still require masks for their employees and patients. Silly health care providers

I think there's always been skepticism on the efficacy of mandates because people do not follow them. Not because masks when worn properly don't work

blackcease · Feb 23, 2023

Ok gotcha didn’t know his history.

It’s pretty wild how much variation you can get on how folks interpret the exact same data. Seems like half the battle nowadays is just figuring out what if any agenda is being pushed when you see/read/hear something.

shogun · Feb 24, 2023

A mask works as a barrier. How efficient depends on the mask and how it's worn. Been wearing disposable masks and still haven't gotten covid so they work for me.