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Masks, Part 2, Criticism, & Fact Checking

Zoe Harcombe has a good article on face masks--she looked at several studies on the effectiveness of mask wearing, and concludes they do help reduce transmission.

A question many have asked is, why would masks help health professionals but not the general public? A commenter hinted at the answer: health care workers can't stay six feet away from patients. This is, I presume, why masks are popular in the Far East--areas like Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, and Tokyo are very crowded, and from what I gather, people in eastern Asia tend to stand closer together than they do in the US or Canada. That may be why we have fewer flu deaths from lower respiratory infections here. It may be that masks would be less effective here than they are in Asia--most of us are standing farther apart to begin with.

That leaves us with the question, if masks are recommended, where are hundreds of millions of masks supposed to come from? The usual answer is "make your own," which is fine as far as it goes, but this assumes that people are going to do as they're told. They've been told not to hoard groceries, but shelves are still picked over. Hardly anyone sews anymore and our textile industry was offshored generations ago. How many people are going to buy surgical masks instead at a time when hospitals have a shortage? The same commenter thinks many on Ebay are probably stolen from hospitals, and there was an indication from a manufacturer speaking with the president at a recent press conference a few days ago that thousands of masks were going out the back door of a New York hospital.

The Surgeon General has been criticized for not recommending masks, but he's between the devil and the deep blue sea. If he recommends them and health care workers end up even shorter than they are, he'll be blamed...if he doesn't, and masks might have saved more members of the general public, he'll be blamed. There was no good course of action. I think he made the best decision he could under the circumstances.


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Some have also criticized #FilmYourHospital, a call to check up on reports of hospitals as "war zones" with "dead bodies piling up," as a clarion call to conspiracy theorists and crackpots. It used to be that people who didn't believe everything they saw on TV were called adults. Just tonight as I wrote this post, a neighbor on Nextdoor said,


As I wrote a day or two ago, there were no crowds at the hospitals I drove by, and no local news reports I've seen have mentioned dead bodies piling up. 

My response:
According to Johns Hopkins--consistent with everything else I've read--less than 1% of COVID fatalities had no pre-existing condition, and people in their 20s and 30s have a mortality rate of 0.2%.
According to the state of Indiana, nobody here in their 20s has died of COVID19. One person in their 30s has died. Everyone else has been 50 or over.
A grand total of 21 people have died in Marion County from COVID-19 over the past few weeks. Normally? In 2017, 162 people died every week from all causes. What do they normally do with all the dead bodies at the hospital?
Sources: https://coronavirus.in.gov https://www.stats.indiana.edu/profiles/profiles.asp?scope_choice=a&county_changer=18097 https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX_Guide/540747/all/Coronavirus_COVID_19__SARS_CoV_2_

When a crazy "report" like the one my neighbor made up makes the news, people aren't being crackpots or conspiracy theorists to fact check it.
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