The UCLA team created maps of movement and found that on average each nursing home is connected to seven others through staff movement. Limiting nursing home employees to one facility could mean fewer COVID-19 infections — but that would hurt the workforce of people who say they work multiple jobs because of low wages.
Can we stop with the cock-n-bull story about Covid being about human life and suffering?
More than 84,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19 across the U.S., representing 40% of all coronavirus fatalities in the country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's most recent analysis. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
By the way, nursing homes have about 0.5% of the population of the United States. So on a ratable basis being in a nursing home means you are eighty times more likely to die from Covid than you should be based on your population representation. And by the way, that's not adjusted for life expectancy; on a per-month basis you're not eighty times more likely to die from Covid, it is something like 10,000 times more likely Covid will kill you if you're in a nursing home on a month-by-month basis!
What is the multiplier if I drive with a BAC over 0.1%? 0.08 is legally intoxicated, but nearly everyone who is involved in a fatal accident or is arrested for DUI has a level well north of 0.1. The median in one study I read said it was 0.15. Having a little portable breathalyzer that I keep in my car to not drive while intoxicated, and having given one to my daughter when she turned 21 for the same reason, I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that 0.15 is fucking smashed.
But -- I bet if I was to drive with a 0.15 BAC I would be less than EIGHTY TIMES more likely to cause or be in an injury (or death) accident than while driving sober. Far more likely than if sober? Sure. But the statistics are clear; alcohol is involved in a very significant percentage of fatal car accidents but by no means is it statistically all of them, which is what this data substantiates.
I remind you that I wrote on this back in March and April, when the pattern became clear. If we wanted to stop Covid from killing people the most-effective means to do so was to rent RVs or FEMA-style trailers and put them in the parking lots of nursing homes, locking the employees on the property and paying them whatever amount of money it took to convince them to do so and not quit.
We knew in March that Covid was in feces and 40% of the nursing home residents are incontinent. It is impossible to prevent the bug from spreading once it gets in there unless you have extraordinary infection control that extends to all clothing, bedding and other items in the room that can be potentially cross-contaminated. That is nearly impossible in shared rooms where one of the residents is incontinent, and the ventilation systems and bathrooms make it even worse since any aerosolized feces is going to get all over the bathroom and inevitably infect the other resident.
Exactly zero nursing homes in the United States are set up to deal with this, and there is no reasonable way to change that on a short-term basis, nor can you realistically do it at all for the money available. Never mind that the median life expectancy for someone who is admitted to one of these places is six months. Yes, some people live in them for years, but the median is six months.
She doesn't want to work at multiple nursing homes, but her rent is $2,200 a month, and her low pay and limited hours at each nursing home make multiple jobs a necessity.
"I don't want to get sick. But we need to work. We need to eat, we need to pay rent. That's just how it is," Tapia says.
So rather than face reality -- that we, the people created this system, we funded it, we built warehouses where we shovel old people who we don't like very much and don't want to deal with, and did so at a price where a living wage cannot be made by working at one single location and, God Forbid, staying in a trailer for the next six months and then we shut down schools, we closed businesses, we closed bars, we canceled concerts and destroyed people's lives after we created the conditions in which this alleged "pandemic" would kill medically brittle people on purpose and for profit.
Of course what do they all say? "Increase access to PPE", right?
Nice try, no donut.
The problem is structural and so the lawyers and policy wonks can't solve it without structural changes, which are not going to happen in the short term because they can't, and they won't happen in the long term either, because Covid will be over.
But folks, this is a math problem when you get down to it.
And it's also a fact that we knew all of this and I reported on it when Kirkland happened, and it was obvious what was going to happen if we did not take care of it immediately. I so noted.
Well, rather than take care of it we closed the nation, we're still screaming about masks which do exactly nothing and in fact make it worse.
Why?
Because to reach suppression of the virus you need a sufficient part of the population to have immunity. Immunity can only be acquired three ways:
1. You can get the bug and survive.
2. You can get vaccinated and the vaccine doesn't hurt you.
3. You're already partially or entirely immune due to cross-reaction with other viruses.
We know a material amount of #3 exists in the population but there is no cheap and fast test for it. It can be tested but it's both slow and expensive, and thus mass-surveillance is impractical. At present there is no #2 either, and while so-called "Warp Speed" vaccines will show up sometime toward the end of the year it will be years before we truly know they're safe and how effective, and in any event distribution will not be widespread before the summer of 2021. If you're healthy you're insane to take any vaccine until full safety information is available, peer-reviewed and published. That will be years from now.
That leaves infection.
Any mitigation that reduces the number of infections contracted by people who the virus almost-never actually harms dramatically increases the total number of people who die because it skews the ratio of medically-brittle people higher in the total case count. It's basic math: Ax + By = C. If you reduce "Ax" then "By" MUST INCREASE. You learned this in first-year Algebra.
If you were born prior to the 1990s you know damn well how to deal with a virus that has far less lethality split than Covid19 -- because your mother did, and so did her mother, and so did hers.
The spread between chicken pox causing serious illness or death is about 4:1 between children and adults. That is, your mother intentionally took you across the street to play with the kid who had it, infecting you on purpose because while there was risk you would get very sick or even die from doing that if you got the bug when you were an adult the risk was four times higher that you'd have a very bad time.
Covid19 doesn't have a 4:1 ratio between young people and old people.
It has a 100:1 or more ratio and among those under 15 compared against those over 65 it's more like a 10,000:1 or more ratio!
Your mother and every single Doctor knew damn well what the right thing to do was and so you went next door when the kid there had it and played with him or her. I did. I got it. I recovered like nearly everyone else does. And I'm perfectly safe to go help someone else who has it for that reason.
Today we stick your kid with a needle instead. Is that superior? Probably. But that vaccine has more than two decades of use and took a hell of a long time to prove it was safe and effective. It's likely a good trade-off, especially because the option to take your kid next door no longer exists as in all probability the kid next door got vaccinated, and thus the cases that do happen are more likely to happen to you as an adult.
But there is no Covid vaccine today.
Every single infection taken by someone who the virus cannot hurt is a public good; it increases the amount of immunity in the population and reduces the risk of spread to others because an infected person who comes into contact with another previously-infected person cannot give the bug to them as they're immune.
My mother did not just take me across the street because I was at higher risk if I didn't get Chicken Pox until I was 20, 30 or 50. She also did it because everyone else in the damned country was also at higher risk if I was not immune, and I'd become immune by getting it.
We killed close to a hundred thousand people, and quite-probably as many as 80% of those who have died thus far through mask orders, "social distancing", closing schools and now we are throwing college-age kids out of college for doing what is in the best interest of everyone in the community -- being college-age kids, going to the kegger and getting the virus because it is extraordinarily unlikely they will be seriously harmed by that but every infection they take is one your grandmother, who is 100x more likely to die, does not have to take.
This is a math problem and we handled it properly and with our heads held high when it came to Chicken Pox, which I remind you did kill people from time to time, including occasionally a kid.
Let's put some numbers to this. We have had an alleged 200,000, more or less, Americans die allegedly "from" Covid. We know that number is bullshit, because included in that figure is documented proof that thousands who wrecked their motorcycle and died, or ODd, or committed suicide, are considered "Covid" deaths. So says the CDC. But let's ignore that for a minute and just take at face value 200,000 dead Americans, even though we know that number is crap.
What percentage of Americans are over 65? About 13% nationally, with many counties (including mine) at roughly 20%.
There are a grand total of 13 people under the age of 15 who the CDC says died "with" COVID19 out of the whole. THIRTEEN.
Out of those under 45 there are a grand total of 2,746 or approximately 1.5% of the total who have died. Most of those were likely people with serious underlying conditions who got Covid at a very bad time (e.g. while undergoing cancer treatment and thus had a trashed immune system.)
Since the current CFR (among symptomatic cases) is about 1.5% in the Untied States this means if you get Covid19 and are under the age of 45 your odds of being ok is 99.98%.
If you are under 15 your odds of being ok are 99.99992%.
In other words if we intentionally infected every person under the age of 15 we would expect to see a grand total of 52 dead kids across the entire United States.
52.
And we would achieve nearly 60 million infections, all of which confer immunity and which is about 18% of the population.
Given cross-reaction immunity we would have stopped this bug with 52 dead kids.
From the point that we achieved that community spread to everyone else would be a sporadic and "once in a while" thing; widespread infection and death would be impossible because there would not be enough other people to get sick.
We murdered your Grandmother and Father and we're still doing it because instead of encouraging kids to be kids with open schools, open playgrounds, having them all congregate together and "share the love" where it is wildly improbable that anything bad will happen we instead closed schools, demanded they wear masks, put up dividers and worse, closed raves, kicked kids out of college for having keggers and similar.
We should be holding raves, complete with mosh pits and free-flowing kegs of beer for anyone of college age up to about 30 every single Friday night. We should not put up dividers and close schools we should instead put all the desks together and mandate every kid hug every other kid in the building every single day. If the teachers are scared because they ate themselves into a 400lb mass of diabetes then FIRE THEM ALL and replace them with young adults who are healthy and at not much more risk than the kids.
Your screaming school teachers killed your grandmother.
Your governor who forbade young people from being young people and being in immediate personal contact with each other killed your grandmother.
Your Mayor who mandated "masks" and "social distancing" killed your grandmother.
Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell and Donald Trump killed your grandmother.
So did Anthony Fauci.
Every goddamned one of these people was taken across the street when they were kids, as was I, to get Chicken Pox! On purpose. And every single one of them knows why that was done.
This is math problem and every one of these cocksuckers in our government and alleged "doctors" know goddamn well I'm right.
So did your mother, and she neither had or needed a medical degree. She simply needed to be able to do basic arithmetic.
Please explain to me why every single one of the Governors, Mayors and so-called "experts" haven't been ejected from the public square and what we knew was true for well more than a hundred years done instead? We knew it and we did it for a bug that had less skew in risk by a factor of ten thousand times than this one does. We did it precisely because of that skew.
And by the way, this is what Japan did. They left the kids and young adults alone and guess what -- while people are getting Covid there nobody, statistically speaking, is dying and Tokyo has 50% seroprevalence.
May I point out that this means that of the 96,000 Covid "infections" if all of them are in Tokyo (they're not) more than one hundred people have actually had the virus for each one that has been counted as a "case"!
ALL of the so-called "experts" predicted disaster in Japan. There was no disaster. Those so-called "experts" weren't simply wrong -- they were maliciously wrong. This malice has spread and been enforced world-wide with damned few exceptions.
If we had Japan's case fatality rate about 4,500 Americans would be dead, not 200,000+. But there would be no emergency, nobody would have lost their job, there would be no mandates, schools would be fully open with no dividers and mask orders and nobody would have made hundreds of billions of dollars either including assholes like Jeff Bezos and the pharmaceutical, medical and testing companies.
THE GOVERNMENT KILLED YOUR GRANDMOTHER ON PURPOSE FOR POLITICAL REASONS -- AND IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER YOUR GOVERNOR OR MAYOR IS A REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT, NOR WHETHER YOU LOCAL GOVERNMENT IS. THEY HAVE ALL DONE IT, IT IS INTENTIONAL, THEY KNOW GODDAMNED WELL WHAT THE MATH IS ON THIS AND THEY ALSO KNOW DAMN WELL HOW TO HANDLE A BUG LIKE THIS BECAUSE ESSENTIALLY ALL OF THEM ARE OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE LIVED AND PRACTICED SAME FIRST HAND!
THEY DID THE EXACT OPPOSITE KNOWING FULL WELL THAT DOING SO WOULD LEAD TO OVER 200,000 DEAD PEOPLE. THIS WAS ALL DONE SO THE MEDICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL "BUSINESS" COULD MAKE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND TO DO THAT YOUR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS HAD TO BE LEFT AT RISK TO DIE.
YOU ARE STILL PUTTING UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT AND WE KNEW EVERY BIT OF IT WAS TRUE IN MARCH.
WHERE DID WHAT MADE AMERICA TRULY GREAT -- THAT WHICH LED TO 1776, THE CAPACITY TO UNDERSTAND BASIC ALGEBRA THEN TELL THE GOVERNMENT TO FUCK OFF AND MEAN IT THROUGH WHATEVER MEANS ARE NECESSARY -- DISAPPEAR TO?
The literal last line of my book Leverage published in 2012 by Wiley is this: The math is never wrong.
Let's look at physics and mathematics folks.
We'll start with a single cough or sneeze.
Everyone "knows" that if you cover a cough or sneeze, and you should do it into your sleeve instead of your hand, this will reduce the risk of someone else getting a virus you may have, right?
Wrong.
It doesn't. So says the science! This is a myth, just like it is a myth that you can wear a mask and reduce transmission.
Wait -- you say! YUCK; that's obvious that it helps.
Well, no.
Here's why.
You sneeze and a huge loogie comes out your nose. Yuck! Nasty! Mucus, full of germs.
It goes, if uncovered...... downward, on the floor.
And harms nobody.
It's disgusting, but that's it. You should still do it anyway because it's disgusting not to, but you won't stop a virus by doing so.
What? If I stop the loogie then how come that doesn't do anything?
Because in addition to the loogie out come a bunch of large drops, each also laden with virus. Maybe a few hundred drops. Yuck! Thus covering or physically blocking those will reduce transmission to other people, right?
Wrong again, statistically speaking.
Why?
Because in that same forceful exhale are an enormous number of sub-micron water droplets that are formed as the saturated vapor in your lungs (100% RH in expired air) cools slightly as it travels up from the lungs to the trachea and out the mouth or nose and comes into contact with the ambient air (well, unless it's over 98.6F in the air where you are anyway!)
Remember your basic physics: As any saturated vapor cools it condenses. Any saturated vapor that cools by even a tiny amount will condense -- that is, coalesce the individual vapor molecules into larger aggregates.
Ordinary "tidal volume" (that is, the amount of air you move in a resting condition with each inhalation) is about 500ml. For a cough or sneeze it is much larger; the maximum volume of air that can be inspired in adult human lungs typically is in the range of 4-6L, or eight to 12 times the "at rest" breathing amount.
When we breathe normally we produce very few or no large droplets. When we sing, play a wind instrument, yell, scream, cough or sneeze we produce a fairly large number of them.
But none of this matters at all, statistically, because with each breath we produce millions of small condensate drops, and all of them which do not aggregate beyond the pore size of the medium in a mask will go right through said mask in either direction, most of those condensed molecules are produced between the lungs and either before or just after exit from the body due to condensation of the 100% RH water vapor and each of them individually, if you are infected with a virus, can carry enough virons to infect another person.
We've all "seen our breath" outside when it's cold.
That's aggregation and condensation to a great enough degree that the aggregates are visible; there are thousands to millions more said aggregates that are too small to see and when it's not cold outside none of them aggregate and condense sufficiently to be visible but they are all still there.
Note that during ordinary breathing the mean particle size is sub-micron. Statistically none of these are filtered in either direction by anything less than an N95.
This is why physics says that masks don't work against viruses and exactly zero RCTs show that they do.
Never mind the repeated attempts to mandate masks in 1918 which did nothing to prevent the spread. Of course the revisionism of today says "well it's because people didn't adhere to it." Sure, there were people who put up the middle finger; after all, they threw people in jail for refusing -- but the facts are that nearly everyone complied.
Every single person that has ever "seen their breath" in the winter months knows, if they think about it for 30 seconds, why masks can't work and don't.
They can't work because blocking 1,000 pretty-large droplets sounds like it's great except hundreds of thousands or even millions of condensed water vapor molecule clusters were also expelled, they have enough virons on them to infect another person and very nearly zero of those are caught by the mask in either direction. The ones you see when you breathe out in the winter are >50um in size (the limit of visibility to the unaided eye); more than 50 times the size of the mean particle you actually exhale. Worse, every one of those tiny particles, unless condensed out or breathed in by someone else can remain in the air for hours since they are small enough to remain within the purview of brownian motion of air molecules; that is, they "float" so to speak because the energy of said molecular vibration and ordinary air currents, even indoors, is large compared to the pull of gravity toward the ground and thus they remain suspended in the air.
The reason we have a flu season, as I've noted, is that the higher the absolute humidity, which tracks with temperature, the greater the odds that further agglomeration of these clusters of molecules will occur and once they get large enough gravity takes over as they are too heavy and they fall to the ground harmlessly.
So your mask stopped the nasty-looking and smelling loogie which can infect exactly one person, unless you wipe it around on people, and 1,000 of the 5,000 modest-size droplets you expelled. This is why the mask gets nasty all over the inside (which, by the way, if left on for any length of time or reused will breed bacteria on the inside surface which you can inhale, and it will be very bad for you if you do so.)
But it's worthless in terms of protecting anyone else because at the same time you expelled the 5,001 droplets and stopped 1,001, which sounds like a decent hazard reduction, you also expelled anywhere from thousands to several million micrometer-size drops, an effective none of which were stopped, all of which are infectious, and thus you actually caught materially less than 1% of the potential infections that can screw someone else!
1% is not statistically significant. Filtering out 0.1-1% of the infectious events out at the source DOES NOTHING.
The reason workers in a virus lab wear moon suits, go through multiple e sets of sealed doors with decontamination procedures before that suit is removed and breathe pressurized outside air while inside the lab is that these are facts and said virus -- any virus -- will go right through any "mask."
Then there is an often-cited NIH review that claims that masks "might" work. Well, that depends on the mask. If you read the actual study you'll find that there is a RCT (again, the gold standard for medical science) that found that cloth masks increased transmission -- in other words, they were worse than the control group that was wearing nothing! That study found N95s to be effective (no surprise) and that surgical masks might be, but non-medical masks aren't part of the debate -- and yet that, and cloth, are what we're talking about here in the general public. That same review also noted that coronaviruses appear to be preferentially emitted in aerosols as opposed to droplets, which instantly destroys the argument for source control since anything that does not have a high quality seal and fit will pass nearly all of your aerosol (as opposed to larger droplets) right out into the space around you.
Oh, and don't run any bullshit about "oh it's only so-called droplets" nonsense in terms of being specific to Covid19 either. That's another common claim but there's zero scientific evidence for that. I'm not the only one who's noticed this -- there's a group of 239 scientists who signed a letter to the WHO. Not that they should have needed to; unless you're a mouth-breathing idiot the early outbreak in an apartment building at Wuhan and another in Hong Kong where there were no plumbing traps and thus gas (aerosol) from people's scat was getting into other people's apartments and the outbreak occurred across floors in units where the individuals had no reasonable possibility of personal or droplet contact along with the choir group that took all manner of reasonable precaution yet got infected anyway all make clear that in fact the so-called "large drop only" theory is nonsense. It not only has no basis given the spread we have observed it has no basis in physics either.
Never mind what appears to be one very-well researched and run down super-spread event in Germany -- in a meat-packing plant after compulsory mask-wearing was put into place for employees. The masks were worthless; a huge number of people were infected and they were able to trace the index case too because of a fortuitous mutation that allowed them to sequence the RNA and prove it. That put the final nail in the coffin of those who claimed this is not an "aerosol" (whether originating from feces or out your respiratory tract) disease.
Further, as I've repeatedly noted, that Covid-19 isn't following the laws of physics on the agglomeration that occurs with absolute humidity is very strong evidence (but not proof), again on the science, that it is in large part not being transmitted through the air but rather by contact with contaminated surfaces and since we know intact virus is found in feces fecal contamination is very likely involved (exactly as it is with polio, which also didn't follow the laws of physics on aerosol or droplet transmission because it wasn't, in the main, transmitted that way.) A mask does nothing to prevent "fomite" (item-based) transmission whatsoever nor does it work as source control for feces, obviously. In fact wearing a mask may make transmission materially more-likely if the mask is not taken from a clean, sterile container only after you have washed your hands, is then put on, and once removed you immediately wash your hands and do not re-use the mask until and unless it has been sterilized. This, of course, is impossible if you are out in the public and desire to eat or drink something. As soon as you do contamination of yourself and others, if there is contamination on your mask, is assured. In short a mask is a filter and thus concentrates whatever is in the environment on its two surfaces; on the interior from what you exhale and on the exterior from the environment around you. Once a mask is worn, even for a few minutes, it is biologically dangerous both to you and others and becomes more dangerous the longer you have it on. Without proper protocol you are more likely to infect yourself or others if pathogens are present than protect anyone at all and that protocol is utterly impossible to follow in general public life.
This has been noted in the literature; this article is often cited as "supporting" community mask mandates. If you actually read it it does no such thing because of exactly what I've noted above:
Taking a mask off is a high-risk process (34) because pathogens may be present on the outer surface of the mask and may result in self-contamination during removal (31).
If your position on "masks" is really one that includes closing all places where food and/or beverages of any sort are consumed on-premise, along with the banning of consumption of food or beverages in public where by definition you will not be able to follow good protocol with a mask to limit cross-contamination of others and self-infection then just say so and be done with it. Those arguing for mask orders in the public in fact are arguing for a complete and permanent lockdown except to go get groceries or take a trip to the hospital; they must be forced to come clean as to their actual intent. So long as any firm can remain in operation that permits or serves food or beverages of any sort for on-premise consumption masks are likely to increase infection rates because from an epidemiological point of view once used they are exactly identical to used toilet paper in terms of infection risk and if you put a used one on a table or bar you just contaminated that surface. Once you put a used one back on your face without first sterilizing it you have just contaminated yourself.
We have known all of this since February, as I have documented.
Physics is not a list of suggestions folks.
It is a list of natural laws that nobody can violate.
Masks are worthless when it comes to viral transmission by aerosol and in addition they are obviously also worthless against transmission that occurs due to contact with contaminated surfaces or objects. That's the physics of it and nobody has ever demonstrated an ability to modify the laws of physics. Only an N95 (or better) can attenuate to any meaningful degree viruses in exhaled or inhaled breath simply because virus particles and the water vapor particles that carry them are small enough to pass right through anything less. It is like trying to stop mosquitoes with a chain-link fence. I'm sure you get a few, but not enough to matter.
Grow up, deal with the fact that masks are worthless, learn to live with the fact that this virus will not be responsive to voodoo or magical incantations by governors, mayors or anyone else. Manual removal of potential contamination from your hands by washing with soap and water will help, but there is no guarantee because as we know this virus can spread through multiple vectors. The sooner those who are not significantly harmed by this virus get it and thus inhibit transmission the sooner it will be equivalent in its impact to seasonal flu or less.
There is no other reality folks, and for reasons I've explained before a vaccine is unlikely to work either. Don't get your hopes up for that as you are very likely to be disappointed.
If this nation cannot face the realities of physics then we are back to the persecution of Galileo and the burning of "witches" at Salem. There is utterly no point in my, or any other thinking person's continued engagement on any matter of economics, politics, public health or other policy if that is to be the regression of intelligence and logic among the people of this nation as what was America is doomed to collapse back into the Dark Ages.
Folks, the science is settled on masks.
As I have repeatedly pointed out they do nothing for viruses. There are a number of reasons for this -- and physics tells us that they shouldn't work. If you want to read the whole screed it's here, complete with a link to another source from before when these became politicized that includes links to multiple random controlled trials, which are the gold standard in medicine. They found no evidence that masks even when worn by medical personnel who are trained, did anything to inhibit viral transmission.
There are plenty of observational studies that claim effectiveness. Observational studies are worthless; by definition they cannot prove causal links. Further, as I've repeatedly pointed out the person who wants to make an extraordinarily claim (or impose an extraordinarily order, such as a lockdown or a mask requirement) has the burden of proof, not suggestion.
There are people who say "well, but one viral particle isn't enough to get infected, so if you block some of them that's benefit." That's only half-true. All viruses have what is called a "MID", or "minimum infective dose." The problem is that one <2.5um aerosol particle, which is not filtered effectively by even an N95, and not filtered at all by anything less, has enough virons in and on it to infect you. In other words, just one of those particles that gets through has more than a MID on it and thus the claim is false.
In fact masks may actually make the situation worse in that they radically concentrate larger droplets, such as are expelled in a cough or sneeze and leave them on the mask surface where they can then be transferred to your hands and infect someone. If not on the mask they drop rapidly onto the ground because they're too large and gravity gets them. It is what are known as the "fine particulates" that can remain part of the fluid motion of the air for an extended period of time -- in fact, almost-permanently.
Larger particles can be forcefully expelled by yelling, singing, playing wind instruments (although most of them collect in said instrument; thus the spit drain in a trombone, trumpet, etc) and, of course, coughing and sneezing. But those large particles drop to the ground quickly; they are much heavier than air. You want those to drop to the ground because they can't infect anyone who isn't running their hands on the ground immediately thereafter! Concentrating them where you can touch them is bad, not good. (Incidentally while we all now say "cough or sneeze into your sleeve" there's no science supporting that either -- in fact what studies we have say doing it doesn't decrease transmission.)
But a particle that is small enough passes through in both directions with a mask. That is, what you exhale passes through and so does what you inhale. That's the physics, and it's also the result of RCTs of which there have been many over the decades. Remember, we've tried to figure out how to stop flu transmission for decades as the flu kills upwards of 60,000 a year in the United States alone -- and have never succeeded.
That's not because we didn't study it.
We did study it.
Repeatedly.
Here are four controlled trials in the general population. I also have multiple ones over the last 20 years in health care settings with the same results. This isn't my data, it isn't conjecture, these are published medical studies.
And these are surgical masks and N95s -- not bandanas or your girlfriend's panties.
What do these studies repeatedly show?
HAND HYGIENE, that is WASHING YOUR FUCKING HANDS, works.
It produces statistically significant reductions in virus transmission, repeatedly, in controlled trials.
MASKS NEVER HAVE.
Never mind that the CDC itself published a retrospective look at various RCTs and found that masks on people in the general population are useless. When did they say this? In May of this year.
Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
This is from the alleged experts that everyone in the media, along with all the Screaming Karens, claim we must listen to.
Well?
I've pointed this out repeatedly but, even worse, I identified manual transmission of this virus as the predominant vector in March.
Here's proof -- read it. This was not the first article on that, but it's the most-concise. Masks do zippo if transmission is occurring via your hands and in fact are likely to make the situation worse because any "adjustment" of said mask with your hands puts your hands right where they need to be in order to infect you -- on your mouth, nose or eyes.
Note that many people claim SE Asia's penchant for masks attenuates such viruses. Wrong. The data says otherwise:
The highest mortality rates were estimated in sub-Saharan Africa (2·8–16·5 per 100 000 individuals), southeast Asia (3·5–9·2 per 100 000 individuals),
In sub-Saharan Africa you can probably safely presume that the mask prevalence is an effective zero compared with SE Asia, yet SE Asia does not outperform sub-Saharan Africa in mortality from viral infuenza and it underperforms Europe and America, where mask usage is an effective zero.
In other words the observational data correlates exactly with both the expected physical outcome based on physics and the results of Random Controlled Trials (RCT), the gold standard for medical investigation.
THE SCIENCE IS CLEAR AND UNEQUIVOCAL; MASKS DO NOT WORK TO ATTENUATE AEROSOL VIRAL TRANSMISSION.
Never mind that now we have (finally!) admission of what I talked about a hell of a long time ago and had to be the case simply analyzing the mathematics and viral sequencing out of Italy and elsewhere -- this virus was here in the US long before claimed, penetration of it into the population is wildly more common than claimed, there is cross-immunity, which we knew in February and March since Diamond Princess, and all of this combined means we're now arguing over closing the barn door after the horses have all left!
But we have a further problem with this virus in that as with goddamn near everything today politics is once again focused on how to screw you with 5% of an issue while leaving the other 95% alone which is where all the damage is happening.
We saw this with HIV/AIDS, where we told everyone that any sort of unprotected sex was extremely dangerous where 95% of the transmission was occurring in those who engaged in unprotected anal sex or IV drug use with the sharing of needles. We shoved over 450,000 American in the hole by engaging in politicized bullshit, most of whom should not have died. We also told Americans that one third of all American people were going to get HIV/AIDS and die, which was an outrageously false statement but did scare the living Hell out of everyone alive, most-particularly heterosexual couples which, I remind you, are sort of important for the continuation of the human race. I was a young adult at the time and remember VERY VIVIDLY the death counts on the nightly news, in the local papers and the scaremongering that claimed we were all at very high risk and that any sexual contact was likely to lead directly to you becoming a corpse.
This does NOT mean you can't get HIV via heterosexual, vaginal sex. You can and just as now where they trot out the few 20 year old healthy victims of Covid-19 they did the same thing for the no-special-risk heterosexual man or woman who got AIDS and died. It does, however, mean that most cases are not contracted that way because while it's possible to transmit it in this fashion it's quite difficult, especially in the absence of other STDs that leave open lesions on and around the genitals.
We knew this by 1985 and intentionally lied to the American public for over a decade. 450,000 Americans alone are dead, many of them because we did not tell people the truth about the risk profile of various behaviors all of which were under their personal control.
Now we're doing it again and we're killing people again through the same goddamned cult behavior that is in fact no different than the voodoo practitioner who gets all your money to lay "spells" -- whether for your good or an enemy's demise.
The virulence of all aerosol transmission of respiratory viruses, without exception, follow very closely the absolute humidity in the region in question. This is absolute fact and is why if you look at the CDC data for ILI -- diagnosed as a specific flu or not -- you will see exactly this pattern. We did not know that this was tied directly to absolute humidity for a long time, but about 10 years ago the link was discovered and curve fit -- and it's a near-exact fit when controlled for all other factors such as time spent outdoors, HVAC prevalence and similar. Unlike most of the other theories put forward over the years this also fits exactly with expected behavior based on physics while the other "explanations" that people have attempted to conjure up were in fact mere speculations. In fact all respiratory aerosol-transmitted viruses have been observed to have a 400% or more range in virulence based on this factor -- that is, an effective "R" or "Rt" from under 1.0 to over 4.
It is why every single year we have a "flu season." It is why you are much more likely to catch a cold in the winter than the summer. Some people do get a cold or flu in the summer, but not many. This is science, not conjecture or politics.
Covid-19 is not following this pattern; we knew this in March. We knew this because places that were already very hot, where absolute humidity was already way higher than the winter and early spring months, were seeing massive outbreaks. We confirmed this when the virus got into Dade county in Florida by persons returning to the US from Italy and spread like wildfire -- it was not being attenuated even though total humidity was much higher than that of New York City at the same point in time. We continue to see confirmation in that now we have outbreaks in places like Dallas and San Antonio TX well into the summer, along with Miami, Los Angeles, South Carolina and Phoenix.
Note that the prevalence of A/C does not change any of this. Not only is the virus spreading like Hell in places like rural India (where there are no A/C units) but A/C units condense a huge amount of material out of the air and get rid of both the aerosols and anything in them in the condensate which is drained to the ground outside. If the presence of A/C units didn't attenuate transmission about equally well as being outdoors then we'd see massive outbreaks of flu in office buildings and cattle-car packed call centers in the summer but we don't.
All of these facts are hard, scientific evidence that the primary mechanism of spread of Covid-19 is not aerosol.
IT IS IN FACT HARD EVIDENCE STANDING WITHOUT A SCINTILLA OF REBUTTAL THAT THE MAJOR MEANS OF TRANSMISSION IS MANUAL. ANYONE WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE MUST BE FORCED TO PROVE, THROUGH SCIENCE INCLUDING CONCURRENCE WITH THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, WHY THE SAME TOTAL HUMIDITY PATTERN THAT ATTENUATES ALL KNOWN RESPIRATORY AEROSOL VIRAL TRANSMISSION DOES NOT ATTENUATE COVID-19. IN OTHER WORDS YOU MUST PROVE THAT YOU'RE NOT A BELIEVER IN MAGIC OTHERWISE YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A VOODOO PRACTITIONER -- OR CLIENT OF SAME! I'VE BEEN DILIGENTLY LOOKING FOR SAID EVIDENCE SINCE MARCH AND HAVE YET TO FIND IT; INDEED, ALL THE "MASS INCIDENTS" POINT THE OTHER WAY!
EVERY ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE IS KNOWINGLY FULL OF CRAP OR CLINICALLY INSANE AND THEIR LIES ARE KILLING PEOPLE.
Incidentally you will find the same is true of norovirus. This is why Norovirus spreads rapidly on cruise ships even in the Caribbean where absolute humidity is sky-high. Norovirus is contact spread, including through feces -- which we refuse to acknowledge as a means of spread of Covid-19 even though the overwhelming scientific evidence is that it spreads in exactly the same way norovirus does and we KNOW, scientifically, it is in feces.
When a cruise ship gets an outbreak of norovirus do they mandate masks? I've been on a cruise where it happened and the answer is NO. They spray the hell out of every single surface with a bleach solution on a nearly-continuous basis. The entire damn ship smells like bleach. Guess why they don't mandate masks? Because the virus is not attenuated in spread through total humidity which is proof that the primary means of spread is not aerosol and even if it did masks don't work against viruses and they know it.
Covid-19 is not attenuated in spread through total humidity either.
IT IS NOT, IN THE MAIN, SPREAD VIA AEROSOL.
PERIOD.
Which means even if masks could work against respiratory viruses, which they can't, they won't work in this instance because that's not how the virus is spread. Never mind that indoor A/C units condense out a huge amount of aerosol and in addition have filters in front of said condensers which have no risk of manual transmission as they're away from people in a box where you can't touch them (a "mask" for the A/C unit, if you will) and thus indoor transmission in the summer months should be an effective zero.
I've been pointing this out since FEBRUARY, raising Hell about it since March, and there has not been one scintilla of evidence that provides any hint otherwise.
THAT IS THE SCIENCE AND THIS BULLSHIT WITH POLITICIZING THIS BUG NEEDS TO LEAD TO LIFE PRISON SENTENCES OR WORSE IF IT IS NOT STOPPED IMMEDIATELY, WITH APOLOGIES AND ADMISSION OF THE INTENTIONAL LIES THAT HAVE BEEN PUT FORWARD BECAUSE JUST AS WITH HIV IT HAS AND IS KILLING PEOPLE BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS.
THOSE INTENTIONALLY MISDIRECTING THE PUBLIC FOR POLITICAL PURPOSE AT THE COST OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES MUST BE HELD TO ACCOUNT. WHAT THESE PEOPLE, ALL OF THEM, HAVE DONE IS COMMITTED MURDER BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS, IT IS INTENTIONAL DEPRIVATION OF YOUR CIVIL RIGHT TO LIFE UNDER COLOR OF LAW AND AUTHORITY AND WE MUST DEMAND JUSTICE.
This virus is not being spread the way we're told.
Social distancing is close to worthless.
NY's data makes this quite clear. So does Florida's.
Both slammed the door; SE Florida and NYC.
The bend should be evident in one viral generation time. The new case rate should collapse in two viral generation times. If Community Transmission via bars, restaurants and "social interaction" was more than 2/3rds of the total the effective R0 would go under 1.0 and community transmission would collapse. If it was half then R0 would be 1.5 and we'd have transmission approximately equal to a bad seasonal flu.
IF you actually bent the curve.
These measures did not bend it to any material degree. Enough time has passed to know this is true; at most they have lengthened a "turn time" by one day (in other words, R3.0 to R2.5.) That's effectively nothing!
Why not?
It's being spread in the medical environment -- specifically, in the hospitals -- not, in the main, on the beach or in the bar.
When Singapore and South Korea figured out that if as a medical provider you wash your damn hands before and after, without exception, every potential contact with an infected person or surface even if you didn't have a mask on for 30 minutes during casual conversations with others (e.g. neither of you is hacking) transmission to and between their medical providers stopped.
Note -- even if you didn't have a mask on and were not social distancing in the work environment, which of course is impossible if you're working with others in a hospital, you didn't get infected.
And guess what immediately happened after that? Their national case rate stabilized and fell.
The hypothesis that fits the facts is that a material part of transmission is actually happening in the hospital with the medical providers spreading it through the community both directly and indirectly.
Remember that all disease R0 is a composite of all the elements of transmission. If any material part of transmission is happening in hospitals and other medical settings stopping that will stop or greatly attenuate community transmission. Every medical provider goes home and interacts with the public.
Then the hospital fills up and guess what -- they call in more doctors, nurses, orderlies and other people. In fact they've done exactly that; in hard-hit places they're getting volunteers. Excellent, they need the workers, except every one of those new workers in the place is also a brand new vector to the rest of the community too unless they wash their damn hands before and after every contact with any item or person as well.
What's worse is that the data is that if you wind up on a vent you die nearly all the time. They had a doc on Tucker Carlson last night confirming that we are not doing materially better than Wuhan in this regard.
We're wrong about how this thing is spreading and we're wrong about the silent attack rate. The step functions in the data here in the United States cannot be explained by ordinary community transmission but they are completely explained if the transmission is happening not among ordinary casual contact -- that is, not "social distancing", but rather through the medical system itself. That explains the step functions that are seen in places like Florida since it takes several days before you seek medical attention after infection and it also explains why NY, despite locking down the city and more than one viral generation time passing -- in fact two -- has seen no material decrease at all in their transmission rate.
In addition it further is supported by the fact that what we've seen here, in Italy, in Wuhan -- indeed everywhere is not an exponential curve. It's a step-function flat acceleration graph. Broad community transmission doesn't happen this way (you instead get a straight and continual exponential expansion until you start to obtain suppression via herd immunity) but if the spread happens as each "generation" gets driven to hospitals for testing and medical attention and the spread is largely happening there what we see here and in other nations in the case rate data is exactly the function you produce in terms of exposure rates.
In other words there should be no straight-line sections in the case rate graphs -- but there are.
Fix the protocols in the hospitals right damn now. PPE is not the answer if your hands, gloved or not, become contaminated and not immediately washed off. Hand-washing at an obsessive level -- before and after each patient interaction and before and after each contact with a piece of equipment that might be contaminated is. In other words the monster vector (remember, R0 is a composite, not a single number) which I've hypothesized since this started is not oral droplets -- it's fecal.
This also correlates exactly with the explosive spread in nursing homes where many residents are incontinent.
Folks, by definition medical facilities concentrate sick people into small spaces. If what's wrong with them is not infectious this doesn't matter. But if it is you had better not transmit anything between them or between you and them or you instantly become one of the, if not the only vector that matters.
Then as the place fills up you have more people working and thus more vectors into the rest of the community. Even if you have gotten the virus as a nurse or doctor and recovered and thus are immune if you have it on your hands and go down the escalator to the subway you can still contaminate the railing and the grab-rail in the car unless you wash your damn hands before and after any contact with any thing or person!
The presence of step functions and apparent linear-fit line segments in what should be a clean parabolic curve says this is exactly what has happened.
That in turn explains why the lockdowns are not doing a damn thing -- except destroying the economy, that we must do everything in our power to keep people out of the hospital in the first place and that, in turn, means using even potentially-valid prophylaxis and promising (but not yet proved) treatments early in the course of the disease so as to keep people out of the damned hospital in the first place while fixing the protocols in the hospitals so they stop transmitting the bug.
Don't tell me about all the doctors and nurses doing this already. That's a lie. I've been in plenty of hospitals (and worse, in nursing homes) in my years and in exactly zero instances have I seen any evidence that before and after each contact, with zero exceptions, those hands go under a stream of water with soap.
And reopen the damned economy.
Now.