Posted on 04/20/2021 7:25:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I was driving to the hardware store yesterday and observed a guy on the sidewalk walk a good 10 feet into the roadway to avoid passing next to another walker on the sidewalk. He put his life in a million times more danger walking in the road next to cars going 25-30 mph than passing by another walker for a half-second.
People have zero sense of risk and zero common sense.
Decades ago I took a class in Game Theory and we studied the work of Kahneman and Tversky. They did seminal work on what they called “Prospect Theory,” how people avoid risks when the probability of that risk is very low. They found people cannot properly evaluate low risks. This guy in the street was a textbook example of taking a high-risk action to avoid a very low-risk problem.
Mask wearing, especially by yourself in the car or when walking outdoors by yourself, falls into the same category.
Nope these guys came right into the cafeteria wearing their scrubs hats, scrub overlay on their shoes, full gowns.. I was there to do a cancer medical device lecture at the medical college. They even walked down the crowded college halls with their scrubs on. I was shocked, I tell you, shocked! Go visit a medical college cafeteria someday. But at Stanford cafeteria nor Providence nursing college cafeteria nor UCSFMed Ctr Paranassus cafeteria I never saw that happen with people wearing scrubs.
Parnassus
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. This study is not affiliated with Stanford University, nor does the author work for the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System as he claims. The study presents a hypothesis that includes false claims about the health effects of wearing masks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to recommend wearing face coverings to reduce the spread of COVID-19, as research shows they can block the transmission of respiratory droplets, which spread the virus.
THE FACTS: Websites and social media users ranging from political candidates to health influencers are falsely claiming a study published on a digital research repository came from Stanford University and proves face masks are ineffective.
In reality, the study is not affiliated with Stanford and is based on debunked claims about face masks, including the false notion that wearing a face covering decreases oxygen levels and increases carbon dioxide levels.
...
BKMK
Careful of the knee-jerk, friends.
There’s a BIG disclaimer on the CDC website that this article links to that says it’s specifically talking about RESPIRATORS, not the cloth facemasks....
Keep digging, don’t give up.
Up above I said I could find no evidence the study was done at Stanford, and I myself think masks are helpful. Still, my opinion could change as further evidence comes out, and science’s should too. These “fact-checkers” are too dogmatic themselves, acting as if simply because a view is not currently the prevailing one among scientists, it’s necessarily false, and anyone who supports it is the scum of the earth. Yet just a little over a year ago Fauci and others at the CDC were not in favor of the general public wearing masks. (”There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Fauci, March 8,2020, 60 Minutes]
A survey of the gradual development of science shows that the prevailing view in countless instances has been wrong. After thousands of years in which dissenters were persecuted, I’d hoped we’d learned that the best policy for arriving at the truth is to allow a wide range of opinions, and let people examine the evidence for the various views. The current trend of “fact-checking” leading to censorship is based on the old idea that the establishment always knows the truth, and that anything that differs from it must be crushed.
That’s true, the fact checkers can be biased and even dishonest.
Fauci and the CDC were against wearing masks for the general public, but they were always for wearing masks for front line workers.
They just lied to us about why. They were caught with their pants down. Nobody replenished the PPE stores after they were deplenished due to the 2009 swine flu under Obama.
Instead of admitting they were caught red handed and asking the public to save the masks for the front line workers, or even ordering retailers to only sell the masks to front line workers and medical facilites, they told us it was dangerous for us to wear a mask.
But the lie was obvious at the time. How could it be dangerous for us, but not for the front line workers? How much training is needed to wear a mask? Dr Chris Martenson called them out on the lie instantly. And said they were now going to have to get the public to unlearn that.
>> "AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. This study is not affiliated with Stanford University, nor does the author work for the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System as he claims." <<
The AP makes the author appear to be a complete fraud. The "Medical Hypotheses" article makes no explicit claim, though, that the author Vainshelboim is currently working for the VA or that the study itself was done at Stanford. Under his name, though, I see "Cardiology Division, Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System/Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States", put there either by him or the editors. My first assumption would be that he's currently associated with them, so I think that's misleading. I suppose they could be interpreted merely as past associations, but in my opinion they shouldn't be listed that way.
The AP article quotes a Stanford medical school spokesperson as saying, "Several years ago (2015), he was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year, on matters unrelated to this paper." That's not an insignificant association. It shows that Stanford considered him worthy of that role at the time, and is the kind of thing people list on their credentials. Here's what Wikipedia says:
"In academia, a visiting scholar, visiting researcher, visiting fellow, visiting lecturer or visiting professor is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university to teach, lecture, or perform research on a topic the visitor is valued for."
So making an association with Stanford is not unjustified (e.g., saying something like "written by someone who was once a visiting scholar at Stanford"). The study (hypothesis, summary of evidence) itself was not done at Stanford, though, and no one currently at Stanford gave official approval to its conclusions. It shouldn't be called "a Stanford study". It's just Vainshelboim's opinion.
p
I believe they're referring to N95 masks... the ones most people wear don't 'trap' much - OR keep much out.
LOL FB is censoring that study, too! There are e now 3 studies and fb hates them all!
RE: There are e now 3 studies
The Stanford study is one, this CDC report is the second, what’s the 3rd?
But are the eyes a common means of infection? I’ve read that breathing in through the nose and mouth (which have much larger openings) is the most common way.
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Common enough that the government (and common sense) says don't put your fingers in/or rub your eyes if you've been out in public without washing your hands well. The reason? You can introduce pathogens, including viruses...including covid, via your eyes.
It's also why technicians and scientists who work in bio safety labs that deal with viruses like covid wear eye protection.
Just one example publication on this topic:
Coronavirus and Your Eyeshttps://www.med.unc.edu/ophth/wp-content/uploads/sites/806/2020/03/CoronaVirusandYourVision.pdf (American Academy of Ophthalmology - 2020)How can coronavirus affect your eyes? The first thing to understand is that coronavirus can spread through the eyes — just as it does through the mouth or nose.
When someone who has coronavirus coughs, sneezes, or talks, virus particles can spray from their mouth or nose onto your face. You are likely to breathe these tiny droplets in through your mouth or nose. But the droplets can also enter your body through your eyes. You can also become infected by touching your eyes after touching something that has the virus on it.
The fact that the government bureaucrats initially (and correctly) told people there was no need to wear masks...and then later mandated that people wear a piece of relatively loose fitting cloth over their nose and mouth, but have zero such mandate to even pretend to have people protect the eyes is proof positive enough that much of what they've done has been a sham.
It's about control. It's about the visual. If enough people see everyone else walking around with a mask on, most people will in turn do what the government tells them to do because it looks very serious for everyone (and not just very serious for those who are immunocompromised and at risk of lots of different pathogens).
It was also about politics. They hated Trump enough to do everything from spy on him, to call him an agent of Russia, to destroy the greatest economy and spread fear and uncertainty in the country. They needed him out, by any means necessary.
It’s a matter of degree. My understanding is that breathing in through the nose and mouth is the primary means of infection, and it takes more than a trace amount of the virus to infect. Infection is possible through the eyes but not as likely. Many sources will support that view. (I assume you’ve seen them, and I’d rather not take the time to look them up.)
As for wearing a mask being anti-Trump, Trump himself supported wearing them, and before the election I thought wearing one would give people the confidence to go back to work, and get the economy going again. It’s too late now for that to help get Trump elected, and the vaccine is here now. With nearly all the high-risk persons having had the chance to be vaccinated, I believe wearing a mask should be voluntary, but still advisable around some persons — up close, anyway — as long as the infection rate is moderately high.
‘All the masks need to do is reduce the amount of the virus being propelled far enough to reach others.’
I, for one have never denied that typical masks and plastic face shields protect against droplets being contained from ehalations like coughing, sneezing, shouting or singing (you’d be amazed at the number of people I encounter chanting in the supermarket aisles)...where I draw a line in the samd is the notion of normal breathing through our nostrils as being a method of pathogen distribution, which is what a number of people on this forum have been telling me...
I don’t wear a mask all day wherever I go. I wear it into the store and rip it off when I exit like I just lost a patient.
Short-term mask use is harmless unless you are wearing a Trump mask which can cause violent outbursts in liberals.
“The first thing to understand is that coronavirus can spread through the eyes”
I believe they have walked this back. Covid enters through the lungs
‘I believe wearing a mask should be voluntary, but still advisable around some persons — up close, anyway — as long as the infection rate is moderately high.’
of course; that is a perfectly reasonable position, but quite unfortunately, the masks have served as markers of either your virtue and servility, or your social pathology, depending on your acceptance or reection of diktats...
the masks, being such visible markers, have generated hatreds and hard feelings because of their social misuse; one need refer to no more than this very forum to see that...
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