Japan has ended its Covid-19 state of emergency by following the policy of wearing face masks, good hygiene, voluntary and not very restrictive social distancing (without large-scale testing). They focused on finding clusters of infections and attacking the underlying causes, which often proved to be overcrowded gathering spots such as gyms and nightclubs.
Thus, the rule of thumb: the “three Cs”— avoid closed spaces, crowds, and close-contact settings in which people are talking face-to-face.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/japan-ends-its-covid-19-state-emergency?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-05-26&et_rid=694207261&et_cid=3340566
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/japan-ends-its-covid-19-state-emergency?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-05-26&et_rid=694207261&et_cid=3340566
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
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Sunday, May 31, 2020
Saturday, May 30, 2020
COVID-19: Face Mask Violators
To the degree that someone violates standard face mask protocol, they are hostile and/or naive. Those who are deliberately hostile are potentially a greater liability than those who are simply naive, but they’re all a liability. Here’s where ‘social distancing’ takes on a fuller meaning beyond mere ‘physical distancing’.
https://www.phillyvoice.com/psychological-reactance-theory-coronavirus-restrictions-covid-19-social-distancing-masks/
https://www.news-daily.com/features/health/the-psychology-behind-why-some-people-wont-wear-masks/article_e4989eba-bd63-569e-980a-4d9c914a3308.html
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
https://www.phillyvoice.com/psychological-reactance-theory-coronavirus-restrictions-covid-19-social-distancing-masks/
https://www.news-daily.com/features/health/the-psychology-behind-why-some-people-wont-wear-masks/article_e4989eba-bd63-569e-980a-4d9c914a3308.html
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Video, using infrared, shows spread of cold, flu and Covid viruses as we talk and breathe:
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
COVID-19: Spanish Flu Originated In China
[Note that WWI, hence WWII, came about as the result of human greed and nationalistic imperialistic ambitions.]
An article published in 2014 by the National Geographic indicates that laborers imported from China and transported across Canada was the source of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu:
“For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location, scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks in the future.
The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.
Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic.
Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease's origin to one location.
But some other historians already find his argument convincing.
"This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."
Last of the Great Plagues
The 1918 flu pandemic struck in three waves across the globe, starting in the spring of that year, and is tied to a strain of H1N1 influenza ancestral to ones still virulent today.
The outbreak killed even the young and healthy, turning their strong immune systems against them in a way that's unusual for flu. Adding to the catastrophic loss of lives during World War I, the epidemic may have played a role in ending the war.
"The 1918 flu was the last of the great plagues that struck humanity, and it followed in the tracks of a global conflict," says Humphries.
Even as the pandemic's origins have remained a mystery, the Chinese laborers have previously been suggested as a source of the disease.
Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.
In the new report, Humphries finds archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
He also found medical records indicating that more than 3,000 of the 25,000 Chinese Labor Corps workers who were transported across Canada en route to Europe starting in 1917 ended up in medical quarantine, many with flu-like symptoms.
The Spanish flu reached its height in autumn 1918 but raged until 1920, initially gaining its nickname from wartime censorship rules that allowed for reporting on the disease's ravages in neutral Spain.
Physicians began debating the origin of the pandemic almost as soon as it appeared, Higgins says, with historians soon joining them.
France's wartime trenches, ridden with filth, disease, and death, were originally seen as the flu's breeding ground. The flu's tendency to strike young adults was explained as the disease targeting itself to young soldiers in trenches. The theory also purported to explain how the illness spread from Europe to cities such as Boston and Philadelphia by pointing a finger at returning troop ships.
A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 doughboys.
But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic "winter sickness" by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China's Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks' time in late 1917.
At first thought to be pneumonic plague, the disease killed at a far lower rate than is typical for that disease.
Humphries discovered that a British legation official in China wrote that the disease was actually influenza, in a 1918 report. Humphries made the findings in searches of Canadian and British historical archives that contain the wartime records of the Chinese Labor Corps and the British legation in Beijing.
At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war.
"The idea was to free up soldiers to head to the front at a time when they were desperate for manpower," Humphries says.
Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.
So desperate was the need for labor that on March 2, 1918, a ship loaded with 1,899 Chinese Labor Corps men left the Chinese port of Wehaiwei for Vancouver despite "plague" stopping the recruiting for workers there.
In reaction to anti-Chinese feelings rife in western Canada at the time, the trains that carried the workers from Vancouver were sealed, Humphries says. Special Railway Service Guards watched the laborers, who were kept in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Newspapers were banned from reporting on their movement.
Roughly 3,000 of the workers ended up in medical quarantine, their illnesses often blamed on their "lazy" natures by Canadian doctors, Humphries said: "They had very stereotypical, racist views of the Chinese."
Doctors treated sore throats with castor oil and sent the Chinese back to their camps.
The Chinese laborers arrived in southern England by January 1918 and were sent to France, where the Chinese Hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer recorded hundreds of their deaths from respiratory illness.
Historians have suggested that the Spanish influenza mutated and became most deadly in spring 1918, spreading from Europe to ports as far apart as Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone.
By the height of the global pandemic that autumn, however, no more such cases were reported among the Chinese laborers in Europe.
Humphries concedes that a final answer to the mystery of the Spanish flu's origins is still a ways off.
"What we really need is a sample of the virus preserved in a burial for the medical experts to uncover," Humphries says. "That would have the best chances of settling the debate."
For the last decade, experts such as Jeffery Taubenberger, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have sought burial samples across continents, seeking to find preserved samples of the virus in victims of the outbreak.
Taubenberger led a team in 2011 that looked at flu virus samples taken from autopsies of 32 victims of the 1918 outbreak.
The earliest sample found so far was from a U.S. soldier who died on May 11, 1918, at Camp Dodge, Iowa, but the team is looking for earlier cases.
A broad number of samples from flu victims before and after the pandemic might finally narrow down its origins. Essentially, scientists would need a genetically identified sample of the influenza's H1N1 virus taken from a victim who died before the first widespread outbreak of the pandemic in spring 1918 to point to a time and place as the likely origin point of the pandemic.
One from China in 1917, for example, would fill the bill.
"I'm not sure if this question can ever be fully answered," Taubenberger cautions, noting that even the origin of a smaller flu pandemic in 2009 still eludes certainty.
Ultimately, "these kinds of [historical] analyses cannot definitively reveal the origins and patterns of spread of emerging pathogens, especially at the early stages of the outbreak," Taubenberger said, of the new historical report.
In the end, however, knowing the origin of the disease might provide information that could help stop a future pandemic, making the search worthwhile.
"I would say that the takeaway message of all of this is to keep your eye on China" as a source of emerging diseases, Higgins says. He points to concerns about avian flu and the SARS virus, both arising from Asia in the last decade.
The SARS outbreak claimed perhaps 775 lives in 2003, and avian flu A (H5N1) has killed 384 people since 2003, according to the World Health Organization, which is carefully watching for signs of an outbreak of the diseases.
We have seen a lot of emerging diseases travel around the world in recent decades," Higgins says.
History has a way of repeating, he says, and research into the origins of the 1918 flu could help prevent a scourge like that from happening again.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/
Calling Covid-19 the ‘Chinese Flu’ Carries A Burden:
http://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-calling-it-chinese-flu-carries.html?
m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
An article published in 2014 by the National Geographic indicates that laborers imported from China and transported across Canada was the source of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu:
“For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location, scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks in the future.
The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.
Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic.
Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease's origin to one location.
But some other historians already find his argument convincing.
"This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."
Last of the Great Plagues
The 1918 flu pandemic struck in three waves across the globe, starting in the spring of that year, and is tied to a strain of H1N1 influenza ancestral to ones still virulent today.
The outbreak killed even the young and healthy, turning their strong immune systems against them in a way that's unusual for flu. Adding to the catastrophic loss of lives during World War I, the epidemic may have played a role in ending the war.
"The 1918 flu was the last of the great plagues that struck humanity, and it followed in the tracks of a global conflict," says Humphries.
Even as the pandemic's origins have remained a mystery, the Chinese laborers have previously been suggested as a source of the disease.
Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.
In the new report, Humphries finds archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
He also found medical records indicating that more than 3,000 of the 25,000 Chinese Labor Corps workers who were transported across Canada en route to Europe starting in 1917 ended up in medical quarantine, many with flu-like symptoms.
The Spanish flu reached its height in autumn 1918 but raged until 1920, initially gaining its nickname from wartime censorship rules that allowed for reporting on the disease's ravages in neutral Spain.
Physicians began debating the origin of the pandemic almost as soon as it appeared, Higgins says, with historians soon joining them.
France's wartime trenches, ridden with filth, disease, and death, were originally seen as the flu's breeding ground. The flu's tendency to strike young adults was explained as the disease targeting itself to young soldiers in trenches. The theory also purported to explain how the illness spread from Europe to cities such as Boston and Philadelphia by pointing a finger at returning troop ships.
A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 doughboys.
But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic "winter sickness" by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China's Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks' time in late 1917.
At first thought to be pneumonic plague, the disease killed at a far lower rate than is typical for that disease.
Humphries discovered that a British legation official in China wrote that the disease was actually influenza, in a 1918 report. Humphries made the findings in searches of Canadian and British historical archives that contain the wartime records of the Chinese Labor Corps and the British legation in Beijing.
At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war.
"The idea was to free up soldiers to head to the front at a time when they were desperate for manpower," Humphries says.
Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.
So desperate was the need for labor that on March 2, 1918, a ship loaded with 1,899 Chinese Labor Corps men left the Chinese port of Wehaiwei for Vancouver despite "plague" stopping the recruiting for workers there.
In reaction to anti-Chinese feelings rife in western Canada at the time, the trains that carried the workers from Vancouver were sealed, Humphries says. Special Railway Service Guards watched the laborers, who were kept in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Newspapers were banned from reporting on their movement.
Roughly 3,000 of the workers ended up in medical quarantine, their illnesses often blamed on their "lazy" natures by Canadian doctors, Humphries said: "They had very stereotypical, racist views of the Chinese."
Doctors treated sore throats with castor oil and sent the Chinese back to their camps.
The Chinese laborers arrived in southern England by January 1918 and were sent to France, where the Chinese Hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer recorded hundreds of their deaths from respiratory illness.
Historians have suggested that the Spanish influenza mutated and became most deadly in spring 1918, spreading from Europe to ports as far apart as Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone.
By the height of the global pandemic that autumn, however, no more such cases were reported among the Chinese laborers in Europe.
Humphries concedes that a final answer to the mystery of the Spanish flu's origins is still a ways off.
"What we really need is a sample of the virus preserved in a burial for the medical experts to uncover," Humphries says. "That would have the best chances of settling the debate."
For the last decade, experts such as Jeffery Taubenberger, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have sought burial samples across continents, seeking to find preserved samples of the virus in victims of the outbreak.
Taubenberger led a team in 2011 that looked at flu virus samples taken from autopsies of 32 victims of the 1918 outbreak.
The earliest sample found so far was from a U.S. soldier who died on May 11, 1918, at Camp Dodge, Iowa, but the team is looking for earlier cases.
A broad number of samples from flu victims before and after the pandemic might finally narrow down its origins. Essentially, scientists would need a genetically identified sample of the influenza's H1N1 virus taken from a victim who died before the first widespread outbreak of the pandemic in spring 1918 to point to a time and place as the likely origin point of the pandemic.
One from China in 1917, for example, would fill the bill.
"I'm not sure if this question can ever be fully answered," Taubenberger cautions, noting that even the origin of a smaller flu pandemic in 2009 still eludes certainty.
Ultimately, "these kinds of [historical] analyses cannot definitively reveal the origins and patterns of spread of emerging pathogens, especially at the early stages of the outbreak," Taubenberger said, of the new historical report.
In the end, however, knowing the origin of the disease might provide information that could help stop a future pandemic, making the search worthwhile.
"I would say that the takeaway message of all of this is to keep your eye on China" as a source of emerging diseases, Higgins says. He points to concerns about avian flu and the SARS virus, both arising from Asia in the last decade.
The SARS outbreak claimed perhaps 775 lives in 2003, and avian flu A (H5N1) has killed 384 people since 2003, according to the World Health Organization, which is carefully watching for signs of an outbreak of the diseases.
We have seen a lot of emerging diseases travel around the world in recent decades," Higgins says.
History has a way of repeating, he says, and research into the origins of the 1918 flu could help prevent a scourge like that from happening again.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/
Calling Covid-19 the ‘Chinese Flu’ Carries A Burden:
http://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-calling-it-chinese-flu-carries.html?
m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Sunday, May 24, 2020
COVID-19: Why Face Masks Make Some People Feel Weak
Many people don’t like wearing a face mask because it makes them appear weak. After all, we do tend to associate wearing a face mask with being sick (in a weakened condition). Notably however, because of Covid-19’s often presymptomatic and asymptomatic characteristics, many people are “infected” but don’t know it. Thus, they unknowingly spread the virus by simply breathing and talking. They’re our Typhoid Marys.
https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-typhoid-mary
Talking can transmit SARS-CoV-2:
https://youtu.be/VmYuCtPZRNY
How far droplets travel from talking:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/23/sanjay-gupta-wearing-masks-facial-coverings-benefits-ebof-pkg-vpx.cnn
Related postings on Covid:
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Note: In actuality, properly worn face masks empower the wearer. Universal face mask usage and common sense hygiene would curtail the pandemic so that life could resume and, also, give us the time to develop a vaccine and treatments.
https://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/05/covid-19-hong-kong-is-example-of-how-to.html?m=1
The most common face mask violation that I’ve observed is people who wear the mask covering their mouth but leaving the nose uncovered. It reminds me of the recalcitrance displayed by motorcycle riders who used to wear their helmets on their knees as they rode in order to comply with helmet laws — in defiance of laws intended to protect them. Though this was, in and of itself somewhat amusing, the current defiance shown by those who refuse to properly wear their face mask is less than amusing in light of what’s ahead for all of us. The Spanish Flu pandemic lasted for three years. The Covid-19 pandemic is only just getting started:
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-typhoid-mary
Talking can transmit SARS-CoV-2:
https://youtu.be/VmYuCtPZRNY
How far droplets travel from talking:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/23/sanjay-gupta-wearing-masks-facial-coverings-benefits-ebof-pkg-vpx.cnn
Related postings on Covid:
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Note: In actuality, properly worn face masks empower the wearer. Universal face mask usage and common sense hygiene would curtail the pandemic so that life could resume and, also, give us the time to develop a vaccine and treatments.
https://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/05/covid-19-hong-kong-is-example-of-how-to.html?m=1
The most common face mask violation that I’ve observed is people who wear the mask covering their mouth but leaving the nose uncovered. It reminds me of the recalcitrance displayed by motorcycle riders who used to wear their helmets on their knees as they rode in order to comply with helmet laws — in defiance of laws intended to protect them. Though this was, in and of itself somewhat amusing, the current defiance shown by those who refuse to properly wear their face mask is less than amusing in light of what’s ahead for all of us. The Spanish Flu pandemic lasted for three years. The Covid-19 pandemic is only just getting started:
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
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https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Thursday, May 21, 2020
COVID-19: One-way Valve Face Masks (Respirators) Are Detrimental In Our COVID Environment
One-way valve face masks may be more comfortable to wear because they allow easier exhalation than traditional masks, etcetera; but, they fall short because of the valve design which only filters air breathed in, but not breathed out [Note, also, that the force of the exhalation breath is projected further in front of the breather. It’s somewhat akin to blowing thru a straw.]. Thus, they don’t function appropriately in our COVID environment — neither in the health care setting nor or in the community. This type of face mask is now under fire for not protecting the public as it should and is now starting to be outlawed in some places.
“While valve masks outwardly appear like a technological step up from a homemade cloth or a standard surgical mask, an old fashioned cloth or surgical mask is actually superior for the COVID-19 pandemic, especially since the major reason the CDC began to recommend the universal use of masks in the community was because of asymptomatic infection and wishing to reduce the transmission from the person who is infected to others.”
What about those who insist standard masks are just too uncomfortable? It is suggested that they 'get with the program’. And if you're wearing masks just to protect yourself, that's different than the program needed to deal with this pandemic. Places like Hong Kong and Israel have proven the real value of proper universal face mask usage.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ditch-valve-face-mask-pros-cons/story?id=70511555
My Comment: I know how uncomfortably warm and stuffy breathing is while wearing a face mask. This is why I suggest that those people who must wear them for prolonged periods of time both search online for ‘dermatology face mask tips’ and to, also, consider buying higher quality face masks such as those that use a silk blend with cotton. Single use masks are convenient, but have their own problems.
One face mask I recommend is made in America, is antimicrobial and reusable (washable):
https://foxsox.com/collections/womens-view-all-products/products/flexfit-mask?variant=31689254764587
Related posting:
Hong Kong is an example of how to best deal with pandemic:
http://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/05/covid-19-hong-kong-is-example-of-how-to.html?m=1
Fact Check on face masks:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masks-dangerous-health/
Also, search: ‘avoid face mask skin irritation’
Example -
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/13/rash-irritation-downsides-face-masks-how-to-protect-skin-according-to-doctors.html
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
“While valve masks outwardly appear like a technological step up from a homemade cloth or a standard surgical mask, an old fashioned cloth or surgical mask is actually superior for the COVID-19 pandemic, especially since the major reason the CDC began to recommend the universal use of masks in the community was because of asymptomatic infection and wishing to reduce the transmission from the person who is infected to others.”
What about those who insist standard masks are just too uncomfortable? It is suggested that they 'get with the program’. And if you're wearing masks just to protect yourself, that's different than the program needed to deal with this pandemic. Places like Hong Kong and Israel have proven the real value of proper universal face mask usage.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ditch-valve-face-mask-pros-cons/story?id=70511555
My Comment: I know how uncomfortably warm and stuffy breathing is while wearing a face mask. This is why I suggest that those people who must wear them for prolonged periods of time both search online for ‘dermatology face mask tips’ and to, also, consider buying higher quality face masks such as those that use a silk blend with cotton. Single use masks are convenient, but have their own problems.
One face mask I recommend is made in America, is antimicrobial and reusable (washable):
https://foxsox.com/collections/womens-view-all-products/products/flexfit-mask?variant=31689254764587
Related posting:
Hong Kong is an example of how to best deal with pandemic:
http://samslair.blogspot.com/2020/05/covid-19-hong-kong-is-example-of-how-to.html?m=1
Fact Check on face masks:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masks-dangerous-health/
Also, search: ‘avoid face mask skin irritation’
Example -
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/13/rash-irritation-downsides-face-masks-how-to-protect-skin-according-to-doctors.html
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
COVID-19: Hong Kong Is Example of How to Stop Pandemic
“New York City, with a population of about 8.4 million, has had over 28,000 coronavirus deaths as of May 18. Meanwhile, Hong Kong has officially recorded only four Covid-19 deaths, despite having 7.5 million residents.
One reason that could help explain the stark disparity: In Hong Kong, nearly everyone wears a face mask in public.
If any city in the world was likely to experience the worst effects of the coronavirus, Hong Kong would have been a top candidate. The urban area is densely populated and heavily reliant on packed public-transit systems, and it has very few open spaces. Moreover, a high-speed train connects Hong Kong to Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus originated.
Hong Kong, it seemed, was doomed.
But almost as soon as the outbreak first began in the city, millions of residents started wearing masks in public. One local told the Los Angeles Times that the government didn’t have to say anything before 99 percent of the population put them on.
Experts now say widespread mask usage appears to be a major reason, perhaps even the primary one, why the city hasn’t been devastated by the disease.
“If not for universal masking once we depart from our home every day, plus hand hygiene, Hong Kong would be like Italy long ago,” K.Y. Yuen, a Hong Kong microbiologist advising the government, told the Wall Street Journal last month.”
“Not wearing masks in Hong Kong is like not wearing pants”
Hong Kong’s Effective Use of Face Masks:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/18/21262273/coronavirus-hong-kong-masks-deaths-new-york
Defeating Covid Requires Persistence:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-hong-kong-resurgenece-holds-lesson-defeating-it-demands-persistence/
How Pandemic Could End:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-could-end1/
Search: ‘COVID-19: Hong Kong Is Example of How to Stop Pandemic’
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
One reason that could help explain the stark disparity: In Hong Kong, nearly everyone wears a face mask in public.
If any city in the world was likely to experience the worst effects of the coronavirus, Hong Kong would have been a top candidate. The urban area is densely populated and heavily reliant on packed public-transit systems, and it has very few open spaces. Moreover, a high-speed train connects Hong Kong to Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus originated.
Hong Kong, it seemed, was doomed.
But almost as soon as the outbreak first began in the city, millions of residents started wearing masks in public. One local told the Los Angeles Times that the government didn’t have to say anything before 99 percent of the population put them on.
Experts now say widespread mask usage appears to be a major reason, perhaps even the primary one, why the city hasn’t been devastated by the disease.
“If not for universal masking once we depart from our home every day, plus hand hygiene, Hong Kong would be like Italy long ago,” K.Y. Yuen, a Hong Kong microbiologist advising the government, told the Wall Street Journal last month.”
“Not wearing masks in Hong Kong is like not wearing pants”
Hong Kong’s Effective Use of Face Masks:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/18/21262273/coronavirus-hong-kong-masks-deaths-new-york
Defeating Covid Requires Persistence:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-hong-kong-resurgenece-holds-lesson-defeating-it-demands-persistence/
How Pandemic Could End:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-could-end1/
Search: ‘COVID-19: Hong Kong Is Example of How to Stop Pandemic’
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
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Thursday, May 14, 2020
COVID-19: Two Reasons To Wear A Face Mask
The Real Reason to Wear a Face Mask:
Research shows that even a cotton mask dramatically reduces the number of virus particles emitted from our mouths—by as much as 99 percent. This reduction provides two huge benefits. Fewer virus particles mean that people have a better chance of avoiding infection, and if they are infected, the lower viral-exposure load may give them a better chanceof contracting only a mild illness.
COVID-19 has been hard to control partly because people can infect others before they themselves display any symptoms—and even if they never develop any illness. Three recent studies show that nearly half of patients are infected by people who aren’t coughing or sneezing yet. Many people have no awareness of the risk they pose to others, because they don’t feel sick themselves, and many may never become overtly ill.
Note: Consistently and properly wearing a cloth face mask when around others not only protects them from you (if you’re pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic), it protects you by greatly decreasing the viral load that you might inhale.
[Much of the reporting on coronavirus seems to make people think infection is a quantum, complete effect like neural transmission: if a single virus particle embeds in my nasopharynx, I’m done.
No. If you are sitting praying in a church or synagogue next to hundreds of others, or at a close-set dinner party, or a psychotherapy session in a small closed room, chances are better you will be exposed to the several hundred viral particles presently postulated as needed to cause general infection.
Fortunately, what’s called our innate immune system prevents us from getting heavily infected, and if infected, ill. Otherwise, you and I would not be here...]
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/getting-healthy-now/202004/coronavirus-the-importance-viral-load
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by relevance):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&m=1
Related COVID-19 postings (by date):
https://samslair.blogspot.com/search?q=Covid&max-results=20&by-date=true&m=1
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Hypatia: Daughter of Theon and Neo-Platonism
“Sitting in the chair of philosophy previously occupied by her father, Theon the mathematician, the immortal Hypatia was for many years the central figure in the Alexandrian School of Neo-Platonism. Famed alike for the depth of her learning and the charm of her person, beloved by the citizens of Alexandria, and frequently consulted by the magistrates of that city, this noble woman stands out from the pages of history as the greatest of the pagan martyrs. A personal disciple of the magician Plutarch, and versed in the profundities of the Platonic School, Hypatia eclipsed in argument and public esteem every proponent of the Christian doctrines in Northern Egypt. While her writings perished at the time of the burning of the library of Alexandria by the Mohammedans, some hint of their nature may be gleaned from the statements of contemporaneous authors. Hypatia evidently wrote a commentary on the Arithmetic of Diophantus, another on the Astronomical Canon of Ptolemy, and a third on the Conics of Apollonius of Perga. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, her devoted friend, wrote to Hypatia for assistance in the construction of an astrolabe and a hydroscope. Recognizing the transcendency of her intellect, the learned of many nations flocked to the academy where she lectured.”
http://www.ascension-research.org/The_Mysteries_and_Their_Emissaries.html
Biography and historical background:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hypatia
Video about Hypatia’s Life and Death (5 min.):
https://youtu.be/n1mwZrVJ-TI
Movie, “Agora”, is about Hypatia’s Life and Death. It is readily available.
Note: I’d posted previously about the ‘Separation of the Church and State’. This posting used the story of Hypatia as a backdrop.
https://samslair.blogspot.com/2011/08/2.html?m=1
http://www.ascension-research.org/The_Mysteries_and_Their_Emissaries.html
Biography and historical background:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hypatia
Video about Hypatia’s Life and Death (5 min.):
https://youtu.be/n1mwZrVJ-TI
Movie, “Agora”, is about Hypatia’s Life and Death. It is readily available.
Note: I’d posted previously about the ‘Separation of the Church and State’. This posting used the story of Hypatia as a backdrop.
https://samslair.blogspot.com/2011/08/2.html?m=1
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Global Warming in a Nutshell
Why is the overall rate of global ice melt gradually increasing? Some say that it’s because the sun is shining more brightly. But we’re in a solar minimum. Others say that it’s because of the Milankovitch cycle. However, Milankovitch himself proved that we should already have been experiencing the beginning of the next ice age. In order to comprehend why the ice sheets are melting and ocean levels are beginning to rise is to understand that when the photonic energy emitted by the sun as visible light and infrared radiation strikes the Earth’s surface, the visible light that is not reflected away is absorbed and, thus, converted into additional infrared radiation which is felt as heat as it is radiated into the atmosphere where this ‘photonic energy’ begins to interact with the larger atmospheric molecules. Known as the greenhouse effect, it keeps the planet from freezing over.
Note: Any increase of larger atmospheric molecules strengthens the greenhouse effect.
Photon(ic):
Global Warming ‘In a Nutshell’
All of the World’s Carbon Emissions in One Chart:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/
Greenhouse Effect Basics:
https://youtu.be/bpa0aFY--pE
Greenhouse Effect Basics:
https://youtu.be/bpa0aFY--pE
Greenhouse in a Beaker:
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