Peter wrote:
The UK problem is that “health” is a devolved item and it has been a wonderful opportunity for local politicians to feel important. I am told Germany has the same problem… The result is inevitably a diluted message.
Yes that is correct. Health is a local matter here, and while the Chancellor and the 16 Minister Presidents of the Länder did agree on a common set of measures yesterday, the legal enforcement happens locally. And differs widely from one state to another, further confusing people. Furthermore, the local entities are financially much weaker than the federation, which can draw from unlimited loans at negative interest rates.
The cacophony of measures among German regions has certainly helped to reduce compliance. If rules aren’t standardised, people question them more.
gallois wrote:
IMO you should put people like @Medewok on prime time television around the world saying exactly what he wrote in his post 148.
There are! (at least in Germany)
The problem is that for each “MedEwok” you will find 2 others, that claim that
a) wearing masks and staying at home is against they constitutional and human rights
b)they haven’t seen any evidence that not meeting other people protects you at all and
c) they don’t trust prime time television at all because people like “MedEwok” use it for their government influenced propaganda, while so many people on telegram are telling the real truth that is suppressed by main stream media.
MedEwok wrote:
And differs widely from one state to another, further confusing people. Furthermore, the local entities are financially much weaker than the federation, which can draw from unlimited loans at negative interest rates.The cacophony of measures among German regions has certainly helped to reduce compliance. If rules aren’t standardised, people question them more.
Fully agree! I think the root cause of this situation is simply that the people who designed the split of responsibility between federal and state in Germany some 70 years ago never thought about the possibility of a global pandemic that is going on for many months. Guess in the aftermath of the current crisis we have learned a lot and need to change our constitution for such situations.
gallois wrote:
IMO you should put people like @Medewok on prime time television around the world saying exactly what he wrote in his post 148.
I certainly got the message. Thankyou
That is very kind of you to say. But there are more knowledgeable colleagues on television who’ve been doing just that, so it’s not the lack of medical professionals on TV that is a problem. The medical profession is itself divided on the best response to this pandemic. We are not the best experts at evaluating the societal damage of lockdowns etc.
All we can do is warn that our capacity for treatment is not unlimited and that a pandemic like this can easily lead to a collapse of our healthcare systems. That it turn would lead to untold suffering even among people who’ve never even been close to a single strand of SARS-CoV2 RNA.
b) prior infection provides little resistance. In that case, barring some unknown-to-medical-science mechanism, vaccines won’t help much either.
That’s not necessarily so. You can have Tetanus multiple times, but vaccination against it is very effective. Tetanus isn’t much like COVID and the vaccine is actually against the toxin rather than the organism. But the point remains that a vaccine response can be different from a natural immune response – why is it that you don’t make antibodies against the toxin the first time round, as it is there are there in your body?
Even if a vaccine only protects you for a year (for the sake of argument) that would still be valuable. Even if many people didn’t want to be vaccinated, it would make healthcare provision much easier if you could take healthcare workers with asymptomatic infection out of the equation.
I have mixed feelings about masks. They’re probably helpful and they’re not too onerous, but much of the history of medicine in recent years has been about moving away from interventions that made sense, but were often ineffective or harmful, towards interventions that are based on evidence.
When worn diligently, FFP3 masks are certainly effective. One of the observations nationally has been that the healthcare workers doing the riskiest procedures had lower infection rates than those who were just round and about. The difference is that anaesthetists doing intubation etc… were given preferential access to the better equipment.
An interesting thought is that perhaps mask wearers are less likely to get serious infections than non-mask wearers. If someone coughs in your face you are still likely to become infected, but perhaps if both parties are wearing masks you will only inhale a few thousand viral particles rather than a few million and will not inhale them so deeply. It seems reasonable to expect that this will improve your chances of getting a mild rather than a severe infection, but who knows.
So personally I have no objection to wearing a mask or even for mask wearing to be mandatory. But I hope that someone, somewhere is doing proper research on their effectiveness. COVID is offering up a lot of natural experiments (e.g. why did we not wear masks in Wales when it was mandatory to do so in shops in England). They may not be proper randomised controlled trials, but there are so many of them globally that hopefully the epidemiologists will be able to draw some conclusions sooner or later.
One thing I have discovered that masks differ greatly in their wearability. I find the pleated ones much less stuffy.
I would like to throw a grain of salt into that discussion. I don’t doubt the healtcare system carrying the burden and I understand exponential curves. The bug is a bad one, it may harm also younger people, and nobody in his/her right mind would want to get it.
However, 6+ months into the pandemic we do know more than we did in the beginning. Among other facts, we do know where people get infected and where, with almost full certainty, they do not.
I attach a graph (unfortunately in German) from the German Robert Koch Institute where you can see where people infected themselves. This is information derived from the myriad of follow up phone calls being performed by the health administration offices.
Closing down cinemas, museums, restaurants, and sports places, who have proven to be able to adopt to distancing and protection measures, does not seem right. Most people get infected on private functions, and in households. Shutting down all those businesses will do harm to millions of people. There is no program available for all those who are self-employed, working as artists, singers, actors, and in other professions.
As you can see, over half of infections come from the blue areas – various living areas, private households, etc. Restaurants are very unlikely places. Shutting them down – again – is not the right measure, they don’t affect the health system.
On the right side from the top:
living areas
private households
elderly homes
migrant centers
medical centers
hospitals
doctors
rehab centers
working place
educational center
care center
senior living homes
kindergartens
leasure time
restaurants
overnight sleeping
public traffic
other
I have mixed feelings about masks
It’s important to wear them correct 
Over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the quest for a rational approach to containing this is futile. The reason for that is not so much the number of people who refuse to accept measures to contain the virus, but why they do that.
We expect a vast majority of people who have relatively low risk to make HUGE sacrifices to protect people who have high risk. At the same time, the people who need protection – with the sad exception of elderly requiring care now deprived of visitors and help – lose comparatively little.
Do we see the typical range of behaviours from those people who don’t think they should be making these sacrifices. Some of them say that ‘this is not worth it’, and we see denial, excuses etc from others so they can justify their (non-)actions
And facts are unlikely to change these behaviours.
Well thank heavens he is wearing one. What happens to the strap on the other side?
However, 6+ months into the pandemic we do know more than we did in the beginning.
That’s a little unfair, though it would be nice to know a lot more.
It makes sense to concentrate on community spread – there is more that you can do to control community spread than spread within households, and secondly if spread only happened within households the virus would have fizzled out a year ago. How does one household infect the next?
A somewhat better study than “masks don’t work in Vietnam”:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/27/science.abd7728.full
“Consistent with data for the human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-1 and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV (17), we also find stable antibody titers over a period of at least 3 months and only modest declines at the 5-month time point. We plan to follow this cohort over longer intervals of time. Although this cannot provide conclusive evidence that these antibody responses protect from reinfection, we believe it is very likely that they will decrease the odds ratio of reinfection, and may attenuate disease in the case of breakthrough infection.”
Good post, Euroflyer.
I think a lot of this has been known for some months here, but it assumes people behave responsibly. If you have a restaurant which is well “behaved” then probably the data is right. But if you have a “restaurant” which is packed, and in which everybody is holding a packet of crisps (“food purchase” being a requirement for not wearing a mask) then all bets are off. Maybe Germans are better behaved? I don’t know but they possibly are better behaved than some over here
And for sure people lie to track & trace questioners. They are hardly going to admit they went to some “illegal” gathering. The UK compliance with T&T is poor and I imagine it is poor everywhere because who wants to be consigned to sitting at home for 2 weeks just because somebody has called you and told you that you were with somebody infected. There is no good solution to this… other than a test but the govts don’t want to pay for a test for every T&T target person.
We are now into “half the country taking the p1ss” mode.
This is interesting too. Apparently the strain in Ireland is from Spain and probably from holidays in Spain during the summer. The lack of airport testing has always puzzled me. In the early days the test kits were not available but surely they must be available now?
