The NON-TRUTHS of Our Current Covid-19 Policy

[Steve3007]

BUT… Masking and social distancing of healthy people act to greatly increase the infection/deaths to vulnerable people.

This is not true because, as previously stated by various others including me, healthy people are not vacuum cleaners who somehow remove the virus from the environment more effectively than unhealthy people do. It's not about removing the virus from the environment. It's about the rate at which the virus reproduces inside the bodies of various people.

If a person could be determined to be healthy in the sense that when exposed to it they would quickly fight off the virus and become immune to it, then masking/social distancing them would have no effect one way or the other. There is no mechanism by which doing that could somehow increase the infection/death rate to vulnerable people as you've said it would. Of course, masking/social distancing might damage their quality of life in other ways, or damage their ability to earn a living. So that could be an argument against doing it. But what you've said is not such an argument.

[Terrapin Station]

Correction: I said per minute above. That's actually per second. So simply by talking, you can introduce as many as 60,000 virions per minute into the environment.

[Terrapin Station]

This is not true because, as previously stated by various others including me, healthy people are not vacuum cleaners who somehow remove the virus from the environment more effectively than unhealthy people do.

lol--yeah, why he's thinking that I don't know.

[Terrapin Station]

To use his mosquito analogy, once a healthy person comes into contact with a mosquito (well, or a few of them), for at least a couple days they're going to be putting tens of thousands of mosquitoes back into the environment per minute simply by talking. They're not going to somehow absorb the millions of mosquitoes that people like them are putting into the environment.

This can be avoided by wearing a mask.

[Terrapin Station]

Actually, rereading the paper again, it probably should be 1,000 per minute, not per second. That they talk about both seconds (thousands of droplets produced per second) and minutes makes the "of these" comment a bit ambiguous, but it's probably app. 1,000 virions per minute.

[RJG]

So wear a mask if you don't want to be a jackass.

...including immune people? ...do you want to keep killing grandmas (vulnerable people)?

If we don't, at the very least, allow our recently vaccinated and previously infected populations to start participating in herd immunity (take off their masks and start full time socializing), then we will soon reach a point of no return. The party will be over. Humans will become the next extinct animal on this planet within 5-10 years.

Continued social distancing of our healthy immune people will only allow the virus to grow and mutate into potentially more deadly strains (making for less available healthy people overall to fight this virus). Herd immunity is the ONLY means to stop this virus. Vaccinations are useless if we don't allow vaccinated people to participate in herd immunity. And we can never develop vaccines at a faster rate than the new mutations occur.

We are contributing to our own demise by messing with mother nature. Never in the history of mankind have we 'intentionally' socially distanced (in massive amounts) our 'healthy' populations from participating in herd immunity. This is as insane as holding back our white bloods cells from attacking and killing an invading virus. We can't win by playing defense (i.e. "hiding" from the virus). Next year at this time (assuming we don't come to our senses, and release the healthy people back into society) we will have at least 10-12 more mutations, and possibly up to 4X more deaths. Today's healthy people will be tomorrow's vulnerable people.

Isn't the definition of insanity - doing the same thing and expecting a different result? WAKE UP PEOPLE!

[Terrapin Station]

So wear a mask if you don't want to be a jackass.

...including immune people? ...do you want to keep killing grandmas (vulnerable people)?

If we don't, at the very least, allow our recently vaccinated and previously infected populations to start participating in herd immunity (take off their masks and start full time socializing), then we will soon reach a point of no return. The party will be over. Humans will become the next extinct animal on this planet within 5-10 years.

Continued social distancing of our healthy immune people will only allow the virus to grow and mutate into potentially more deadly strains (making for less available healthy people overall to fight this virus). Herd immunity is the ONLY means to stop this virus. Vaccinations are useless if we don't allow vaccinated people to participate in herd immunity. And we can never develop vaccines at a faster rate than the new mutations occur.

We are contributing to our own demise by messing with mother nature. Never in the history of mankind have we 'intentionally' socially distanced (in massive amounts) our 'healthy' populations from participating in herd immunity. This is as insane as holding back our white bloods cells from attacking and killing an invading virus. We can't win by playing defense (i.e. "hiding" from the virus). Next year at this time (assuming we don't come to our senses, and release the healthy people back into society) we will have at least 10-12 more mutations, and possibly up to 4X more deaths. Today's healthy people will be tomorrow's vulnerable people.

Isn't the definition of insanity - doing the same thing and expecting a different result? WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Yes, including immune people. Immunity doesn't mean that you don't come into contact with the virus, that the virus doesn't reproduce in your body, and that you don't then put more of the virus back into the environment. Immunity means that after your body comes into contact with the environment and it starts reproducing in your body, you don't get ill from the virus, because you can produce antibodies that fight/kill off the virus in your body within a couple of days. The process takes days to complete, where in the meantime, the virus is reproducing in your body and you're putting more of it back into the environment. Usually, within 2-3 days of coming into contact with a virus you'll start to get ill. If you're immune, within 2-3 days of coming into contact you won't get ill. But the situation is the same for those first couple days whether you're immune or not.

You should be familiar with this from the flu. If you come into contact with someone who has a flu strain (at work, for example) that you're immune to you because you've had it already or you've been vaccinated for it, you won't get sick, but you will sometimes get someone in a different environment sick (a family member at home for example), because you're carrying the virus for a couple days, it's reproducing in your body, and you're putting it back into the environment.

Eventually people will be able to do things without worrying about masks, but that won't happen until the vast majority of the population is immune either via having coronavirus already or via vaccination. We're nowhere near that yet, obviously. We'll get there, but it will probably take another year at least.

And then we're more than likely going to have to get vaccinated every year or two, just like the flu, because coronavirus is going to keep evolving into different strains just like the flu does.

[Steve3007]

Of course, I hope I am wrong. And maybe one of you can show the flaw in my reasoning.

WAKE UP PEOPLE!

I guess he's got that off his chest now and will leave it there, without addressing the flaws that were pointed out. I preferred it when his misunderstandings about logic were only applied to subjects like whether the universe is infinite. At least they don't do any real world harm there.

[Pattern-chaser]

And healthy people, in general, don't die from covid. (...according to the latest published empirical data, of the 2.3 million worldwide covid deaths so far, 99.1% of these people had at least 1 known underlying condition.)

Of the 33,841 deaths that occurred in March and April 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 30,577 (90.4%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 3,264 (9.6%) had none. - Link

About 94% of people who have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. also had other contributing conditions listed on their death certificates, according to new data released by the CDC. - Link

Spreading misinformation is not helpful. Please don't do it.

[Sculptor1]

Non-Truth # 2 - Healthy people (including the asymptomatic, previously infected, and recently vaccinated people) when infected, "contribute" more of the virus, back into the environment than they "remove". This is a blatant non-truth.

THis does not make any sense, since no one "REMOVES" viruses.

For every virus (within the environment) that infects a healthy person is one less virus that can infect a vulnerable person.

Your mis-speaking betrays your lack of understanding.

Mask wearing and social distancing acts to lower the infection rate.

Masking and social distancing of vulnerable people act to lower the infection/deaths to vulnerable people.

BUT… Masking and social distancing of healthy people act to greatly increase the infection/deaths to vulnerable people.

NO.
Mask wearing and social distancing lower infection rates for ALL people. Non vulnerable people area carriers.

[Sculptor1]

And healthy people, in general, don't die from covid. (...according to the latest published empirical data, of the 2.3 million worldwide covid deaths so far, 99.1% of these people had at least 1 known underlying condition.)

Of the 33,841 deaths that occurred in March and April 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 30,577 (90.4%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 3,264 (9.6%) had none. - Link

About 94% of people who have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. also had other contributing conditions listed on their death certificates, according to new data released by the CDC. - Link

Spreading misinformation is not helpful. Please don't do it.

Indeed.

And it is not as if death is the ONLY problem.
We are seeing about 100 admissions per day to hospitals in the UK of CHILDREN with long COVID.
This is the tip of a large iceberg of associated symptoms in people of all ages regardless of pre-existing conditions.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... GfJxrYtN7g

RJG is just trying to justify his ducking his social responsibility to protect others.

[Belindi]

RJG wrote:

People get infected by being in contaminated environments (i.e. from viruses in the air or on surfaces that ultimately transfer into one's respiratory system).

Viruses even coronavirus are delicate things that do not survive long outside of living cells.

NB masks with valves are designed to protect the wearer from particulates and gases but do not protect other people against what the wearer exhales. So masks with valves are not suited to prevention of spread of infections from person to person.

[RJG]

Viruses even coronavirus are delicate things that do not survive long outside of living cells.

Coronavirus can survive up to 7 days on surfaces such as cardboard. Go into any grocery store and see all the people picking up a cereal box for instance to read the nutrition info and put the box back for others to do the same. Lots of potential for infection!

[RJG]

Sculptor1 and Pattern-chaser,

My data comes from a non-biased worldwide source (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/). And while you are checking out this link, go check out and compare the deaths-per-capita of USA (with strict social distancing) with Sweden (with no social distancing). Also notice the actual deaths - Sweden has virtually no more covid deaths, while good old USA are still increasing the killing of our own people by implementing the false notion that social distancing our healthy population saves lives.

Logic, and empirical evidence says we have screwed up massively. But yet we are too vain to admit it, even at the expense of killing more of our own people.

[Belindi]

Viruses even coronavirus are delicate things that do not survive long outside of living cells.

Coronavirus can survive up to 7 days on surfaces such as cardboard. Go into any grocery store and see all the people picking up a cereal box for instance to read the nutrition info and put the box back for others to do the same. Lots of potential for infection!

Yes, but I suppose that is because the porous cardboard retains bodily fluid such as sweat and skin cells that virus uses as its medium. Dry surfaces or surfaces that dry readily and get the air about them don't support virus for long. Some disease microbes have survival mechanisms (spore-bearing) that let them survive when they are dry but as far as I know coronavirus is not one of those.
I wonder if cool dry climates , all else being equal, are healthier.