Face Shields

hi mr philpots. really i am not sure we disagree. your last sentence i certainly agree with. we don't want to ignore good advice, and masks do for example to "reduce the spread". but its just not either or. masks have their limitations. the virus is only about one micron. the mask N95 is rated that at 3 microns. yes the virus is attached to "droplets" but that includes aerosols which come in a full spectrum of sizes and can also be smaller than 3 microns. do masks help? yes.

you are in a room with one hundred people, all wearing masks, will the masks help. yes. you are in a room with 100 people and you are the only one wearing a mask, will it help. maybe a little. one of the problems is compliance and i would say in my public experience now every day perhaps half of the public population is masked but many are t shirts or cloth masks, in no way 3 micron rated.

should we try anyway? sure, why not. for one thing we don't want people to blame us for the problem. are we really preventing the spread of covid. with all the non compliance i personally, as an epidemiologist, do not think so.

not to be too crude, but can you stop diarrhea with your finger? no, but perhaps you can slow it down a little. i will try to follow the rules here if i can. i find the face shield and back shield virtually meaningless. i don't want my friends upset with me, or the government becoming interested in me, but professionally, in this environment there is little we can do and with the current death rate from covid, does it really matter?

 

so ... we should just do nothing ? really ...? Maybe it is good that you retired when you did as that attitude would lend nothing to the current crisis ....

 

so how much more of the philippine economy would you propose to sacrifice? that is the trade off. only an effective vaccine will affect covid deaths.

pullum parvis

 

As an epidemiologist, your work would be involved with the spread of a disease - including how the virus spreads and what public health measures can be used to reduce or stop that. But often you challenge anyone here trying to reduce the spread and you give examples of people NOT doing anything (or doing it badly) as evidence that the whole thing is pointless.

An epidemiologist should be backing control methods and decrying the people not observing them - NOT criticising the methods being put in place. It is the people who criticise control methods or fail to obey them who are the ones an epidemiologist should be worrying about.

 

And anus. Perhaps humans have evolved a match - not research I wish to do!

 

lol, well as a nurse, student and otherwise, i have some actual "hands on" experience with that topic (ever hear of an impaction or tripple H enema? ) fortunately my actual practice for my last six working years was in psychiatric nursing so my finger was fortunately pointed at the other end!