Corona-zona

  On Tuesday NY Times Columnist Bret Stephens ran an op-ed  where he dripped contempt for people who said masks work. He thinks we all owe him and other anti-maskers a big fat apology. He cites a new review of scientific literature as evidence that masks really don't work. He quotes one of the study's authors (an epidemiologist who I suppose he interviewed) as saying there is no evidence that masks work, and no evidence that hand washing and air filtration work either. He then whines about how badly the anti-maskers were treated when they were right all along. No mention of poor treatment of pro-maskers. I guess it's OK since they were wrong all along? Here's the thing. Look at the "plain language summary" written by the authors of the   actual study :  We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed. Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory ...

  This just in: A federal judge in Florida (because of course Florida) has struck down a CDC rule requiring people on airplanes and other mass transit to wear masks. The judge in question was appointed by T**** (because of course she was). The judge said in her ruling that the CDC never had the authority to issue these mandates. I suppose she never read section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264). It  says "the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states." As Steve Vladek, professor of law at the University of Texas said : This is both a big deal and a truly preposterous (nationwide) injunction. The CDC’s statutory authority is specifically directed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases across state lines. Where else is such spread more likely to occur than transport hubs like airports? Whe...

Mask-hole parents who disrupt and threaten violence  against school boards over mask mandates look like even bigger idiots than they did before. A new study forthcoming in the journal Pediatrics shows that masking is effective at preventing the spread of COVID-19 at school, just like the public health people have said all along. Researchers studied within-school transmission in the last six months of 2021 among over a million students and over 150,000 staff member in 61 K-12 districts in nine states. Six of the districts had optional masking policies, nine had partial masking policies (changing over time or based on conditions), and 46 had universal masking policies. The differences were big. For every 100 community-acquired infections, the universally masked districts had 7.3 cases acquired in-school, while the optionally masked districts had 26.4 cases. That is a rate 3.6 times (or 72%) higher. Districts with partial masking policies had rates 2.4 times higher. This seems obvi...

  Just when you think people can't get any crazier, there's this. Mask-hole parents are bombarding schools with fake notices of claim, threatening to file them against their surety bonds if the schools don't do what they want. This includes ending masking policies and various other things. They're being egged-on by a website and Telegram group called "Bonds for the Win." The website is run by this fruitcake woman in Scottsdale named Miki Klann who thinks the Earth is flat and that AIDS is a hoax. Here is an example of one of their documents served in Michigan. It lists 15 violations of state, federal, and international law—including the Nuremberg code, naturally—that the school has supposedly committed. All legal experts agree that these claims are 100% bullshit. This type of bond fraud   is a form of paper terrorism and was innovated by the sovereign citizens movement . They flooded courts with invalid pseudo-legal documents claiming they are not subject t...

A recent study has concluded that lockdowns don't work. It is being bandied-about by conservative media as proof that other pandemic mitigation measures like masks don't work either. The study  is a meta-analysis, which statistically combines the results of other, smaller studies to gain  power to detect differences. It was done by some some economists—not epidemiologists.  It was published in a journal that is not peer-reviewed and was founded by a coauthor of the paper. That guy also happens to be a fellow at the arch-conservative Cato Institute. Talk about motivated reasoning. Public health experts criticized the study , saying it used an squishy definition of lockdowns. It also did not properly account for complex disease processes such as the wide variation in time it takes for infected people to die. Despite this, Rand Paul wasted no time taking the study at face value, claiming that lockdowns do more harm than good. He also said that masks don't work. Wait...wasn...

A study just published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications looked at the effects of male facial occlusion on judgments of attractiveness by females. The effects were the same for both attractive and unattractive men. The researchers got pictures of low- and high-attractiveness male faces covered with a medical mask, a cloth mask, a book, or nothing (see header pic). They then asked females to rate how attractive the faces were. Here is how the ratings came out: Basically, any covered face was significantly more attractive (meaning the difference is unlikely to be due to chance) than the uncovered face. This was true both for attractive and unattractive faces.   This lack of difference between baseline attractiveness surprised the researchers. I suppose they reckoned that hiding features of an ugly face would work better than hiding those of a handsome face, but nope. Also the medical mask was rated as significantly more attractive than the other two coverings....

I've been doing this blog for just about a year now. The first regular post was January 6, 2021. I'll reflect on that in a few days. Meanwhile, what kind of a media outlet would this be if I didn't do a year-in-review post? Looking back over the year's posts, it's amazing how much has been going on, and how much there potentially is to review. I can't spend all day on a detailed summary.  So I will try to focus on a bird's eye view. Vaccines & Anti-Vaxxers Vaccines have to be the biggest topic on this blog over the past year. Vaccines were very hard to get this time last year. A lot of people wanted them and the distribution was just getting started.  People had to navigate really crappy systems, like one in Arizona , to make reservations. There were " vaccine tourists " who would travel from other states and even countries in an effort to get jabbed.   Then, around March last year, those who wanted the shots had largely gotten them, and incre...

  Here are updates on three recent Corona-zona posts for your reading enjoyment. Florida School Walks Back Vaccination Quarantine Policy Last week I blogged about a private school in Miami  that established a policy saying kids must be quarantined for a month after a COVID-19 vaccination. They claimed the policy was a result of careful deliberation even though this apparently included no research on whether COVID-19 vaccines can cause "virus shedding" (they can't). Yesterday there came word that they changed their mind after receiving notification from the Florida Department of Education that their policy was being investigated. Wait, a Florida government agency is actually doing something to promote vaccination and public health?!? Somebody tell DeSantis—he must put a stop to this immediately! Florida Surgeon General Nominee is a Mask-hole Too Last Saturday I blogged about an appointment by Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis of an anti-vaxx doctor to be the ...

  Earlier this month the CDC released a study on the effectiveness of mask requirements in schools in preventing the spread of COVID-19. It was conducted by researchers from ASU, the CSC, Maricopa and Pima counties, and the Arizona Department of Education. (Where is AzDHS?) The researchers compared schools with "early mask requirements"—i.e., in place before school started—to those with "late mask requirements" (instituted after school started) to those with no mask requirements.  Usable data were collected from 999 of 1,041 (96.0%) of K–12 public non-charter schools in Maricopa and Pima counties. The results show that—guess what—masks work. Here is a chart derived from numbers presented in a main results table in the study: In other words, schools without mask mandates were three times more likely to have an our break as schools with mask mandates. Actually the figure is a little higher. Quoting the CDC report: "After adjusting for potential described confoun...

  A new study  is—as far as I know—the first truly controlled field experiment on mask effectiveness. The conclusion is that masks work.  We already knew masks work because you can see it for yourself . But it's one thing to see that masks block droplets and another to know that this translates into meaningful protection at the community level. This latest study involved 600 villages in Bangladesh, which have a combined population of 342,126 adults. Researchers randomly selected some of the villages to be in the treatment group and the rest were in the control group.   For eight weeks, people in the treatment villages received free masks, information on the importance of masking, role modeling by community leaders, and in-person reminders. Villages in the control group received none of that. Researchers visited the villages every week over the study period to observe how many people were properly wearing masks and social distancing at mosques, markets, the ...

Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has had his wings clipped by a Florida judge.  The judge threw out his ban on mask mandates in schools.  The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by parents who were worried about their kids getting exposed to the virus while at school.  The judge concluded that mandated mask use is "reasonable and consistent with the best scientific and medical opinion in this country." DeSantis had planned to withhold funds from schools who defied his ban. The judge said he would issue an injunction prohibiting that.   The judge also suggested, essentially, that DeSantis should grow up and look for solutions rather than throwing bombs in the culture war.  "We will not solve any issue if we can't sit down and work together and take positions recognizing what's going on is not some recent imposition or some attack on the country," he said. Somebody buy that judge a beer.  Apparently not everyone in Florida is equal parts stupid and d...

  Here are some updates on topics recently covered in this blog. No Vax Could Cost You "Unvaccinated individuals have potential to cost the employer more from a health care spend perspective," Symons told CBS MoneyWatch. "They could get COVID and incur expensive hospital costs up to $50,000 for an individual with a tough COVID case." Back in June I blogged a proposal to make people who refuse vaccinations pay their own way if they get COVID-19. It's only fair: If people exercise their freedom to forego the vaccine, they should also be responsible for the consequences of that decision.  As it is they freeride. They can refuse the vaccine for childish and/or political reasons, then depend on those of us who have made the responsible choice to save their bacon with expensive hospital care that everyone pays for through insurance premiums. Incredibly, nobody has rushed to implement my proposal, but insurance providers may be taking a step in that direction. They...

  [Hey...been off for a couple days due to work demands. I had a choice of what to post about today, but I'd be remiss if I didn't cover this particular topic.] Yesterday the Arizona governor dropped another Ducey, signing an order prohibiting universities from mandating vaccines or masks. You can't require people to be vaccinated, and you can't require those that aren't (or can't be) to wear masks to prevent them from catching or spreading disease.  This is—straight up—an order to promote public illness. It's like when Ducey decided in spring 2020 to ban local government mask mandates, only to change his mind when Arizona became the worst place in the world for COVID-19. If we needed masks to prevent illness then, why are they bad now? Of course, Ducey says this is all about individual freedom. But it's not just about individuals. If you don't get vaccinated and also don't wear a mask, you are endangering not only yourself but others around yo...

  As regular readers know, there has been quite a bit of coverage on this blog about mask effectiveness. It forced me to learn about aerosols and how they move around a room and spread the virus. On of the casualties of that learning has been my innocence/naivete regarding how much exhaust from other humans I probably have always breathed in. This new study demonstrates how even normal breathing creates a "saliva plume" that travels some distance from the breather.   The study concludes that "normal breathing indoors without a mask can transport saliva droplets capable of carrying virus particles to a distance of 2.2 meters, or 7.2 feet, in a matter of 90 seconds." Eeww.  That means if you're sitting next to someone who is not masked on a plane, or within seven feet of someone at a bar or restaurant, and they are merely breathing, you're going to be inhaling stuff from their "saliva plume." If that plume happens to include enough SARS-CoV-2 parti...

A paper just published in the journal Science  shows, once again, that masks are effective at mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission.  The twist on this study was that they looked at masks' effectiveness as a function of how virus-rich an environment is. They found that "surgical masking achieves large reductions in infection probability when the maskless infection probability is low, but increasingly smaller reductions when the maskless infection probability is high."   So in other words, masks work extremely well when the viral load is low, and less well when the viral load is high, as you'd expect. They found similar results for N95 masks, which are about an order of magnitude better at preventing infection.   They also considered different combinations of who is wearing a mask. Again, as you'd expect, the found that effectiveness was highest when there is "universal masking," next highest when someone emitting the virus is masked, and next highest when ...

  The CDC and its director Rochelle Walensky are taking a lot of flack over their announcement last week that vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks in most settings. This is something everyone has been wanting, so why the uproar? Just a couple of days before the announcement, Walensky was defending CDCs mask policies at a Senate hearing. She got an earful from Sen. Susan Collins, who said "I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don't anymore." She continued: So, here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission, and unworkable restrictions on summer camps. Why does this matter? It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendation, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.  Ouch.  So you would think Collins and people like her would be overjoyed when the mask guidance changed. Perhaps she was, but others, not s...

  Last month I did a post about some guy trying to "debunk" masks by providing us with all the devastating scientific evidence that masks don’t work. Turns out that, on careful examination, his scientific evidence was bunk.  People like this try to " baffle 'em with bullshit ," counting on most people not knowing how to read the studies they cite and/or being too lazy to do so.   A few days ago I saw a story about a study proving that masks are harmful.   It was published in an outlet called Medical Hypotheses. That journal publishes ideas, not actual research, so their articles don't "prove" anything.   The author claimed to be affiliated with Stanford.   Stanford has said he is not affiliated with them. You can draw your own conclusions regarding what that says about his credibility. I looked at the abstract, which says there is no scientific evidence of masks’ effectiveness. That is straight-up wrong.  Look here . Readers, I don’t have...

  We've all gotten familiar with masks and their limitations over the past year. There is no doubt that they work  (at least if they're not fake ), but they have problems. Leakage is one that can currently only be addressed with external appliances . Another is comfort.  Since masks are a big market, lots of people are trying to design a better virus-trap. Predictably, there are high-tech entries.  Razer is designing one , but it's not for sale yet. One that is for sale, assuming you have $299 to drop on a mask, is the Xupermask . It is a collaboration between Will.i.am and Honeywell (?). Both of these things have N95 filtration, active ventilation, speakers, and Bluetooth. The Xupermask has noise cancelling headphones too, for some reason.  They also look like they'd be at home in a Mad Max movie (assuming the post-apocalyptic landscape still has power to charge the masks).  While these entries are a little over-the top, they are at least designed to...

This past weekend the CBC released a video about problems with fake or substandard KN95 masks that are sold by many retailers. They bought a bunch of different brands from Amazon, Walmart, Lowes, etc., and had them tested for filtration efficiency by a university lab. Half of the masks they tested did not meet the standard of filtering 95% of virus-sized particles. One brand, Seal Goods, which is for sale on Amazon, tested as low at 19% filtration efficiency.   The video claims there are three red flags indicating you might be dealing with a sketchy brand: Failure to list a manufacturer on the packaging.  Having the FDA logo on the package or mask (the FDA doesn't permit its logo to be used in this way).  Use of ziplock bags or other unmarked packaging. Maddeningly, the video does not say which brands it tested did meet the 95% standard. However, a recent article in Health  lists six brands you can buy online that are also on the FDA's Emergency Use Authoriz...

  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who allegedly has his own problems following the law—is suing Travis County, and the state capitol it encompasses, Austin. Those jurisdictions are refusing to to comply with an order from their marshmallow-eating governor to rescind all pandemic restrictions, including mask ordinances. This is just so messed up. First, public health experts uniformly agree that the Texas governor's move is reckless . Travis County and Austin officials are just doing what they think is right to protect the health and safety of their citizens. Paxton is basically suing to force those officials to endanger their citizens. Second, once upon a time, Republicans like Paxton (and Abbott) were all about devolving power and championing states' rights . This is the exact same thing, only one level down. Apparently it's only important to devolve power until you're the one wielding the power and the subordinate entities make decisions you don't like. Third...