Vetalia wrote:Australian rePublic wrote:I wish New South Wales would make face masks mandatory already , but unfortunately, that would require a compitant government. I purchased a reusable face mask from eBay, but unfortunately, it's lost in transit. Till it arrives, I'm stuck with single use
I don't really know why mandatory masks in businesses and other indoor business places are not standard policy...they seem to be such an easy, effective way to minimize the spread of coronavirus even without considering any social distancing factors. Had such measures been implemented early on the disastrous lockdowns could have likely been avoided in their entirety.
Really, there isn't a whole lot that can't remain open and functioning with a simple mask mandate in place.
At the beginning of everything, though, the WHO was saying masks didn't do much to stop the spread of the virus - they have a point, since virus particles can still make it into your body through your eyes, but the distance travelled by particles leaving your nose and mouth is reduced substantially if you wear a mask, so the cliche of "it's not to protect you; it's to protect others" is actually true. I agree that if wearing masks had been mainstream and encouraged early on (February-early March), the whole thing could have been significantly reduced in scope.
With that being said, remember how in March when the lockdowns were first instituted, the line was that things could go mostly or fully back to normal in only 2-4 weeks? As it stands right now, our attempts to "flatten" the epidemic curve have done just that: prolong the duration of all of this without reducing the area under the curve. Little did anyone know that the actual peak of the epidemic in the United States would be in
July as opposed to March or April.
I am, for the record, still not convinced lockdowns are the answer. During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa a few years ago,
Sierra Leone instituted only a three-day lockdown, and I can't find anything regarding Liberia or Guinea imposing a lockdown at all. They made sure people knew how to prevent the disease, people understood the gravity of the situation and followed through, and the epidemic resolved itself from first case to last trickle in a bit over two years. SARS, bird flu, and swine flu all for the most part resolved themselves without state- or country-wide lockdowns within two years or less. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem never formally instituted a "stay at home" or similarly named order; she focused on getting information out to people and letting them make their own decisions, and the outbreak there seems to have peaked in
May and have seen a mostly linear growth in total infections for the last two months, only a slight increase within the past couple of weeks.
My strategy if I had been the leader of a state or country: make sure accurate, complete, and recent data are publicly available, and make sure there are enough masks and enough space in hospitals to go around. Emphasize proper hygiene, keeping distance from other people, and otherwise remaining safe. Without hysterics and without downplaying what's going on, just make sure to hammer the point home and give people the information they need. Quarantine infected people and work on contact tracing, but don't try to dodge the problem by locking everyone in their house.
Glorious Hong Kong wrote:I do not believe for one moment that Hong Kong is recording more than a hundred cases a day while Shenzhen next door has zero cases. I call bullshit. China is definitely fudging its figures. I'll never forgive that lying bitch Carrie Lam for using the pandemic to postpone the Legislative Council elections for an ENTIRE YEAR because the CCP is legitimately afraid it might lose for the first time ever despite the entire system being historically rigged in its favor.
Vietnam is experiencing a second wave of virus cases due to illegal immigration from CHINA, and Vietnam had no local cases for MONTHS. Don't tell me the second wave in Hong Kong is due to the pan-democrat primaries that were held last month. The second wave was imported from CHINA. The first global wave to ravage Europe and the United States was imported from CHINA. CHINA is to blame for the pandemic's origins. If China was a democracy, there wouldn't even be a fucking pandemic in the first place. The government lies and cheats like there's no tomorrow.
100%. With a competent Chinese government that's actually transparent and respects people's rights, we might have something like MERS come out of this, or something like SARS that spread around the world a little bit but never reached pandemic levels, but the saying of "China lied, people died" is by this point an objective fact.
Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2020 6:32 am
