Westerly

Effective when people use it, but they dont, so it's not effective. It's like a seat belt. Super useful if you use it, completely useless if you dont. People dont take precautions and they never are going to. Want more proof, just look up your local DZ. Many dont wear masks, those who do are doing so very substandardly. In the end, this is a game of I need you to do your job (wear a mask) to protect me, I cant do that myself which in the end means we have no actually effective solution because no one is doing it and I cant force other people to do the right thing. Again, even if EVERYONE wore a mask, it still wouldent be enough. That only slightly helps, but most people would still get infected anyway. It only reduces the transmission levels a bit. Even with universal masking, even the best approximation puts us at 100k more deaths through the winter.

You mean the same CDC who originally said that masks were not effective for anything and they recommended not wearing one at all? Also the same CDC who last month said you dont need to self isolate or get a COVID test if you were in close contact with someone who tested positive? The size of a Covid virus is about 1.3 nm. A cloth mask has gaps in it that are so large comparatively it's like an ant walking through an airplane hanger door. The reason why N-95 masks work are becasue they are electrically charged so small particles 'stick' to the fibers. Without that feature, they would be substantially less effective. Cloth masks dont have that feature at all.

I'm advocating we release the vaccine now to anyone who wants it. Yes it will take time to make and I get that, but for everyday we screw around with more testing is another day that thousands will die. In the end the vaccine will get approved eventually anyway and all this waiting will have accomplished is hundreds of thousands that will be dead that otherwise wouldent have been if they were able to get the vaccine out sooner. It will be a case of 'oh, I guess the vaccine WAS safe and effective after all, good thing we made everyone wait for no reason". There is a good reason to test drugs, but sometimes there is a good reason cut corners as well. This is a case where quantity matters more than quality.

lol that's not even remotely in the same neighborhood as a relevant example. A reserve will function perfectly fine regardless if it was packed 180 days ago or 190. A cloth mask made from a T shirt DOES NOT and will not ever provide the same level of protection as a NIOSH certified N-95 or above mask. They are not the same thing. That's the equivalent of having your buddy wrap some twine he bought at Home Depot around you to tie you into the seat of car and saying 'that's basically the same thing as wearing a seatbelt'. No it's not. It's ghetto rigging which is crap. Cloth masks are the PPE version of ghetto rigging and they do not and will not ever afford anywhere near the same level of protection as certified PPE designed for reducing transmission of infectious diseases. If everyone swapped out their cloth masks for properly fitted N-95 masks, we would save lots of lives because real PPE works better than fake PPE. Why I need to explain the importance of quality and using genuine product is beyond me. I'd think that would be obvious.

The problem with masks is they do very little to protect YOU. They are for protecting others. So really the protection for you comes in the form of other people, not you, wearing a mask. The obvious problem there is that other people dont give a shit about you, thus they dont wear a mask and you get infected even if you are wearing a mask. It's not a very good plan. So a plan that relies on the generosity and care of other humans to ensure your safety is a plan guaranteed to fail (as it has been in the USA). I prefer actions that I take that protect me directly, which a vaccine is one of those.

A cloth mask is not PPE. OSHA decides what is and what is not PPE, and an uncertified made at home mask does not meet the legal definition of PPE. If you showed up to a construction worksite which required a respirator and all you brought was a cloth mask made from a bandanna, you'd be thrown off the site. The R not rate is not going to drop long-term below 1 as long as people are infectible. Right now the projections show that at our current track by March 450,000 people will be dead. If we had 100% compliance with mask wearing 100% of the time, we would have 340,000 deaths. Put another way, even with everyone wearing masks, 340k people would still be dead. That's a reduction of like 30% over what we have with our currently mixed usage. That's good, but not exactly a god send. If masks were truly that effective and legitimately really PPE, then there would be few additional deaths. I bet if everyone wore full, legit PPE including N-99 masks properly fitted, a face shield and a full body chemical suit, deaths would probably drop 100k even lower--just proving that cloth masks are not real PPE. They are band aid in a desperate situation. They help the situation, but you absolutely can still die even if you wear a cloth mask. A vaccine goes far, far beyond that. A vaccine will drastically reduce your chances of death well beyond what even legit PPE can offer.

Yes, but that wont happen until most of the population has already been infected. As long as there are people to infect, the virus will keep infecting. South Korea and all the others were able to get their numbers super low because they kept them low in the first place. A virus is much easier to contain when only a few people have it. But eventually 2 becomes 4 and 4 becomes 8 and 8 becomes 16 and so on and so on. So controlling it early on can be effective, but once you have 10m cases it's completely uncontrollable at that point. No level of measures will contain it when there are that many people infected. There is absolutely nothing the USA could do to get our cases down to zero at this point which means eliminating it entirely will never happen without a vaccine. That's the main strategy of all viruses. They are vulnerable early on, but once they spread to enough hosts they are a runaway train doing 90 through the middle of the city. There is nothing that can stop them except a vaccine at that point.

140k today. another new, new record. 80 to 140k in a week. maybe 280k in another week???

I am not claiming that. However, none of those things are preventatives. They are intended to slow the cognation curve so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. Cloth masks and hand watching is not legit PPE. They are desperate attempts at making home made PPE instead because we dont have enough real PPE for everyone. Washing your hands and wearing a mask will not prevent you from eventually getting COVID. If a vaccine does not come out, the virus will continue to run its course until eventually everyone gets infected. Masks and hygiene cannot and will not prevent that. The only tool we currently have that will completely prevent you from getting COVID is social distancing, but that is not physically possible. We cant live our entire lives without interacting with a single person. A vaccine however PREVENTS you from getting COVID. Once you get a vaccine, you're now immune and will never get COVID, OR at the minimum you may still be susceptible, but at a MUCH lower level that makes it more like the flu and less like a SARS virus. That's the difference. One just delays the inevitable, the other prevents the inevitable from ever occurring. A vaccine does not require everyone to get vaccinated. It just requires that I get vaccinated for it to help me. If other people choose not to take the vaccine and they get sick, that's on them. Those who choose to take the vaccine will still be protected even if almost everyone else chooses not to.

It might make sense if the current reserves on the market were failing 50% of the time which is more of an appropriate comparison to what's going on at the moment. This is not a normal situation we are in and extreme situations require extreme reactions. Your scenario is not urgent in any capacity. The real situation we are in is extremely urgent. I bet the FAA would rush testing of a new reserve if they were finding that 5,000 skydivers were dying every year from reserve failures.

There is absolutely no evidence to make that claim. Not one single person who has taken a COVID vaccine trial has died as a result of the vaccine and more than 250,000 people are currently in trials. Not one anywhere on the entire planet in any test being conducted by drug company resulted in a death of even one of the test subjects. This is like claiming that skydiving is unsafe because you KNOW that if both your main and reserve fail to deploy, you're going to die. While that statement is technically true, it's also total bullshit because that has almost no chance of happening in the first place. These vaccine trials dident come out yesterday. Some have already been conducting human testing for almost a half of a year now and so far they have been fairly safe. Very few people have had any adverse consequences in taking it, and the couple that did are easily within the standard deviation of adverse reactions that occur in already-approved vaccines for other diseases. You keep peddling a scenario that has almost no chance of actually happening and using that against the defense of a scenario that has a 100% chance of occurring. That's not a very strong argument. In the end the anti-vaxxers are not going take a vaccine regardless of the results of the trial so that's mostly a moot point.

Yea, good luck, there are still going to be lockdowns in effect by then. I guess people dont get it--COVID is not going away. This is the new normal, at least for the next 2-3 years. The life you knew in 2019 doesent exist anymore.

Lots of things 'can' happen. I can tell you what WILL happen. Hundreds of thousands more people will be dead for every few months it's not released. And what happens when the vaccine is finally approved and the FDA says yep it's safe and effective? Then we're gonna be like crap, I guess it was safe all along. Well kind of late at that point for a lot of people who are already dead.

It's a done deal. The courts arnt going to do anything. Biden is the new president, accept it or not, it's a material fact at this point.

Just another arguing point as to why it should be released immediately. Every day they are screwing around trying to make "sure, super sure sure' that it's effective and safe is another day thousands die. Sometimes you just have to call it good enough and move forward.

bump another day with 129k cases. pretty solid for a sunday. I'd say that's a new record, but every day is a new record.

Hua? What are you talking about. Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral vote.

I guess technically Trump could run for president a second time in 2024. I dont think the constitution disallows a single term president from becoming president a second time. What a freaking show that would be...

133,000 cases today. We went from 80,000 something to 133k in a week. I guess we are on track to make 200,000 by Thanksgiving easy.

Another massive increase? We're still in the current massive increase. It's just one continuous increase. Maybe people will get scared when we get to 300,000 cases a day. Doubt it though. They might get scared when they call 911 and ask for an ambulance and the operator tells them medical services are currently unavailable.

Well that goes both ways. Trump rallies always lead to an increase in COVID cases shortly after, but I bet so do Biden rallies. There is no way around it. If you put people together its going to spread. The virus doesent care who you support.

So fighting Nazis was their most recent mission?

It's almost as if we could have SOMEHOW predicted that hosting a major rally with hundreds of thousands of people largely from the 'COVID is fake news' group, all of which are not socially distancing at all for two weeks straight, would lead to something like Zeus' giant hammer from the sky coming down to lay waste to all the disobedient underlings. Except in this case the hammer is much smaller and there are trillions of them. But that's just a pipe dream. Too bad no one could have possibly predicted the absolute disaster that would ensure after a major event like that. As they say, freedom is paid for in blood. I guess they just werent expecting it would be their blood that's doing the paying.

Canada has a military? What do they even do?

Dont they already claim all that crap? Anyway, they can claim whatever they want. Claims dont determine presidents, votes do.