The begining of the end ?

Face masks are no longer required in Orange County although health officials still strongly recommend people wear them.

Chief health officer of Orange County, Calif., lifted the requirement for the public to wear face masks .. days after his predecessor resigned amid criticism, and even death threats, over her issuing the face mask mandate in late May.

Dr. Clayton Chau announced Thursday that while face coverings are no longer mandatory, they are strongly recommended to keep the virus at bay as more businesses in the county are given the green light to reopen.

County officials announced Thursday that bars and breweries, gyms, movie theaters, hotels and more would be able to open Friday as the state moves into Stage Three of its reopening plan, according to the Register.

Public and private neighborhood swimming pools can also open with appropriate social distancing measures in place.

yes but in this theory herd mortality climbs till a 70 percent immunity is achieved. At current rate of infection 2 percent of the population eat as high as 12 percent has been infected with exemplar hospital trade ment we have a recober death ration of 12 percent without treatment. Allow a non infected 20 pool to exist. 

Mortality worse case scenario studies Apr 2020.

Rhe other methods to prevent infection i

s practice raid It hygiene.

Social distancing.

Mask protection hand sanitizer.

Quarantine effectively saves lives.

So mucho intelligente Ducey did this a little while back and how has it turned out for you guys down south? 

Sometimes people need a punch in the face to understand what decisions are necessary even if they are not popular. The places which have density and a hands-off approach have been getting cracked, I would expect the same in the OC...

I guess the term of the thread heading could mean many things..

This sounds like a really intelligent strategy. Arizona and Florida took this approach, and it is great here right now. 

People are not going to be penned up at home for much longer ..even if there is a risk...

Two weekends ago, it was country artists Chase Rice and Chris Janson stirring outrage when they proudly posted videos of themselves playing to packed crowds of fans with no masks in sight.

Last weekend, it was hip-hop star DaBaby in the hot seat for playing a show in a large, packed nightclub where his unmasked female fans were literally reaching out and grabbing him..

Now it's hard-rock band Great White ,which performed an outdoor show Thursday night for a general admission audience in North Dakota, many of whom posted videos giving no indication of even a single mask in the crowd, with fans jammed together, and even shirtless in some instances.

If,you can recall the 2003 tragedy at "The Station "in which 100 people were killed,, including Great White guitarist Ty Longley and 230 more injured in a pyrotechnic-related fire at a Great White show in West Warwick, Rhode Island.

North Dakota has not been ravaged by COVID-19 as much as other states have, largely by virtue of a mostly rural population.

MARGARET BRENNAN: We want to go now to the Surgeon General Vice Admiral Jerome Adams. The doctor joins us this morning from Woolcottville, Indiana. Good morning to you.

U.S. SURGEON GENERAL DOCTOR JEROME ADAMS: Well, good morning, MARGARET. I wish I was here under different circumstances because, as you mentioned, case counts are going up in many localities and we are absolutely concerned about that. But there are two very important things that I just want the American people to know. Number one, we are in a very different place than what we were in February and March. We have an over 300 percent increase in available PPE and that's not to say mission accomplished, but we are in a better place. We have from Remdesivir, steroids, convalescent plasma

Source face the nation today's program.

Are you masked up the message is changing...

This translated to common tongue.

Thatvwe gave doctors and emergency rooms enough time to prepare for this eventual worldwide outbreak. We have ventilators medicine triage procedures mask down quarantine standards to treat 1 million Americans needed hospitalization.

We are bow ready to treat the potential infected.

Meantime research teams aro 7 nd the world race for a vaccine. This where the tide turned. And instead of double digit number of percent mortality we have lowered immediate casualty to less than 1 percent and that better than the common super flu .

In my realm and humble opinion that sir is winning.

Bottom line.

New York City health officials reported zero new coronavirus deaths on Sunday for the first time since the state's first death was recorded on March 11, 

Yes,it was meant as a double entendre ..

We covered this ground in Key's thread about  a week ago.  And for the record  (again) this is where I disagree w Trump as an overall supporter of him .   Wear a damn mask people  !   Your " live free or die " attitude stops when your decision to not wear a mask can effect my health 

IMHO,  trump errored in not making this a federal mandate early on.  He already exercised his emergency powers in March declaring  a national emergency.   Follow through w this decision,  too.  Here we are kidding ourselves that masks can be enforced in one part of the country... and not the other.   We sit here and pretend that people don't travel from city to city... 

He kinda got a bum rap on the whole mask thing. They were questioning him not wearing one in instances where it probably wasn't really necessary. Giving press conferences and such. Dude is like 80 and he's the President. I'm sure he gets tested daily.

Just today, the World Health Organization announced that masks should only be worn by healthy people if they are taking care of someone infected with COVID-19:

Just before the COVID-19 madness, researchers in Hong Kong submitted a study for publication with the mouthful of a title, “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures.” Oddly, the study, just published this month, is actually housed on the CDC’s own website, and directly contradicts recent advice from the CDC about wearing a mask. Namely, the study states:

English translation: there is no evidence that wearing masks reduces the transmission of respiratory illnesses and, if masks are worn improperly (like when people re-use cloth masks), transmission could actually INCREASE. Moreover, this study was a meta-analysis, which means it dug deep into the archive of science (all the way back to 1946!) to reach its conclusions. Said differently, this is as comprehensive as science gets, and their conclusions were crystal clear: masks for the general population show no evidence of working to either slow the spread of respiratory viruses or protect people.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Coronavirus response, is such a big deal:

"From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual," Van Kerkhove said on Monday. "We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They're following asymptomatic cases, they're following contacts and they're not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare -- and much of that is not published in the literature," she said. "We are constantly looking at this data and we're trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward."

The liberal, anti-Trump media have the folks scared to death.  

It doesn’t hurt to wear the masks.  Don’t be a jerk, like the guy in Walmart trying to shove by the guy — just doing his job, by keeping people without masks out of the store. 

But don’t fall for the okey-doke that wearing a mask is a panacea.  The evidence just doesn’t support it.  More and more and more people have been wearing masks and there is no reason to believe it has slowed anything down — especially as more testing has shown an increase in cases.  All of this as the IFR has shifted down, down, etc. 

Doesn’t hurt to wear a mask; but, there is no correlation to increase/decrease in the chance of getting the virus. 

Same with being outdoors.  Yet, you still see folks in the parks wearing masks.  Because they have been frightened, more or less needlessly. 

Same with kids going back to school. Look at other countries that have seen that kids have no issue — their kids are back to school.  But we are trying to scare the folks here into not letting the kids go back to school. This is not affecting the kids.  Asymptomatic folks are not spreading this.  The old folks have to be careful and the folks with underlying conditions.   

Masks or not, the virus will have to run it’s course throughout society. Anti-bodies will be built up in this fashion. It is inevitable. In the mean time, hopefully a cure will have been successfully made. 

"Most studies were underpowered because of limited sample size, and some studies also reported suboptimal adherence in the face mask group."

In other words, the studies took small sample sizes of people living in close quarters. People who live together aren't going to wear masks 24/7. They aren't going to avoid coming into close contact, touching common things, ect. Maybe they are hooking up. There's going to be "suboptimal adherence" to mask wearing. The studie didn't test the effects of wearing masks in the general public. There are flaws in mask wearing. Some mentioned in this study include masks being open and ill fitting, masks being reused. It is common sense though that pathogens spread via droplets will be significantly reduced by wearing masks. Aerosolized pathogens are a different story but one would imagine masks would have some effect on this as well.

Ok. Quality of mask. Full face force air battery operated airnpurfier n95 helps standards.

Or a tube sock to cover your mouth... 

A piece of paper with an elastic. 

There are masks used by biomedical blue authorized blue suit abatement and treatment . 

With a second including a dirty room wash room clean room standards. And thays for lead removal and mold. Dealing with death in a home or at a hospital quarantine wing. Most of glove gown mask change in change out. When Dealing with infectious disease. 

Our government mandates some one removing lead or asbestos must use these procedures but rhe fed hasnt adoptes any policy dealing with a mask

First virus is tiny possibly smaller than hepa standards. Second procedures havent been made policy. The who won't say if this airborne. Yet they are xertain lead chips are... And they are made of lead not the lightest of materials. 

The constant confusion between no and all must be decided to a correct policy. That will provide safety for both rhe wearer and the public. But these masks used in a make do situation are not going to be as effective as a food quality 3m respirator

To put the terms in layman.

If you are from the north and you wish to express happiness on a southern beach in Pensacola Florida and you forgot the sunscreen a t shirt provide spf 8 block yes you can obtain spf 50 block.... But not on the beach.

Yes. Lots of studies show it.  These studies have been around before this current virus. Some are more in-depth than others, of course.  Some of these are just samples during this current pandemic.

N95 style are the only truly reliable ones.  The rest are a big drop off in effectiveness.  Cloth masks are minutely effective, at best.  

This is not the answer — or the masks would be more effective.  

As the guy pointed out above — it just about has to run its course.  We have done a ‘terrific’ job of slowing down the herd immunity — instead of letting in build up in the best group, which are kids. 

Bottom line — they help more than harm.  Wear it. But know it is slight-of-hand ‘political’ medical advice. 

You're gonna have to cite more studies because what you've posted doesn't really prove there ineffectiveness at all. I dove into it pretty deeply. I'm not a mask advocate, I just believe in facts. There are a lot of keyboard lab techs out here making claims and citing studies that don't always add up. Some guys quote articles as gospel and when you read said articles they say things like, "many studies show" yet never cite any actual studies. You did cite actual studies yet in the analysis you provided it points to the data being both limited and flawed.

They are listed way back in the Covid thread.  

And they are easily found online with a quick search. 

If you cannot find them — I can dig them up for you. 

I am not anti-mask the same way I am not anti-ecology.  

I just see it as what it is. Political push. And maybe a desperate grasp at anything to turn this around. This simply is not THE answer.  It can be a part — just a very smart part. Barely enough to matter. 

Another factor is folks are gonna be happy to do whatever they think will help and are told to help.  You are always going to have knuckleheads that refuse.  

But, empirically, it will be difficult to prove later that it did help AND that will be overlooked later. 

We will be on to the next big deal. 

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-masksdangerous-health.html

The widespread use of cloth masks by healthcare workers may actually put them at increased risk of respiratory illness and viral infections and their global use should be discouraged, according to a UNSW study.

The study found respiratory infectionwas much higher among healthcare workers wearing cloth masks.

The penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% compared to medical masks with 44%.

Professor Raina MacIntyre, lead study author and head of UNSW's School of Public Health and Community Medicine, said the results of the study caution against the use of cloth masks.

The authors speculate that the cloth masks' moisture retention, their reuse and poor filtration may explain the increased risk of infection.

"These guidelines need to be updated to reflect the higher infection risk posed by cloth masks, as found in our study."

Professor MacIntyre said the study's results pointed to the effectiveness of medical masks, in addition to the harm caused by cloth masks.