That'd be an old tradition. Thanksgiving day was the traditional end of the baseball season a century and a half ago. Football was any time they felt like it.

I'm hoping the demonstrations and riots lead to the end of all this people distancing, once everyone realizes they didn't lead to any increase in sickness -- except for the diseases of getting a brick in your head or getting shot by the cops.

The killing in Minneapolis was just the trigger. It's the go-out-of-business-now edicts, and the resulting unemployment and lack of social interaction that people were upset about. Imagine not even being allowed to date for months.

And I'm sure wearing a mask in public isn't an incentive toward illegal acts, right?

H1N1 Coming Soon To A Theater Near You ...
 

Not sure what that means. There is not a single "flu today". H1N1 caused the Spanish flu in 1918, and Swine Flu in 2009, but there are about a dozen different types of viruses that cause human influenza and a variety of these viruses appear every year. H1N1 was here in 1918, caused a lot of influenza epidemics and pandemics in many other years, and it will be back again.

H1N1 may have been here before 1918, but we've only known about human viruses since the late 19th/early 20th century, and proof that influenza was caused by viruses was not obtained until 1933.

https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.n...=0&w=317&h=186

Who Was That Masked Man ???
 

Tell me about it. I haven't been on a date since 1975. Married for thirty years, divorced for fifteen.

I recently had to visit my bank in person to deal with a credit card issue. It felt really strange entering the bank wearing a mask.

As far as I know I can possibly be practically bathing in covid as I handle medical waste, covid specimens and more all day.With less protection than any poor nurse. I've handled crap that will literally melt surgical gloves in seconds that wasn't always securely closed. Been in the labs when they've had live AIDS spilled on the floor. Outside work I'm constantly exposed to giardia, distemper, rabies, tularemia, hantavirus, tetanus and who knows what else that laugh at covid.

It's just another problem filled with problems. Some of the measures taken when this first reared it's ugly head and we had next to nothing for information. Now we got more information than we know what to deal with. Most of it has shown that if your not in a nursing home ran by a new york politician, your odds of dieing is shockingly low

Typhood Mary ...
 

While 100,000 deaths is pretty bad, the worse part of COVID-19 is that one can walk around with the virus for several days, maybe a week, while being completely asymptomatic and unaware that your'e sick and can infect others. That's not the case with many other infectious diseases, including influenza, (you get the influenza virus, don't know that your'e sick and spread the disease for only a few days, get sick, stay home from work or school, and stay in bed). Not so with COVID-19, with this disease one can infect dozens, maybe hundreds, before one even begins to feel sick.

Because of this, with no vaccine (maybe never, best chance is a very modern MRNA vaccine), our only defense as a society will be social distancing and masks because this virus can spread very quickly, killing the old and elderly, the sick (diabetes, asthma, emphysema, high blood pressure, heart disease, immunodeficiency disorders, etc.), cancer patients (chemotherapy), even some of the young and healthy, and maybe a few children.

Of course we can all wait for active immunity (due to surviving the disease) as the disease travels all over the world, killing millions, but that may take a very long time (luckily viruses have evolved to limit their carnage, if they didn't they would kill all their hosts and viruses die with no hosts).

COVID-19 isn't influenza, it's not a cold. It may not be the worst infectious disease, or have the worst symptoms, or the deadliest, or the most widespread, or the easiest to spread, or the easiest to catch, but it's still pretty bad.

I have a feeling that, like our Chinese, Korean, and Japanese friends, we'll (at least those that care about our family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and complete strangers) be wearing our masks for a very long time, it might even become the new normal.

Asymptomatic spread has been shown to be a myth .

I'm off to play golf with 30 fellow hospital employees, none will be wearing masks.

Asymptomatic Spread ...
 

Citation please.

The British Medical Journal Thorax (British Thoracic Society), and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), both say otherwise.

Actually that's been the case with viral pneumonias, which have been among the leading killers of old people (especially in nursing homes) since forever. How could it possibly be getting into nursing homes, other than by being spread from the general population?

Pneumonia isn't caused by a single agent, but we don't know how many it is caused by. It can be caused by a bacterial infection, by influenza, or by other viral diseases. In most cases of pneumonia, even the fatal ones, the causative agent isn't even explored. Other than influenza and tuberculosis, nobody tries to control the spread of pneumonia agents in the general population, and usually the infection isn't even traced. We just know pneumonia agents circulate in the general population, and sometimes cause pneumonias there, but manifest as life-threatening ones in the debilitated. Influenza at least makes most people sick, and we do try to control the spread of tuberculosis -- which tends to infect some people for a long time, and has a lot of carriers who are asymptomatic or have only occasional symptoms -- but for the most part we try only to protect debilitated persons and health care personnel from these agents.

Covid-19 to me is just another viral pneumonia agent, no different from what we presume to be many others that are always circulating and cause most people little harm. It seems the only reasons efforts are being made to control its spread in the general population are: that it was discovered close to its apparent origin of human transmission, and there was a brief chance to prevent its breakout; and that it was associated with a far more severe version of SARS. But the time its breakout could've been stopped has long passed, and it's now known to be much less of a threat than SARS was. I think efforts to control it in the general population are futile, and that control efforts should have been aimed at isolating nursing homes, not the general population.

Of course nursing homes have always been bad on average at keeping pneumonia from going around; some have viewed such pneumonias as a merciful end where euthanasia was not practiced. But as we know, in various places around the world perverse policies were followed that seemed to deliberately increase the chance Covid-19 would go around such facilities, snipping off lives faster than the usual run of pneumonias would have.

We could all have been trying to live like this for the past century for all the medical justification there was, given what we know about pneumonia, trying to keep these respiratory agents from going around because in a few cases they will kill old, debilitated people. But we would thereby have crippled all of society to try to save those few.

Viral Pneumonia ...
 

I've just about finished reading The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry, about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Most deaths were caused by pneumonia, but at the time they thought it was bacterial pneumonia. Of course back then they didn't know much about human viruses, the viral cause of influenza wasn't determined until 1933.

From what I understand, X-Rays of pneumonia in the lungs of COVID-19 patients are quite nasty compared to other types of pneumonia.

Blood Vessel Disease ...
 

And now there's a new study that indicates that COVID-19 is a disease of the blood vessels.

https://news.yahoo.com/evidence-sugg...195153450.html

1) That citation you provided was very good reading

2) Good for you. Do you want a medal? Does that make you brave or something? I played golf outside without a mask over a month ago. Not sure what your point is. I rarely wear a mask outside.

Some people just need attention I guess. Now we know who announcers are talking about when they say "that official is making it all about himself".

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

Not Molly Malone ...
 

Not COVID-19, but typhoid fever (a bacterial infection).

In New York's fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Mary Mallon,
As she wheeled her laundry barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying,"Why are all my employers dying?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, or was he golfing?

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.8...=0&w=328&h=160

The widespread use of masks in these countries seriously predates the appearance of Covid-19, or sundry other infectious agents.

Primary motivator for mask wearing is the near constant smog, most of which originates in China and wafts eastward.

Just pointing out that most of the medical community outside the quacks and media grifters that haven't seen a patient in years consider the.masks and the lockdowns are a joke. Our hospital system would be back to no masks if it weren't for liability lawsuit fears.

King Coal ...
 

Agree, but as you stated "primary", it's not the only reason.

China loves its coal burning plants, spewing out lots of particulate pollutants, that can be sucessfully filtered by surgical masks.

Surgical masks wouldn't do a very good job filtering out the gaseous components of photochemical smog (nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, ground-level ozone, and volatile organic compounds like hydrocarbons), but could do a pretty good job filtering out smoke particulates in photochemical smog

https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.t...=0&w=300&h=300

Old King Coal was a filthy old soul and a filthy old soul was he.
He called for his asthma, and he called for his emphysema, and he called for his fiddlers with lung cancer.