Well Mr Einstein. Let's just say she did get a test. Then what would the Doctor advise? Yup, you guessed it: you should shelter at home and drink plenty of fluids and eat good stuff yadda-yadda. If you take a turn for the worse, call 911. That is what a Doctor would tell you. Can you believe it? How's that for a strategy to deal with a pandemic?
Anyone that thinks they are going to contact trace me is gravely mistaken and will be advised of such in the most terse terminology. Anyone that knows me knows not to put me down as a contact for tracing either, presumably because of my terse ways.
Point remains. Testing don't do actual jack to cure you and it does not really change your treatment regime.
Dolt Alert: So we can quit wiping down surfaces and disinfecting whole buildings, shopping cart handles and whole planes now? I suppose you are now saying is it OK-fine to touch our faces and such. What the heck was all that hub-bub about washing hands anyway? All those studies about surface longevity of the virus was just a bunch of inebriated fools putzing around on calculators?!? Well... actually that last line may be turning out to be a more accurate then I had hoped. But still....
Stuff your wishes. Wearing a mask creates risks to healthy people, especially flimsy cloth ones that get stuffed in your pocket and reused repeatedly. The Surgeon General told you, Dr Fauci told you, Dr Birx told you. If there is one good thing that may come of this, I hope it is people will be comfortable wearing a mask in public when they are mildly sick. But I doubt our culture will even except that but instead want to treat them as a pariah or harbinger of pestilence.
Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do
Addressing your points -
If I've got a cough and a mild fever for a few days I'm not going to stay home from work and isolate myself until two weeks after symptoms disappear unless I test positive. So maybe that's a difference between you and me. A lot of people are asymptomatic, and tracing and testing can track some of them down. In my community on average the health department traces 10 contacts for each coronavirus patient. If I were one of those contacts I'd want to be tested, so I wouldn't go around passing the disease onto others if I've got it.
Countries where people wore masks at the start have had a very low number of fatalities from this, for example,
Japan - 6 deaths per million
South Korea - 5 deaths per million
Taiwan - 0.3 deaths per million
Hong Kong - 0.5 deaths per million
All these places had direct flights to Wuhan. Hong Kong is the most densely packed city in the world.
Compare to the USA, with 300 deaths per million.
Some countries in central Europe require that people wear masks. Although they got started later than the Asians, they've had great success -- see Figure 6 on page 12 of this,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.13553.pdf
As to methods of transmission, you'd be wise to continue hand washing, etc. This is a good read,
https://www.livescience.com/how-covi...on-routes.html
They describe a case in Singapore that may have been transferred by contact. There's another case, very similar, on a bus in China, where someone transmitted the disease to about 8 or 9 people on the same bus ride. Then the bus empties and someone new boards it and catches the coronavirus, presumably from contact. These two cases would appear to indicate the people caught the disease through contact, but it could have been aerosolized so that they caught it through the air instead. We really don't know, but the CDC is now saying that contact is probably not the primary way the disease is transmitted.
It wouldn't be surprising if Fauci, Brix or the Surgeon General said don't wear masks earlier on. They didn't want the general public wearing masks because they thought it reduced the number available to hospitals and clinics. They're all on the same page now, and they all say wear a mask.
