why do you need N95 masks? Are you doing high risk AGP when you pop out for the milk ?
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Rusty Nails
We remember
- Location
- Living in the slow lane
deptfordmarmoset
Full time tea drinker
- Location
- Armonmy Way
Just checking: RCT = Randomised Controlled Trials?
fossyant
Ride It Like You Stole It!
- Location
- South Manchester
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Sadly it seems genuine. That's a screen capture of German TV station ZDF who reported it as an example of US media bias, as you might be able to tell by the source credit ("Quelle" = source) overtyped bottom right, as well as the German translation subtitles (although it seems "Superb?" is the same in German!)
Rocky
Hello decadence
Yes - which are seen as the gold standard for new drug and other medical intervention research (such as a new surgery technique). The problem is that the few small scale RCTs on mask use have been looking at the impact on the wearer and not people the wearer comes into contact with. So in a situation where your mask protects me, and my mask protects you, there is zero RCT evidence. But more importantly, there's a lot of lab science which looks at how viruses are transmitted in the air through water droplets from the nose and mouth, but all of this is being ignored by SAGE and the government. Also, the WHO is being really naughty - it recommends that the public wear face masks in time of pandemic flu but not for COVID. If anything, given the increased infectiousness of Covid compared with flu, their recommendations should be the other way round.
There is a big debate about the limitations of RCTs in informing public policy - what works in a controlled clinical trial might not work in a public setting for a whole load of reasons.
The irony for me is that the government recommends that we sneeze into a hanky (or our elbow if we don't have a hanky) - try searching for an RCT on the efficacy of sneezing into your elbow. I don't think you'll find one - it's just plain common sense.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
If only a few do it, government will probably like it because it keeps us ticking towards the "herd immunity" idea!
kingrollo
Guru
Indeed !!!
IMO the lockdown isn't being enforced. If shops etc start opening the government aren't going to clampdown on them.
I don't think the gov want a big announcement - the lockdown is over - they would rather people just trickle back to normality - it clears the govt if the infections start to rise.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Well, no, but isn't that why trials are done?
The trouble with "common sense" is that it's often neither common or sense. People may laugh at Trump's bleach injections, but it wasn't many weeks ago that the "common sense" idea of killing c19 by gargling with various useless or harmful things was spreading wildly on social media.
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Not really, if lockdown is seen as lasting forever with no end and no exit then it will be harder for us folk to take. It's when there is no exit and no strategy that you begin to lose faith that the government knows what it is doing in this pandemic. This lockdown is based on a single model from Fergie, so what does that model say about different exit points and strategies? Which options are being considered and why?
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
I understand where you're coming from but strongly disagree. There is not one way out of this, and there should be an opportunity to hear the options and debate them, not suffer a steady stream of diktats sent down arbitrarily from no. 10 over the next year or two.
Low Gear Guy
Veteran
- Location
- Surrey
A controlled exit would be preferable to a slow collapse of the lockdown. A plan for a gradual relaxation with an option for reversing this is required.
