I just received the Happy Masks I bought for the grandparents. I don't know how they are to wear because just arrived and haven't heard reports from the wearers. I have to say though, that they are way thinner and lighter than I was expecting. If they are that thin and light and do indeed filter really well then they are wonderful. I must admit it did give me pause though. I'm not sure if there is any way to find out for sure about the filtration. It's actually kind of hard to believe they are made up of 3 layers. If they weren't $18 each I'd take one apart to make sure.

I'm wondering if we all seemed to have similar numbers of cases at the beginning because we were all testing roughly the same amount of people per day, but of course not catching the real number and NY had so many more uncaught.

Absolutely! Me too! This is a very homogeneous area in terms of way of thinking. One of the drs I work with said his family came into town and refused to go out to eat anywhere because we weren't taking covid seriously here. They were absolutely right!This particular dr does is also taking it seriously, and I have to say there are a number of people at work who are also taking it seriously. I have not eaten in a restaurant since early March or maybe before.

Absolutely agree! And they do mostly wear them in the rooms. I wear mine in complete accordance with the rules and try my best to speak sense in the group. I don't know for sure as I don't discuss politics much at work but I have a strong sense that politics enters into this for some. Honestly, the main thing that I have learned from this experience is that we are, by and large, not as bright as we like to think we are! It's been a shock!

No, sorry I edited to say this was the general public. The staff know it's real, just think they are invincible or something.

Patients are allowed 1 visitor each now. Frankly many people around here are of the "this is a hoax" persuasion. We shut down early, before it had spread much at all in our area, and there was very limited testing here for a long time, so the numbers didn't accurately reflect how many people got it the first time round. The help line here talked to quite a few people who were presumed to have it but not sick enough to get tested. Also all our confirmed positive patients survived, although for a handful it was a close run thing, and they did not count the few who did not survive but did not have a positive test. So, in other words, they haven't seen much with their own eyes yet. ETA - the general public haven't seen much with their own eyes yet, but of course the staff have, just feel invincible I guess.

Midwest, Missouri

We have not had any known positives for a number of weeks but may be starting up again now as some suspected. We are supposed to wear masks when we can't social distance and always wear them in the patient's rooms. A large number of people only wear them when in the rooms and there are some who don't always wear them then also. These are not people who have educated themselves on recent research. I hear some of them coming out with the same conspiracy type things that you read on social media. It's not that they don't believe it's real because we had multiple patients, but never anywhere close to being overwhelmed, but they just say they are over it and they don't care if they get it. Many are fairly young. I think the bravado is also the cool way to be.

From what I've seen at my place of work it would not surprise me at all if there was non-compliance with the rules.

Do kids get it from daycare workers who are wearing masks I wonder?

My favorite bathrooms at the moment are outhouses in state parks. No flushing so no aerosolized particles from that and air circulating from outside, not AC. I don’t know for sure if they are safer but it seems like they might be.

No I don’t disbelieve it. It makes sense and fits in with what I think is true from my research. I have been fooled by photos of crowded beaches and just wondered how much of a difference angles etc make in video.

I can see that collecting samples using different times or methods could skew the results. I was wondering if you could alter their appearance visually with video like you can with still photography. Don’t know if I’m technologically skilled enough to do it myself but I could try.

Do you think the same is true of video? I think the difference in the Petri dishes would still be convincing even if they did something to exaggerate the unmasked ones but it would be good to know if they can do it for video as well when trying to evaluate things.

Sorry! That’s my biggest fear, having to work in those conditions! I’ll be thinking of you!

And that is the real danger of this virus, more so than death, hospital overwhelm.

My dd’s dance studio restarted classes 1/2 way through May and just stopped last week. Spread in our area was very low then. They didn’t restart immediately when they were allowed to but waited a few weeks to see how things were going. Their rules were no adults in the building other than teacher, kids came in dance clothes, left shoes outside, hand sanitizer as they went in and came out. Smaller classes and spread at least 6 feet apart. They cleaned a lot in between classes. I decided to let my dd go to class with the proviso that if spread increased she would have to stop. To be honest I looked in the window the first day back and thought that the huffing and puffing going on was a huge risk if anything was going around. I felt like my dd was low risk herself and we were keeping away from everyone, especially older or at risk people, and wearing masks in stores etc. I’m really glad they quit last week though because things are starting to tick up a little here now.

Maybe not but I thought a big part about the rationale for re-opening schools was the thought that students have a much lower rate than adults and therefore won’t spread it around.

Several pediatric ICU nurses were saying they had seen unusual amounts of newly diagnosed. They weren’t all tested for Covid and those that were it was for current infection, not antibodies, so they weren’t Covid positive at the time they were seeing them.

Was just reading a thread on a Covid HCW page and there were some pediatric nurses wondering if an increase in new T1 patients might be because of Covid-19. Someone linked this on there https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/27/fact-check-doctors-study-whether-covid-19-triggers-diabetes/3267863001/

Interesting. Other than people I looked after at work, I know 2 friends/family who had it and they spent 13 and 30 days on vents - Oxford, England, and Atlanta, GA What is so very bizarre about this virus is the huge range of experiences those who have it go through.

I think it may be this post from Dave Blake Jr: A conversation - me and a faculty member boarded in Infectious Disease. So, I use data science tools professionally and have been following COVID-19 and am med school faculty, but my friend who joined me for lunch yesterday is part infectious disease doctor for a living. He is trained in epidemiology and virology, at least a little, and board certified in infectious disease, one of seven such people at AU-health who are so boarded. He is one of the 2-3 people in the CSRA who know the most about infectious disease. What did we talk about? In part, COVID19. First, we discussed how we both anticipated it would follow epidemiological trends for summer. Infectious disease doesn't do well in summer historically. The 67-8 flu died down in summer, as did 1918. But COVID-19 laughs at summer. It is showing an R of 2 in Oklahoma right now, which is higher than any influenza ever shows in winter! Very surprising. Second, he was surprised no one in the adult Emergency Room staff has tested positive. It looks like regular masks must have some protection. He is trying to get funding to do serum antibody testing on our at risk medical staff to study their rate of infection more properly. Third, I suggested he instead study age demographics of the community for serum prevalence. We really could benefit from more information about the rate of infection of kids. A publication last week claims people under age 20 are infected at half the rate as those over 20. It would be really helpful especially to study the bridge between 15 year olds (who are rarely infected) and 20 year olds (who get infected at the same rate as much older folks). He has seen some studies on the target of COVID-19, being poorly expressed in the nasal epithelium of youth, which provides a plausible explanation for their low susceptibility. They simply don't have many ACE2 receptors in their noses. If the nasal ACE2 receptor is the primary route of infection, this age-dependent change explains why they don't often get infected. Next we talk about what to do in schools. We both agree colleges and universities are headed for the same outcome as Fort Benning - 70-80% of the kids who go on campus with normal activities will be infected in a month. With some restrictions, maybe two months. It just sets up horribly. We both agree elementary and middle schools should be just fine. Let the kids do what they normally do. In high schools there is some uncertainty. Those juniors and seniors - do they transmit more like 20 year olds, or more like 15 year olds? It probably falls in an in-between zone where the two of us would like more information before advocating anything. Part of the issue with kids, also, is the contact tracing data. In other nations, they have traced out many thousands of times/places where a primary donor gave COVID19 to one or more receivers. The DONOR is VERY RARELY under age 20, which suggests even through high school, kids become infected at lower rates, but rarely transmit to others, and rarely get severely sick. In the context of a pandemic, school in person seems like a really good idea for elementary and middle school, while high school is a little dicier, and colleges are a non-starter. In-person school is not "safe", but unlikely to stoke up the rate of infection locally. Kids at school can still bring COVID-19 home, they are just a LOT less likely to do so than 20-39 year olds. We are seeing more younger inpatients with COVID19, but the distribution of the patient ages in our ICU is still the same - all over age 50. We are NOT seeing problems with hospital staff getting infected at the hospital. We have identified aerosoliziing procedures, and have strict PPE requirements for those, and only people under age 50 are allowed to perform them (however some older doctors still do because they are pretty dern stubborn). We both agree uniform, 100% mask use "indoors" in public spaces is appropriate public health policy. Hope you find this summary useful. ETA: Haha just saw you found it already!

Sounds like you are definitely being consistent and that seems pretty rare these days.

Well it was really supposed to be kind of a joke, but we all seem to be having trouble with consistency at the moment I think. I’m pleased to hear that about an alternative to FB. I have to have it because of a work page and a couple of kid activities and the crazy on FB has been hard to bear recently so it’s nice if the crazy can go elsewhere for a while and I won’t get sucked in to it when I get on there to check work stuff lol!

I wonder how many people having absolute fits about contract tracing have Alexa?