My Mask

In reference to your report (Can a face mask protect me from coronavirus? Covid-19 myths busted, 5 April), the use of face masks by the public, together with social distancing and handwashing, prevents the transmission of coronavirus and saves lives. France is the latest country to do a U-turn, joining others such as the US, Austria and Singapore in advising the public to wear them. Covid-19 is spread from aerosols (tiny viral particles); we breathe in aerosols in crowded places like trains, buses and the tube, and we touch our face inadvertently numerous times with potentially infected hands. Masks will protect against this and will be even more crucial when we ease the lockdown to prevent a resurgence of cases.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/the-benefits-of-wearing-face-masks-are-clear

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Dinesh ^club

When my father was born in 1924, the world population stood at about 2 billion people. By the time I was born, the population was about 5.5 billion. A population cannot keep growing faster and faster forever. (Neither can property values, unfortunately.) The truism is easier to accept for bacteria or rodents or sea gulls than for humans, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Doomsayers have a way of coming and going. Thomas Malthus got it wrong in the eighteenth century and Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s. We humans have a history of bucking the system. Perhaps we can engineer the planet and our own population so that we avoid a crash. We’re going to talk here, however, about how a crash could happen, what form it might take, and what could trigger it. ~ Page 4 Intro

Of course, influenza viruses do not have intentions, demonic or otherwise. They are not even really alive. They are incomplete passages of genetic material - RNA, in the case of flu, a molecule similar to the more widely known DNA. They cannot perform the most fundamental task of reproduction without help. Influenza is a parasite of sorts that relies on full-fledged cells of its host to complete it, and on a rapid evolution that gives it the ability to mutate, quickly changing in response to new circumstances. People who study viruses in general and flue in particular, sense that the world has changed in the past few decades, and is continuing to change, in ways that have tilted the playing field to influenza’s advantage. The growth of livestock farms in Asia, the globalization of trade, the rise of the middle class in such places as China, India, and Mexico, the shift in climate -- all of these factors may have created a novel habitat for influenza. That is the theory, anyway. What we know is that evolution is opportunistic, and that with a new niche eventually comes a new disease. ~ Page 13

But the experts didn’t overreact to the 2009 outbreak. The virus came from nowhere, and by the time it made it onto the radar screen of health officials, it was already well on its way to spreading far and wide. “H1N1 caught us all with our pants down,” says Webster. “Not one virologist had the slightest suspicion.” A year before the outbreak, he says, “no one, but no one, would have said that H1N1 would have been the next pandemic.” In spring 2009, health officials must have felt as if they were staring into the abyss.

“This time we got damn lucky the viruses were only mildly pathogenic.” If H1N1 had truly killed as effectively as the 1918 flu, it would have been “total disaster,” Webster says. “You wouldn’t get the gasoline for your car, you wouldn’t get the electricity for your power, you wouldn’t get the medicines you need. Society as we know it would fall apart. There wouldn’t be a hell of a hot scientists could do for you in the first wave.” ~ Page 17

In 1918, the H1N1 viruses burned through the world in less than two years, despite the lack of air travel, leaving 50 million to 100 million people dead in the wake. (Nobody knows precisely how many died. Information about influenza deaths was hard to come by back then, and in many ways it still is.) at the time, the world held 1.6 billion people. By simple extrapolation to the current population of more than 7 billion, a similar disaster today would leave 180 million to 375 million dead. ~ Page 19

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

4 years ago.

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