Seenso

> Here's why masks are useless: You are going to take your mask off with your dirty hands. You're going to wear your mask dutifully while outside, then you're going to walk inside your house and the first thing you will do is take your mask off - with your dirty hands.

The problem isn't so much touching the respirator with dirty hands, its getting your hands dirty by touching a contaminated respirator.

Here's how to remove a mask without touching the (possibly contaminated) front:

N95 3M mask: How to Wear & Remove (by Singapore General Hospital):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxpvDVo_NI

> It is generally [infeasible] for them to manually review every submission so they are dependent on other users reporting the violations.

It may be economically infeasible for them to moderate, but economics is not a "get out of ethics free" card. IMHO, we've gotten too comfortable with tech companies passing the buck on negative externalities that they create or profit from.

We wouldn't accept a "can't do it, not economically feasible" answer from an industrial chemicals company that's been asked to stop polluting a river, and I don't see why PornHub should be any different.

> TLDR; Don't assume everyone is healthy / carries the same risk, even if they look healthy.

Also, apparently serious illness can increase the chance of miscarriage in pregnant women:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/pr...:

> Pregnancy loss, including miscarriage and stillbirth, has been observed in cases of infection with other related coronaviruses [SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV] during pregnancy. High fevers during the first trimester of pregnancy can increase the risk of certain birth defects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203382/:

> Conclusions. The observed birth depressions were consistent with pandemic influenza causing first trimester miscarriages in ∼1 in 10 pregnant women.

> Telling everyone to go out and stockpile food is just the sort of dangerous, panic inducing rhetoric we don't need right now.

I don't think so. The problem is you don't want people to freak out and overdo it now, and you don't want them to freak out and overdo it in the future if some drastic measures are needed.

I think it would be totally prudent to give people specific sensible things they can do to prepare for the worst case. E.g.

1. Keep an extra week's worth of household consumables and whatever food they typically eat on hand.

Don't go splurge on 100 lbs of rice and pinto beans and two years worth of toilet paper. This isn't going to be a like nuclear war: public utilities will remain online, the water supply will be safe, food will be available in stores. The only possible issue with these products is that people may not be able to go out and buy them as frequently as they're used to.

2. Keep an extra month's worth of prescription medications, for similar reasons.

3. Buy a couple of small bottles of hand sanitizer (like travel size), for use on the go, which will last XX weeks for a typical person. But no big deal if you can't find any since washing your hands works well.

> so the result will come not so immediately. Hence being anxious has no payout and being cool does.

That's assuming people are way more rational and less emotional than they really are.

> I say this because halting tries to "cool down" emotion but it still "feels like" panic while making it all go slow would "feel kind of crappy yet normal" hence "buying" time to cool things down while still working.

I don't think so. Halting would allow the traders to get a cup of coffee and switch to another mental gear. A slowdown would probably just keep them in gear and result in a lot of anxious refreshes and attempts to wrestle the system.

>> Bureaucracy is rarely as expensive as aggressive profiteering.

> Have you seen the DoD and other gov entity contracting?

DoD contracting seems like worst of both worlds: a combination of bureaucracy, aggressive profiteering, and rare real-world evaluation of the products.

I'm kinda surprised military production hasn't been nationalized. It seems like it's mainly done by a handful of companies that are almost wholly dependent on government contracts, and the government is loathe to steer too much work away from any of these entities in order to preserve their capability.

I'd be fine with either, and I think it'd also help with price-gouging like Turing Pharmaceuticals engaged in with Daraprim.

A public drugmaker could be obligated to have implemented processes to manufacture every approved drug. If a maker engaged in price-gouging, or had its facilities disrupted, the public drugmaker could supply an alternative supply at fair prices.

> The notion of property rights is not created by the law, but a law of nature, a concept intuitively understood by human beings. The same goes for theft. The law only adopted these concepts, but it created taxes. It is not intuitively obvious that some entity is entitled to a percentage of the money you're earning.

Nope, sorry. You might be on to something if you limited yourself to the "foreign relations" of a community, but we're talking about intracommunity relations here. If you're looking for laws of nature, socially obligatory sharing is far more fundamental and important than any primal notions of exclusivist private property and theft.

Concepts like private property, theft, and taxation do have primitive antecedents, but you're guilty of anachronism if you think those antecedents make some modern ideological notion a kind of fundamental law.

> Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion.

Our law creates both property rights and taxes. Taxes aren't theft because, by law, that money is actually the government's property. If you want individualistically overrule our law to make taxes theft, I might as well do the same to make your property mine.

> N95 masks must be properly fitted to the individual.... So unless you get the proper size, you could still be exposed.

I'd really like to know how often those fit tests actually result in someone needing to select a different respirator size or style.

I wonder if they're only needed if you're required to be 100% sure all your people can use their respirators with near-100% effectiveness. That's probably necessary if you're working in a contagious disease isolation unit or removing asbestos all day every day, but maybe not for less dangerous environments.

> I should also point out that most people in the US face similar conditions to those in Wuhan. The extent of infection is not known, and therefore protective measures are not in place. We have been actively discouraged from "buying masks" and told that they are ineffective.

Not exactly. I'm hopeful that differences between the typical American lifestyle and the typical Chinese lifestyle will help make the epidemic less severe in the US.

Americans are more "spread out" than Chinese: we often drive personal cars instead of taking public transit; our homes are freestanding with more private space per person; our public spaces are often less crowded, etc. I think open offices are even more common in China. Hopefully that extra distance will help.

> I've never understood however the need to disable Aero and switch to Windows Classic, which looks gray, boring and feels like using Windows 98 again.

Gray and boring is good. IMHO, flashy computer UIs are for movies and other cases where actual usability is secondary.

I've always switched to Windows classic, because the menus and icons are more compact, and I can better arrange things so I can access them more quickly. I'm not deficient in motor skills, so the the one thing I don't need is giant, colorful buttons.

> That's probably the case, but if so then that's a real harsh judgement of Material design: that accessibility has actually decreased since 2004.

We've banged it too deep into our heads that change is progress, especially with technology. Sometimes change is really regression, and that's more likely the more refined something gets.

Regressions are happening all the time now, and too many people foolishly defend them as progress.

> and added some very hazardous electrical traps that will be hell to remove without my notes (which I have conveniently misplaced).

I'm pretty sure laying traps like that is illegal, like felony illegal.

> With that perspective in mind, I find it hard to blame them. A wave of panicked attendees demanding refunds could well render them insolvent.

Couldn't a conference like SXSW buy insurance to cover refunds? It's my understanding that you can buy a policy at Lloyd's of London to cover pretty any kind of unique risk.

Pandemics like this one seem rare enough that the premiums might not actually be too bad.

> Conferences are all about cross-pollination. Sometimes it's ideas, sometimes it's serious illnesses.

Just like open offices.

> The problem with this type of call being made by governments, which I hope will become abundantly clear in retrospect, is that governments are incentivized to lie about the severity of the situation (consider CCP response to Wuhan, White House response to unsafe quarantines, etc.).

No. "[G]overnments" aren't "incentivized to lie about the severity of the situation" any more than anyone is incentivized to lie about anything.

It's true that some governments and some government officials are in the habit of blatantly lying, but that shouldn't be turned into some kind of anti-government generalization. Pretty much all the accurate information and advice we currently have about this outbreak comes from governments as well.

Maybe, but I just looked the locations in the article, and it looks like his home is in a town in a rural area [1]. Given it's a smaller area, maybe that constrained things enough that they were able to infer that he must have gotten it during his visit to Wuhan. I can imagine several scenarios with an elderly man that might have allowed them to pinpoint his infection to that visit [2]. However, there's just not enough detail in the article to reconstruct how the local Chinese government ruled out everything but his visit as the source of his infection.

[1] Shennongjia, Hubei. Looks like it's a "county" with about 75k people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shennongjia

[2] For instance: he visited Wuhan, self-quarantined immediately after returning which limited his contact with others, then 27 days later developed infection. Every contact he did have was tracked and confirmed negative. That's total speculation, though.

> Ah, the old C level exec decision to outsource to your "India team". Usually immediately followed by said company having severe and often crippling issues immediately after doing so.

Or the small onshore team they kept burning themselves out trying to hold the ship together.

> The incubation period is not 25-30 days. The mean incubation period is 5-6 days, range 1-14 days.

There are case reports of it being far longer than 14 days:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-incubation/c...

> A 70-year-old man in China’s Hubei Province was infected with coronavirus but did not show symptoms until 27 days later, the local government said on Saturday, meaning the virus’ incubation period could be much longer than the presumed 14 days.

[oops, misread comment.]

> This case should be quoted in every discussion about 5G mobile equipment here in Europe.

Especially since the 5G situation even kinda smells the same:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...:

> As Widman settled in, the secret partners adopted a set of principles for [Crypto AG's] rigged algorithms, according to the BND history. They had to be “undetectable by usual statistical tests” and, if discovered, be “easily masked as implementation or human errors.”

> In other words, when cornered, Crypto executives would blame sloppy employees or clueless users.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...:

> Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices

> "The work of HCSEC [Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre]… reveals serious and systematic defects in Huawei's software engineering and cyber security competence," said the HCSEC oversight board in its annual report, published this morning.

> Arguably, 3M should have put the price up as soon as demand shot up, so that stock would not run out.

No. Raising prices is the econ 101 solution, but we don't live in an econ 101 world. There are other ways to deal with shortages, and 3M chose one of those other ways:

https://news.3m.com/blog/3m-stories/3m-responds-2019-novel-c...:

> We notified 3M authorized distributors that we are prioritizing orders to help serve our base business – including hospitals – due to high global demand.

Some retailers are also implementing non-price-based solutions to the shortages:

https://www.ajc.com/news/home-depot-limits-coronavirus-mask-...:

> As fears continue rising about the deadly coronavirus outbreak, Atlanta-based The Home Depot is limiting the number of protective respirators to 10 per purchase.

> At first, the prices in the local market here were normal and people were buying hundreds of respirators and masks.

One point here, which I think I established previously, is that price movement provided no useful information to the manufactures. The most useful information came directly from institutional medical customers (who were the first to know), not retail profiteers working off of secondary reports in secondary markets.

> As prices have been driven up (almost exclusively this profiteering and parasitic markup, big retailers have not increased prices), people've been buying closer to what they feel they need rather than trying to stockpile -- when the mask is $2, it's easy to grab 50 or 100. When they're $25 people are only buying 1 or 2.

> Gross as it is, this is serving some good -- it's helping to distribute the available inventory over a wider population, instead of concentrating it with the few people that are stockpiling them or exporting them.

However, the profiteers are stockpilers, and they probably stockpile more extremely than even the most aggressive personal-use stockpiler.

For example, looking at it from a pure profiteering standpoint: it's good business if I can buy 1000 masks for $1 each and sell 100 for $20 each during the crisis, I just doubled my money. However, I just wasted 900 masks in the process, from POV of society. Profiteers are panic-driven speculators, and their economic interest is to make wasteful decisions (otherwise they're potentially leaving money on the table). When the crisis is over, they can just unload their (wasted) inventory at the normal price (for instance, by taking advantage of a retailer's return policy).

Also, like TeMPOraL noted, the profiteer's speculative buying could fuel the panic that caused those 100 sales of $20 masks. The signal of empty shelves may be false, or falsely magnified. It's kinda like cornering a market, in that regard.

You also assume people are willing to deal with the profiteers. I don't think that's necessarily the case, especially at a 500-2500% markup. For instance: I'd refuse to buy from a profiteer out of principle, and either live without or use alternatives.

This kind of profiteering is a pretty clear market failure, not an example of the market providing benefit. It's a failure just like government warehouse steering essential supplies away from first responders and the public and towards government elites.

> Masks, as most people wear them, don't do much. They'd need to be custom fitted to ensure no "leakage".

Respirator is the correct and less-confusing term for the item you're referring to.

Everyone should probably wear a surgical mask, because it will help contain the virus to those who have it, and help keep it from spreading. That's what masks are designed to do.

Wearing a respirator is overkill for most people, especially for everyday use, and therefore should be avoided because of the supply problems. They also have the usage complexities you mention. The fit tests verify fit, and are used help choose a well-fitting mask. I'm not sure how often the tests force someone to choose a different type.

I'm not convinced respirators are useless for regular people though, if you're a high-risk person in a high-risk area (such as an elderly person visiting an ER), I think their use might be warranted (coupled with more important practices like strict hand hygiene, etc).

> Profiteers buying masks, at the regular price 3M is happy to sell at, doesn't increase 3M's bottom line?

Not any more than legitimate customers buying the same masks. They provided no signal that 3M wasn't already receiving loud and clear.

Profiteers don't add anything to the situation except their parasitic markup. They misallocate scarce resources away from where they're needed, and those resources end up wasted either in their personal horde or in the hands of those who have more money than sense.

> They are providing the mask manufacturers with cashflow and a strong market signal to manufacture more masks.

No they're not. The profiteers are resellers that bought masks/respirators from the manufacturers at regular price, then sell them with a crazy markup.

I've been watching the prices of these items throughout this whole crisis, and the prices of 3M respirators sold through reputable retailers has not budged. 3M is not increasing them either:

https://news.3m.com/blog/3m-stories/3m-responds-2019-novel-c...:

> 3M has not changed the prices we charge for 3M respirators as a result of the outbreak

> Not true at all. There is a great benefit to "flattening the curve" to spread out the infections over time, as a high percentage of cases for older individuals will require hospitalization, and there are a limited number of beds available. If reasonable isolation measure are in place, this could happen, as there would be fewer active carriers at any time to transmit the virus to vulnerable populations.

Also, delaying infections helps buy time to bring novel treatments to bear on the problem.

> I'm curious how much the type of mask matters. I have two kinds of masks for construction projects:

There are surgical masks, surgical respirators, and regular respirators.

Surgical masks and surgical respirators meet regulatory requirements about blocking pathogens from the wearer, and I haven't seen any of that type with an exhaust valve.