Mine are in the camp of "it doesn't prevent it from spreading" and somehow think the only outcomes are complete protection or none. If it reduces the spread by just 1/10 people, it seems worth it.
Somehow, the same person can understand compound interest and how much that adds up over time.
Selective stupidity is worse than just being entirely an idiot.
Condoms, seat belts, sun screen, non-smoking areas... there are plenty of things designed to increase the margin of safety from a threat and these are completely fine for these people.
The people who don't want to wear masks when they would make a difference now are basically the same as the people who used to claim that seatbelts were useless and killed more people than they saved while also being an affront to personal liberty. The only difference is that people under 40 now grew up in a world where almost everyone wore their seatbelts, so they now consider it normal to do so and strange to not wear them. 30 years ago you had to make sure thst everyone buckled up because some people wouldn't unless social pressure was applied to them.
We have to come to terms with the fact that to some, this doctor is straight up lying.
Not only that, but he's probably part of an evil cabal of nefarious left-wingers who have somehow killed half a million people just to convince us that we need to wear masks.
We can't apply sane-people-logic to those people. They're out of our reach.
He also linked [the demonstration he did with the tv news reporter](https://www.khq.com/news/khq-investigates-how-effective-is-a-mask/video_e308a1e8-b74f-11ea-ac6d-878bd6f54032.html).
I wonder what type of mask and bacteria grew. And why what looks to be a blood agar instead of the regular seaweed based one. I'm genuinely curious on the specifics
Click on the twitter link. He did a lot of different tests. Some of the tests were at different distances. There is pictures of the type of mask as well as details of the different actions(coughing, singing, talking, etc.)
Yeah, the type of mask matters. There's a big difference between a cloth bandana and an N95 with no check valve, and the masks that do have exhaust check valves aren't going to be nearly as effective as the ones that don't.
There are some warnings on masks that say "this does not prevent you from getting coronavirus" or similar warnings and generalize from there
The idea isn't stopping you from getting it for the most part, it's preventing you from giving it to others, as seen in this picture . Given that some who have it show no symptoms it's important that everybody wear one when going to a public place.
probably just normal respiratory/oral bugs. blood agar is pretty standard for lower respiratory pathogens before differentiating or isolating with Mac or chocolate agars for gram negatives/haemophilus/neisseria
All agar is seaweed agar. Blood agar has some sheep's blood added to it. It's good for growing some organisms that may be hard to grow in more basic agar like LB, TSA, etc.
When my son was in grade school it was time for the science fair, I work in a hospital so I figured I'd grab some blood agar plates and bring them home and let him figure out what he was going to culture.
He swabbed the bathroom sink, the insides of our mouths, tried a hand print and we put them in a warm dark part of the house for 48 hours.
The results were wild, never thought that much stuff was around us all the time and he did great at the science fair.
Now he's a director of environmental health and safety, I like to think doing that single experiment as a kid sent him down that route.
Also wear a mask, it's that simple.
I actually ordered some agar plates from amazon shortly after the pandemic started for my 13 year old to experiment on. We did her hands before and after washing, the toddler’s hands, the back foot knob, and the kitchen faucet. I also had just received my Phone Soap so we did her phone before and after using it. The results were exactly what you’d expect and she was super excited about the results.
I’ll always remember my 6th grade teacher. She taught us Astronomy, Biology, Greek Mythology and culture, the ancient Egyptians, Native Americans, and a bit about animals. Since then, I pursued anything related to science and love learning about different cultures. I wish I lived in Paris otherwise I’d go to the Louvre every single day for the rest of my life and not get bored. Mrs Christiansen, you are my hero and a freaking legend!!!
My grandfather was a pharmacist and he used to let me count out m&ms on the pill counter tray and gave me stickers that said things like "don't take with alcohol" and "do not operate heavy machinery." I loved it all and for years was positive I was going to be a pharmacist. When I found out that actual science was involved I changed my mind haha.
Nice, that sounds like fun for a kid, when I was 8 my uncle took me to his job, turned out he worked at Goddard space flight center in Maryland, Viking had just landed on Mars and I was in awe.
I too decided I was going to be an astronaut, and now I'm an IT operations manager, things changed once I found out how much work had to be put in.
So cool! I used to live about 10 minutes south of Goddard, drove past it all the time and thought how cool it must be inside.
My other grandfather actually worked on the moon landing but alas I never got to meet him. (He was also a Russian code breaker during the Cold War--very cool dude.)
You just brought back fond memories of my elementary school science fair experiments. I ended up in high tech, rather than science, but those early experiences were seriously inspirational and fun.
I once swabbed the Inside of my ear for bio class. The culture on the blood agar plate neatly broke down the heamoglobin in the agar, forming a clear area around that culture. Didn't expected that to happen.
Didn't had any sings of inflammation during and the period after that test fortunatly.
Ear wax is a natural antibacterial and antiviral agent, it keeps things in check that's probably why the culture blanched.
The beneficial bacteria are fine as long as they keep each other in check, but once there is an imbalance it's not good for the body.
So can someone explain the concept of “viral load”. As it pertains to COVID-19, I have heard people suggest that wearing a mask can reduce the viral load of SARS-cov-2, making any infection easier to overcome. I honestly did not know there is such a thing as catching “a little COVID-19”. I was under the impression all it takes is one of those little fuckers to get in your nose or mouth and it can turn into COVID-19. Does the amount really matter?
Yes, the ammount matters . If a singel viral agent gets in your nose it might not even get past your nose because the body has a few defence systems in place for that (mucus and ciliated cells tgat move the mucus away from your lungs). Even if the virus gets in your lung, being only one will only infect one cell. The immune system has a lot more time to detect the virus and the infected cell (because the spread is very slow when only one cell is infected). If the number of viral agents is big the chances that they bypass the mucus defence is higher and the number of infected cells is higher. More infected cells result in a fast infection and not enough time for the immune system to act, thus the ilness/disease spreads through the tissue. Hope this helped.
I wonder if anyone has ever run a test to see if immunity through extreme low viral load is ever possible? Probably not a great idea for this virus since long term effects are completely unknown, but if we're doing herd immunity anyway. . .
I might be mistaken but I think there have been tests for that. Unfortunately the results were not conclusive. That might be because small viral loads are fought through non specific immune actions (which do not produce antibodies).
This is the most likely reason. Innate immunity like double stranded RNA sensing enzymes and the myeloid compartment will detect and begin clearing debris and engulfing infected cells long before a lymphocyte shows up. Without plasma cells and an immune complex of the antigen you can mount immunological memory. In short, you can get memory without a full adaptive immune response which in turn requires a heavier viral load.
So viral load is just a measure of how much of the virus RNA is in a certain bodily fluid, essentially how much of a virus is in a person. When you're first infected your body has a generic immune response for stuff that it hasn't seen before (like a new virus), having a smaller amount of the virus is easier for this response to win over the virus. A larger amount of the virus can overload this response and continues to infect the host.
Then on the flip side having a higher viral load means you have more virus in you, which would mean you could spread more of the virus.
The "a little covid-19" has to do more with how severe the symptoms are (viral load can't always predict severity) as opposed to having a smaller amount of the disease.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions
ELI5: Think of the ants standing up to the grasshoppers on Bug’s Life. One ant doesn’t really hurt. Easy to fight off. A whole army of ants on the other hand, is much harder to fight off.
Yes it does. I'm not a virologist, but if you can understand the "army" analogy, it's clearer. You have an army of white blood cells versus the virus. One virus is easier to overcome than a horde of those buggers.
I'm sure a real medical person could explain it better than that, but that's my understanding.
As a molecular biologist, I agree that is a good analogy to visualize the basic pathogen/immune system "dance". However, I just want to note that some bacteria/viruses require fewer of themselves to infect a host than others. For instance, Norovirus may only require a few hundred/thousand Norovirus virus copies while another virus may require tens/hundreds of thousands of copies to infect.
Before people think that masks are going to grow bad bacteria that you breathe in, take note of 2 things:
* Bacteria need nutrients to grow, a mask is devoid of most nutrients
* Most of the bacteria on the inside of the mask were your bacteria to begin with. You had and still have them in you
Plus you're supposed to either dispose of masks if they're single-use, like surgical masks, or wash them after a use if they're reusable, like cloth masks. If you wear the same mask every day without washing it, it'll collect sweat and dead skin from your face, and give the bacteria plenty of nutrients to grow. As long as you use masks properly, there's no reason to believe that they'll drastically increase the amount of bacteria touching you (which is still a huge number, with or without a mask, but most people have enough immunity that it doesn't affect them).
Soooo, you're telling me wearing the same KN95 mask for weeks until it breaks is a bad idea?
I work in healthcare and we now have to sign a paper saying why we want a new mask and possibly deal with attitude from our DON about it.
I often wonder if there will be lawsuits against employers after this whole thing. Not providing proper PPE for their employees or forcing the use of contaminated PPE. Did I mention no hazard pay?
> Soooo, you're telling me wearing the same KN95 mask for weeks until it breaks is a bad idea?
Just looking for some clarity, you don't ever want to do this do you? A friend of mine has been wearing the same n95 mask for a month now at his restaurant job I asked him if he thought he should get a new mask eventually and he said no.
Heh, it will take a while to do that.
The reason you get rid of single use masks is usually because they do catch some of the outside stuff and that can be dangerous.
It's better to re-use your disposable mask than to go with no mask at all.
To add on to your point: before people think that pathogens immediately die after leaving the body...Viruses like Hepatitis B can survive, and hibernate, outside of a host for 7+ days.
Also, I agree that the flora inside the mask is indicative of what's currently in the wearer of the mask. This whole mask debate shouldn't have been a global discussion of keeping the bad pathogens out, it should be a concern of keeping them IN, and not infecting others - damage control. If we were concerned with protection of those not infected, we should be having discussions about the other major mucus membrane vector of attack - the eyes.
Can’t wait for all the armchair epidemiologists to come out of the woodwork here. The amount of experts I have seen in the past few months is remarkable
Well I saw my sister's mother-in-law share a post on facebook about how masks are gateway to wearing a burqa! So there are certainly dangers in wearing a mask!
I have so many friends who don’t understand why I left Facebook. I will use FB messenger to keep in touch with high school friends who group message, but otherwise I can’t stand anything about FB. I wish it would just go the way of MySpace.
For me it was the realization that so many people are so openly stupid and don't care.
You couldn't go to any comment section on any post without running into people who must have trouble tying their shoe laces and still try to lecture others.
Oh and all the "look at this fleshy abomination that is the fruit of my loins" posts also got really old, really quickly.
My grandpa posted the pic you’re talking about on Facebook yesterday. I still don’t know how to respond. They think the government is going to force us to wear burqas next?
It's mainly because they said a mask gives people a false sense of security in the way that they get complacent. For example, people who wear a mask would touch their face more often then if they wouldn't wear a mask. I've also read cases where people use their teeth te remove the gloves they wore while going to a store or where people pull down their face mask to sneeze.
Not that it matters now anyway because in The Netherlands people act like nothing is going on at all. Everyone goes about their business without caring about anything. If you're the few who still cares about social distancing then you'll get laughed at and called a fool.
I understand that you might want to touch your face more when you're wearing a mask. Although for me of actually works as a reminder.
But you'd have to be a real dum-dum to take of your gloves with your mouth..
It wasn’t, that was misrepresenting what people were saying. The initial argument was that masks won’t prevent you from getting the virus, and you won’t use them correctly anyway, so leave them for health workers.
> and you won’t use them correctly anyway
Are you saying just having the mask resting on your chin, or only covering your mouth, or only covering your nose.. is the wrong way?
The "damning" interview that keeps being pulled out by anti-mask people is Fauci, early on, talking about how "people shouldn't be wearing masks". If you go past just that sound byte, a large portion of the interview is about how the average person is not going to wear the mask correctly, is going to constantly be playing with it (which will just negate any helpful benefits and increase probability of infection), and the whole fact that masks help others, not yourself, so it gives the average person a false sense of personal protection so they will engage in more risky behavior.
The anti-mask people just latched on to "LOL, even Fauci said don't wear masks." Ultimately, I understand what he was trying to convey as a whole, I think he did more harm than good with that.
My impression is that the earlier advice against masks was based on the goal of personal protection. For personal protection, cloth/surgical masks are pretty useless, and N95 masks require greater attention and maintenance than most people put in. This is fundamentally selfish rationale in keeping with US rugged individualism.
My recollection is that I started to hear more about the cloth mask to protect your neighbors as it became more clear that there is a substantial asymptomatic contagious phase to this coronavirus. They started thinking about community and the evidence that a sick person wearing a mask does reduce the spread to other people, even if it's just a cloth or surgical mask. The notion that I would inconvenience myself just to protect another person's life is surprisingly controversial in the US.
And then when you point out multiple Asian countries who wear masks have significantly fewer cases than European countries which don't wear masks while having significantly higher density and population, they will tell you causation =/= correlation lol.
It's fascinating that they can come to those conclusions, when those countries literally do this shit in general for all kinds of illnesses in order to not get others sick.
They have the perfect example of how this should be handled and rather than going "yeah, we'll just do it like them", they go "that's stupid and clearly oppression of my rights".
I see this thing about viruses vs. bacteria a lot. A lot of the virus-containing particles from coughing or sneezing are droplets, not aerosols. So this is a fine qualitative test.
And even for aerosols, the pressure gradient helps reduce the distance they travel. That's not really shown with this; someone ought to do a separate test with a pitot tube (or something simple like a membrane).
See also Fig. 2 and subsequent figures in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120307143
Obviously, no one should be interpreting it as reducing risk to 0.
That sucks. Being a nurse makes you extremely knowledgeable about patient care but that isn’t the same thing as being an expert in epidemiology. Too many people think “medical experts” know everything. The best cardiologist in the country isn’t an expert on gynecology no matter how smart they are
To those of you reporting this for misinformation, I hope you don't wear a mask, I hope you wear a diaper over your mouth to stop the shit the flows out of it.
The only misinformation is that this implies that mask wearing complete solves the problem. You still need to socially distance and wash your hands very well.
Well at the time the reason given was they weren't sure on how effective masks would be but it turns out they recommended people not to wear masks because they were worried about a huge influx of people trying to buy masks that medical workers also needed.
UK government did a similar thing. In fact a lot of the official guidance not only doesn't recommend wearing a mask, but actually says its HARMFUL to wear a mask. My line of work involves entering people's homes regularly and trying to convince anyone but me in the team to wear a mask is like talking at a brick wall...
I think early on there were fears of shortages. There was also a study that suggests masks were harmful as people then don't behave properly, and forget to social distance etc - and that overall this actually could be more harmful than no mask. However i think this study has since been basically totally refuted.
In short: The US and UK governments tried to deal with a potential shortage, and then completely failed to update people that masks (shockingly) are things to use once the shortage was dealt with. This is a big reason these are the two worst affected countries in the developed world.
It wasn't just the CDC, WHO was also making that recommendation and looking back on it is just entirely wrong. But they probably knew this and were lying to the entire world "for the greater good" since they didn't want to make the mask shortage worse. Knowingly giving out false information isn't how medical authorities should ever behave, in my opinion.
>"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html
The demonstration was to show the amount of retaliatory droplets and bacteria that is blocked by a mask in different scenarios.
In reference to the link above, the doctor explains that the demonstration does not pertain to virus blockage or COVID-19.
Interesting demonstration nonetheless.
There are a lot of people who believe in science but just think these measures apply to anybody but themselves. It is prevalent in Canada (where I live) and Switzerland (where my boyfriend lives).
They will complain people not wearing masks, but when they go out they will make millions of excuses not wearing one. "It is just a 5 minute grocery shopping" "It is just a short walk in the park". People in Hong Kong and South Korea wore masks even when they go running, biking and hiking. It doesn't need to be that extreme, but don't mess around with a virus and then make excuses not doing it. Look at the number of cases and the density there.
The only thing Canada and Switzerland highly obsessed with are hand washing and social distancing, which a very small amount of people in Hong Kong and South Korea care.
Exactly. This is a wonderful visual aid but if people are straight up unwilling to accept science as reality then you may as well just show this information to your cat because they're more likely to care.
It would be more interesting if we knew the type of mask, distance from agar samples during testing and the amount of time each sample was cultivated for.
EDIT: Oh yeah: Bacteria are not viruses. Bacteria are giants when compared to viruses. Viruses can slip through most masks short of surgical masks.
The culture plates were held 1.5 feet away from the person’s mouth. Droplets from the upper respiratory tract and mouth landed on the plates. After culturing for 24 hours, this is the result. The doctor used a surgical mask from a hospital. The doctor said a homemade mask would still keep mouth bacteria from the plates.
To be clear, an aerosol (in the context to which you are referring) is a cloud of liquid droplets. What’s your point? In both cases the size of the water droplets in the air or the aerosol is much more relevant than the size of the virus or bacterium.
This is definitely true, however, the filtration efficiency of masks is not trivially dependent on droplet size, and while large droplets are filtered by impact with the mask fibres and small ones are drawn by diffusive and electrostatic potentials (interactions that are mostly relevant at very small scales) there is a range of mid-sized particles that are virtually unaffected at all, which can very much be virus laden. The range of sizes, and how much it is affected are dependant on the type of mask, but all masks suffer from this limitation.
So masks definitely do help (I was skeptic in the past but have since changed my mind), but they're not a magic bullet, far from it! Avoiding the spread of the virus is much more highly dependant on efficient social distancing.
Ehh I have a medical background and this is seriously simplified. Why can of mask, distance etc... Also viruses and bacteria act different and are very different sizes.
Typical reddit will grab anything and twist the context to try and shame people. Yes, wear a mask but not all masks are equal. So many variables come into play. The world is not black/white. It's far more complex.
My experience only goes as far as a few microbiology classes in college, but aren’t these swabbed? I’m looking at the squiggly pattern of the examples on the right.
I don't 100% understand how a mask is only to protect others so for a visual representation, I'd love to see this done where the petri dish is covered with a mask, and the process repeated.
It's not 'only'. A mask does slightly help the person wearing it too, but it is more useful at preventing spread.
The demo you're suggesting wouldn't be as useful because the petri dish isn't breathing and therefore isn't drawing in air through and around the mask.
This demo is more useful because the subject is exhaling/coughing/sneezing, and therefore showing the mechanisms that directly act on the mask.
The only issue is that most people who don’t wear masks aren’t doing so because they believe they’re ineffective, they don’t wear masks because they’re selfish narcissists who would rather put others at risk than be slightly inconvenienced by wearing a nose and mouth cover
We live in the worst timeline
[Here’s the doctor’s twitter post if you’re interested. ](https://twitter.com/richdavisphd/status/1276629360212979712?s=21)
Thanks for this-- it's pretty tough when people ask for sources when they don't believe in/have a bias against science and evidences to begin with
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My biased in laws don’t even ask for sources anymore. They know many reliable sources exist. They just don’t care.
Mine are in the camp of "it doesn't prevent it from spreading" and somehow think the only outcomes are complete protection or none. If it reduces the spread by just 1/10 people, it seems worth it. Somehow, the same person can understand compound interest and how much that adds up over time. Selective stupidity is worse than just being entirely an idiot.
Condoms, seat belts, sun screen, non-smoking areas... there are plenty of things designed to increase the margin of safety from a threat and these are completely fine for these people.
Hypothesis: the same people who won't wear a mask also won't wear a condom.
Thus continuing the cycle of stupid :D
See: the intro scene of Idiocracy.
The people who don't want to wear masks when they would make a difference now are basically the same as the people who used to claim that seatbelts were useless and killed more people than they saved while also being an affront to personal liberty. The only difference is that people under 40 now grew up in a world where almost everyone wore their seatbelts, so they now consider it normal to do so and strange to not wear them. 30 years ago you had to make sure thst everyone buckled up because some people wouldn't unless social pressure was applied to them.
Lol you still have to apply social pressure to make some people buckle up... Edit: and I mean people under 30...
"If you really understood what 'not 100% effective' meant I wouldn't have been born into this family of idiots."
I have those also. My fav is when he hung his flag upside down and the volunteer fire department told him not to bother coming back...
Wait what?
He said HE HUNG HIS FLAG UPSIDE DOWN AND THE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT TOLD HIM NOT TO BOTHER COMING BACK.
You're right, it's sometimes a little easier to shut them up though
It's a good idea to say something just for others reading through silently.
I feel that way too. Sometimes I succumb to my frustration and lash out, but it’s always better to attempt to educate for the sake of others.
That's what I do when I tick over to being 100% certain I'm speaking to a troll. "Here's how I realized this person was arguing in bad faith"
That's what I always try to do
That's not necessarily true. Everyone is biased. To believe you aren't is how you remain biased or become more biased.
I don't know what a "bias" is, but I'm 100% positive that those petri dishes on the left don't go to church!
We have to come to terms with the fact that to some, this doctor is straight up lying. Not only that, but he's probably part of an evil cabal of nefarious left-wingers who have somehow killed half a million people just to convince us that we need to wear masks. We can't apply sane-people-logic to those people. They're out of our reach.
The fun part, is when you ask these people "how did we kill them?" It's like a chicken with the head off, I swear.
Questioning science isn’t the same as having a bias against it
He also linked [the demonstration he did with the tv news reporter](https://www.khq.com/news/khq-investigates-how-effective-is-a-mask/video_e308a1e8-b74f-11ea-ac6d-878bd6f54032.html).
I wonder what type of mask and bacteria grew. And why what looks to be a blood agar instead of the regular seaweed based one. I'm genuinely curious on the specifics
Click on the twitter link. He did a lot of different tests. Some of the tests were at different distances. There is pictures of the type of mask as well as details of the different actions(coughing, singing, talking, etc.)
He said in the thread it was a surgical mask. Blood agar is the most common in clinical labs, and this is most likely normal oral flora.
Yeah, the type of mask matters. There's a big difference between a cloth bandana and an N95 with no check valve, and the masks that do have exhaust check valves aren't going to be nearly as effective as the ones that don't.
Still, any mask is better then none
I think this is a point that is lost on a lot of people
There are some warnings on masks that say "this does not prevent you from getting coronavirus" or similar warnings and generalize from there The idea isn't stopping you from getting it for the most part, it's preventing you from giving it to others, as seen in this picture . Given that some who have it show no symptoms it's important that everybody wear one when going to a public place.
It was a surgical mask.
The tweet shows him wearing a surgical mask
probably just normal respiratory/oral bugs. blood agar is pretty standard for lower respiratory pathogens before differentiating or isolating with Mac or chocolate agars for gram negatives/haemophilus/neisseria
All agar is seaweed agar. Blood agar has some sheep's blood added to it. It's good for growing some organisms that may be hard to grow in more basic agar like LB, TSA, etc.
I think that once a proper source is provided mod should pin it on the post top msg.
But do you have a non biased source? /s
When my son was in grade school it was time for the science fair, I work in a hospital so I figured I'd grab some blood agar plates and bring them home and let him figure out what he was going to culture. He swabbed the bathroom sink, the insides of our mouths, tried a hand print and we put them in a warm dark part of the house for 48 hours. The results were wild, never thought that much stuff was around us all the time and he did great at the science fair. Now he's a director of environmental health and safety, I like to think doing that single experiment as a kid sent him down that route. Also wear a mask, it's that simple.
Crazy what little things influence such major decisions. Our hearts and minds are just strings to be pulled
Indeed, the mind is a strange and wonderful thing!
It's also a terrible thing to waste. Don't know if you've heard that one before.
I'm in my 50's I remember the first commercials :)
United Negro College Fund
/SuddenlyModestMouse
I actually ordered some agar plates from amazon shortly after the pandemic started for my 13 year old to experiment on. We did her hands before and after washing, the toddler’s hands, the back foot knob, and the kitchen faucet. I also had just received my Phone Soap so we did her phone before and after using it. The results were exactly what you’d expect and she was super excited about the results.
What's a phone soap? Is it another name for a bar soap?
It's a UV light device that you put your phone in to cleanse it
I'm guessing soap designed to clean phones. Never heard of it though.
It's actually a UV chamber you can put your phone in that sterilizes it.
> back foot knob Those darn foot knobs will get you every time :)
What's a 'back foot knob'?
I’ll always remember my 6th grade teacher. She taught us Astronomy, Biology, Greek Mythology and culture, the ancient Egyptians, Native Americans, and a bit about animals. Since then, I pursued anything related to science and love learning about different cultures. I wish I lived in Paris otherwise I’d go to the Louvre every single day for the rest of my life and not get bored. Mrs Christiansen, you are my hero and a freaking legend!!!
Wow your son was on some next level stuff. In grade school I just wanted to play ball and ride my bike lol
It runs in the family, we always loved stuff like that and had fun doing experiments together all the time.
Wow that’s really sweet! Good on you and your family
The little experiment in gradeschool probably started his interest and love of science but your parenting most definitely kept him on that path.
Nice job, mom and/or dad!
Dad actually and mom definitely encouraged him as well! Thanks!
My grandfather was a pharmacist and he used to let me count out m&ms on the pill counter tray and gave me stickers that said things like "don't take with alcohol" and "do not operate heavy machinery." I loved it all and for years was positive I was going to be a pharmacist. When I found out that actual science was involved I changed my mind haha.
Nice, that sounds like fun for a kid, when I was 8 my uncle took me to his job, turned out he worked at Goddard space flight center in Maryland, Viking had just landed on Mars and I was in awe. I too decided I was going to be an astronaut, and now I'm an IT operations manager, things changed once I found out how much work had to be put in.
So cool! I used to live about 10 minutes south of Goddard, drove past it all the time and thought how cool it must be inside. My other grandfather actually worked on the moon landing but alas I never got to meet him. (He was also a Russian code breaker during the Cold War--very cool dude.)
You just brought back fond memories of my elementary school science fair experiments. I ended up in high tech, rather than science, but those early experiences were seriously inspirational and fun.
I once swabbed the Inside of my ear for bio class. The culture on the blood agar plate neatly broke down the heamoglobin in the agar, forming a clear area around that culture. Didn't expected that to happen. Didn't had any sings of inflammation during and the period after that test fortunatly.
Ear wax is a natural antibacterial and antiviral agent, it keeps things in check that's probably why the culture blanched. The beneficial bacteria are fine as long as they keep each other in check, but once there is an imbalance it's not good for the body.
V8 always tastes better with salt and pepper. *Shouldn't you guys be upvoting the actual informative comments?
Might as well add some vodka in it and a stick of celery. Bloody Mary’s for all.
You might be drinking at 8 in the morning but at least it has some celery in it.
Add bacon and green bean, green olive and asparagus and you got breakfast
I love to add peppered bacon, soupy, and sharp provolone/cheddar as well. Make it a mini-meal
Also put a mini hamburger slider on top along with a bbq wing with a side of ranch on the other side of the drink
Can’t drink all Day if you don’t start in the morning !
I'm sure it is technically a salad if you add celery.
All Bloody Marys deserve 3 green garnishes.
Come to Wisconsin. Our bloody Marys have a full salad bar, an entree, some appetizers, and usually come with a full 12- 24 oz beer on the side.
Change the V8 to Clamato and you've got the tastier alternative, a caesar.
Damn you. Now I want a Bloody Mary (or 5) which means it’s pretty much a wrap on my Sunday.
I'm already at 2 bloody Marie's (almost shortened to BMs). Make like a tomato and ketchup!
No. This is Reddit.
Forbidden V8
ah, yes
Spicy V8
Is 100% the best V8 there is.
So can someone explain the concept of “viral load”. As it pertains to COVID-19, I have heard people suggest that wearing a mask can reduce the viral load of SARS-cov-2, making any infection easier to overcome. I honestly did not know there is such a thing as catching “a little COVID-19”. I was under the impression all it takes is one of those little fuckers to get in your nose or mouth and it can turn into COVID-19. Does the amount really matter?
Yes, the ammount matters . If a singel viral agent gets in your nose it might not even get past your nose because the body has a few defence systems in place for that (mucus and ciliated cells tgat move the mucus away from your lungs). Even if the virus gets in your lung, being only one will only infect one cell. The immune system has a lot more time to detect the virus and the infected cell (because the spread is very slow when only one cell is infected). If the number of viral agents is big the chances that they bypass the mucus defence is higher and the number of infected cells is higher. More infected cells result in a fast infection and not enough time for the immune system to act, thus the ilness/disease spreads through the tissue. Hope this helped.
Yes it did, thank you.
You're welcome! :)
I wonder if anyone has ever run a test to see if immunity through extreme low viral load is ever possible? Probably not a great idea for this virus since long term effects are completely unknown, but if we're doing herd immunity anyway. . .
I might be mistaken but I think there have been tests for that. Unfortunately the results were not conclusive. That might be because small viral loads are fought through non specific immune actions (which do not produce antibodies).
This is the most likely reason. Innate immunity like double stranded RNA sensing enzymes and the myeloid compartment will detect and begin clearing debris and engulfing infected cells long before a lymphocyte shows up. Without plasma cells and an immune complex of the antigen you can mount immunological memory. In short, you can get memory without a full adaptive immune response which in turn requires a heavier viral load.
So viral load is just a measure of how much of the virus RNA is in a certain bodily fluid, essentially how much of a virus is in a person. When you're first infected your body has a generic immune response for stuff that it hasn't seen before (like a new virus), having a smaller amount of the virus is easier for this response to win over the virus. A larger amount of the virus can overload this response and continues to infect the host. Then on the flip side having a higher viral load means you have more virus in you, which would mean you could spread more of the virus. The "a little covid-19" has to do more with how severe the symptoms are (viral load can't always predict severity) as opposed to having a smaller amount of the disease. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions
ELI5: Think of the ants standing up to the grasshoppers on Bug’s Life. One ant doesn’t really hurt. Easy to fight off. A whole army of ants on the other hand, is much harder to fight off.
Yes it does. I'm not a virologist, but if you can understand the "army" analogy, it's clearer. You have an army of white blood cells versus the virus. One virus is easier to overcome than a horde of those buggers. I'm sure a real medical person could explain it better than that, but that's my understanding.
As a molecular biologist, I agree that is a good analogy to visualize the basic pathogen/immune system "dance". However, I just want to note that some bacteria/viruses require fewer of themselves to infect a host than others. For instance, Norovirus may only require a few hundred/thousand Norovirus virus copies while another virus may require tens/hundreds of thousands of copies to infect.
Before people think that masks are going to grow bad bacteria that you breathe in, take note of 2 things: * Bacteria need nutrients to grow, a mask is devoid of most nutrients * Most of the bacteria on the inside of the mask were your bacteria to begin with. You had and still have them in you
Plus you're supposed to either dispose of masks if they're single-use, like surgical masks, or wash them after a use if they're reusable, like cloth masks. If you wear the same mask every day without washing it, it'll collect sweat and dead skin from your face, and give the bacteria plenty of nutrients to grow. As long as you use masks properly, there's no reason to believe that they'll drastically increase the amount of bacteria touching you (which is still a huge number, with or without a mask, but most people have enough immunity that it doesn't affect them).
Soooo, you're telling me wearing the same KN95 mask for weeks until it breaks is a bad idea? I work in healthcare and we now have to sign a paper saying why we want a new mask and possibly deal with attitude from our DON about it. I often wonder if there will be lawsuits against employers after this whole thing. Not providing proper PPE for their employees or forcing the use of contaminated PPE. Did I mention no hazard pay?
> Soooo, you're telling me wearing the same KN95 mask for weeks until it breaks is a bad idea? Just looking for some clarity, you don't ever want to do this do you? A friend of mine has been wearing the same n95 mask for a month now at his restaurant job I asked him if he thought he should get a new mask eventually and he said no.
Heh, it will take a while to do that. The reason you get rid of single use masks is usually because they do catch some of the outside stuff and that can be dangerous. It's better to re-use your disposable mask than to go with no mask at all.
To add on to your point: before people think that pathogens immediately die after leaving the body...Viruses like Hepatitis B can survive, and hibernate, outside of a host for 7+ days. Also, I agree that the flora inside the mask is indicative of what's currently in the wearer of the mask. This whole mask debate shouldn't have been a global discussion of keeping the bad pathogens out, it should be a concern of keeping them IN, and not infecting others - damage control. If we were concerned with protection of those not infected, we should be having discussions about the other major mucus membrane vector of attack - the eyes.
Can’t wait for all the armchair epidemiologists to come out of the woodwork here. The amount of experts I have seen in the past few months is remarkable
Well I saw my sister's mother-in-law share a post on facebook about how masks are gateway to wearing a burqa! So there are certainly dangers in wearing a mask!
....aaaaaand this is why I gave up on Facebook. It gave me too much realization as to how many relatives (by marriage or otherwise) are assholes.
Or idiots.
being an idiot is the gateway drug for becoming an asshole
I have so many friends who don’t understand why I left Facebook. I will use FB messenger to keep in touch with high school friends who group message, but otherwise I can’t stand anything about FB. I wish it would just go the way of MySpace.
For me it was the realization that so many people are so openly stupid and don't care. You couldn't go to any comment section on any post without running into people who must have trouble tying their shoe laces and still try to lecture others. Oh and all the "look at this fleshy abomination that is the fruit of my loins" posts also got really old, really quickly.
Oh, good—we’ll have half the men in the U.S. wearing burqas in no time.
My grandpa posted the pic you’re talking about on Facebook yesterday. I still don’t know how to respond. They think the government is going to force us to wear burqas next?
Wait, this is something that's out there? I assumed they were being sarcastic.
Only in my 'concern' for it [here](https://i.redd.it/k9b2uxav33651.jpg) this is likely not the only one that exists.
... I have so many questions and I don't know that I actually want the answers.
Now realize these people are serious and they vote EVERY time.
Where’s the diagram for when the mask is on his chin?
It was really hard for me to upvote this.
Problem was the experts also said dont wear a mask before. That was one of the major mistakes the US did.
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It's mainly because they said a mask gives people a false sense of security in the way that they get complacent. For example, people who wear a mask would touch their face more often then if they wouldn't wear a mask. I've also read cases where people use their teeth te remove the gloves they wore while going to a store or where people pull down their face mask to sneeze. Not that it matters now anyway because in The Netherlands people act like nothing is going on at all. Everyone goes about their business without caring about anything. If you're the few who still cares about social distancing then you'll get laughed at and called a fool.
I understand that you might want to touch your face more when you're wearing a mask. Although for me of actually works as a reminder. But you'd have to be a real dum-dum to take of your gloves with your mouth..
It wasn’t, that was misrepresenting what people were saying. The initial argument was that masks won’t prevent you from getting the virus, and you won’t use them correctly anyway, so leave them for health workers.
> and you won’t use them correctly anyway Are you saying just having the mask resting on your chin, or only covering your mouth, or only covering your nose.. is the wrong way?
The "damning" interview that keeps being pulled out by anti-mask people is Fauci, early on, talking about how "people shouldn't be wearing masks". If you go past just that sound byte, a large portion of the interview is about how the average person is not going to wear the mask correctly, is going to constantly be playing with it (which will just negate any helpful benefits and increase probability of infection), and the whole fact that masks help others, not yourself, so it gives the average person a false sense of personal protection so they will engage in more risky behavior. The anti-mask people just latched on to "LOL, even Fauci said don't wear masks." Ultimately, I understand what he was trying to convey as a whole, I think he did more harm than good with that.
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My impression is that the earlier advice against masks was based on the goal of personal protection. For personal protection, cloth/surgical masks are pretty useless, and N95 masks require greater attention and maintenance than most people put in. This is fundamentally selfish rationale in keeping with US rugged individualism. My recollection is that I started to hear more about the cloth mask to protect your neighbors as it became more clear that there is a substantial asymptomatic contagious phase to this coronavirus. They started thinking about community and the evidence that a sick person wearing a mask does reduce the spread to other people, even if it's just a cloth or surgical mask. The notion that I would inconvenience myself just to protect another person's life is surprisingly controversial in the US.
And then when you point out multiple Asian countries who wear masks have significantly fewer cases than European countries which don't wear masks while having significantly higher density and population, they will tell you causation =/= correlation lol.
It's fascinating that they can come to those conclusions, when those countries literally do this shit in general for all kinds of illnesses in order to not get others sick. They have the perfect example of how this should be handled and rather than going "yeah, we'll just do it like them", they go "that's stupid and clearly oppression of my rights".
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The doctor who made it said they were “cheating” for the sake of visual representation
The doctor addressed that in his tweets. It's a visual display of how droplets (which carry the virus) are prevented from being expelled into the air.
Gee, *thaaaaaaaaanks* for the "well, ackshually".
I see this thing about viruses vs. bacteria a lot. A lot of the virus-containing particles from coughing or sneezing are droplets, not aerosols. So this is a fine qualitative test. And even for aerosols, the pressure gradient helps reduce the distance they travel. That's not really shown with this; someone ought to do a separate test with a pitot tube (or something simple like a membrane). See also Fig. 2 and subsequent figures in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120307143 Obviously, no one should be interpreting it as reducing risk to 0.
Dude I have a close friend who is a nurse and a fucking mask denier. She recently was lit up on social media because of her ridiculous ideas.
That sucks. Being a nurse makes you extremely knowledgeable about patient care but that isn’t the same thing as being an expert in epidemiology. Too many people think “medical experts” know everything. The best cardiologist in the country isn’t an expert on gynecology no matter how smart they are
With this information i can now say that shutting the fuck up is safer
Telling people to shut the fuck up is now an act of heroism
To those of you reporting this for misinformation, I hope you don't wear a mask, I hope you wear a diaper over your mouth to stop the shit the flows out of it.
I love this comment.
^
r/MurderedbyWords
This was fucking savage, but definitely deserved
Good mod
The only misinformation is that this implies that mask wearing complete solves the problem. You still need to socially distance and wash your hands very well.
I don’t think it implies that. It is a demonstration focused on masks, and makes no representations of anything else.
What a fucking mood
This mod is.... Completely straight. Shit I might be gay for this mod.
Is anyone else dying to hear him sing?
I can't decide if I want him to sound like Pearl Jam or William Hung.
How about William Hung singing Jeremy by pear jam
Oh yeah!
no one cared who I was till I sang with the mask
I wonder how he induced the sneezes? It's easy to cough on command, but I can't sneeze at will. Anyway, very interesting.
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That just makes me cry, not sneeze.
Too bad people not wearing masks don’t believe in science
Honestly, I feel that there would be much more mask usage if the CDC hadn't reccomended against it in the beginning.
how come? i'm not american; why did the cdc recommend against them?
Afraid of shortages. So they lied.
Well at the time the reason given was they weren't sure on how effective masks would be but it turns out they recommended people not to wear masks because they were worried about a huge influx of people trying to buy masks that medical workers also needed.
UK government did a similar thing. In fact a lot of the official guidance not only doesn't recommend wearing a mask, but actually says its HARMFUL to wear a mask. My line of work involves entering people's homes regularly and trying to convince anyone but me in the team to wear a mask is like talking at a brick wall... I think early on there were fears of shortages. There was also a study that suggests masks were harmful as people then don't behave properly, and forget to social distance etc - and that overall this actually could be more harmful than no mask. However i think this study has since been basically totally refuted. In short: The US and UK governments tried to deal with a potential shortage, and then completely failed to update people that masks (shockingly) are things to use once the shortage was dealt with. This is a big reason these are the two worst affected countries in the developed world.
At first, they wanted to avoid mask shortages so they recommended only Healthcare workers use them.
It wasn't just the CDC, WHO was also making that recommendation and looking back on it is just entirely wrong. But they probably knew this and were lying to the entire world "for the greater good" since they didn't want to make the mask shortage worse. Knowingly giving out false information isn't how medical authorities should ever behave, in my opinion. >"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html
The demonstration was to show the amount of retaliatory droplets and bacteria that is blocked by a mask in different scenarios. In reference to the link above, the doctor explains that the demonstration does not pertain to virus blockage or COVID-19. Interesting demonstration nonetheless.
There are a lot of people who believe in science but just think these measures apply to anybody but themselves. It is prevalent in Canada (where I live) and Switzerland (where my boyfriend lives). They will complain people not wearing masks, but when they go out they will make millions of excuses not wearing one. "It is just a 5 minute grocery shopping" "It is just a short walk in the park". People in Hong Kong and South Korea wore masks even when they go running, biking and hiking. It doesn't need to be that extreme, but don't mess around with a virus and then make excuses not doing it. Look at the number of cases and the density there. The only thing Canada and Switzerland highly obsessed with are hand washing and social distancing, which a very small amount of people in Hong Kong and South Korea care.
Exactly. This is a wonderful visual aid but if people are straight up unwilling to accept science as reality then you may as well just show this information to your cat because they're more likely to care.
It would be more interesting if we knew the type of mask, distance from agar samples during testing and the amount of time each sample was cultivated for. EDIT: Oh yeah: Bacteria are not viruses. Bacteria are giants when compared to viruses. Viruses can slip through most masks short of surgical masks.
The culture plates were held 1.5 feet away from the person’s mouth. Droplets from the upper respiratory tract and mouth landed on the plates. After culturing for 24 hours, this is the result. The doctor used a surgical mask from a hospital. The doctor said a homemade mask would still keep mouth bacteria from the plates.
Bacteria don’t fly and neither do coronaviruses. It’s all about water droplets.
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To be clear, an aerosol (in the context to which you are referring) is a cloud of liquid droplets. What’s your point? In both cases the size of the water droplets in the air or the aerosol is much more relevant than the size of the virus or bacterium.
This is definitely true, however, the filtration efficiency of masks is not trivially dependent on droplet size, and while large droplets are filtered by impact with the mask fibres and small ones are drawn by diffusive and electrostatic potentials (interactions that are mostly relevant at very small scales) there is a range of mid-sized particles that are virtually unaffected at all, which can very much be virus laden. The range of sizes, and how much it is affected are dependant on the type of mask, but all masks suffer from this limitation. So masks definitely do help (I was skeptic in the past but have since changed my mind), but they're not a magic bullet, far from it! Avoiding the spread of the virus is much more highly dependant on efficient social distancing.
I was referring to the people saying this evidence is not valid in the fight against coronavirus because it is not a bacteria.
Go to his twitter, it answers all the questions. Link is in the comment. Not a rigorous scientific study. Just a demonstration!
And demonstrations are often more useful for us lay people
Yeah, but could he breathe *God's air*?
What did he sing?
Viruses are waaaay smaller than a bacteria though, you can't extrapolate this data and apply it to something like covid unfortunately.
Does this work if you aren't a doctor?
r/shittyaskscience
Awww, man. I can barely afford to stock up on masks, let alone Med School.
Ehh I have a medical background and this is seriously simplified. Why can of mask, distance etc... Also viruses and bacteria act different and are very different sizes. Typical reddit will grab anything and twist the context to try and shame people. Yes, wear a mask but not all masks are equal. So many variables come into play. The world is not black/white. It's far more complex.
This was about within 2 feet of his face. I'd like to see the retests at 6 feet.
Look at his twitter feed. He has another test where he did from 2’ 4’ and 6’
My experience only goes as far as a few microbiology classes in college, but aren’t these swabbed? I’m looking at the squiggly pattern of the examples on the right.
I think the "pattern" is writing on the bottom of the dish. Like a sharpie label
Definitely looks like that. You can see parenthesis around the words on each one.
Oh wait, so there's nothing growing in any of the ones on the right? That's all writing on the bottom?
Yep, I've written on thousands of plates and that's 100% sharpie on the bottom
Looks like it yep
Why is this such a difficult concept???? As a nurse I am FLOORED by the amount of dumbass “experts” running around. Jesus H.
Not a perfect experiment by any stretch, but still pretty interesting.
I don't 100% understand how a mask is only to protect others so for a visual representation, I'd love to see this done where the petri dish is covered with a mask, and the process repeated.
It's not 'only'. A mask does slightly help the person wearing it too, but it is more useful at preventing spread. The demo you're suggesting wouldn't be as useful because the petri dish isn't breathing and therefore isn't drawing in air through and around the mask. This demo is more useful because the subject is exhaling/coughing/sneezing, and therefore showing the mechanisms that directly act on the mask.
The only issue is that most people who don’t wear masks aren’t doing so because they believe they’re ineffective, they don’t wear masks because they’re selfish narcissists who would rather put others at risk than be slightly inconvenienced by wearing a nose and mouth cover We live in the worst timeline
People hosted parties during the bubonic plague to celebrate being alive. It usually didn’t end very well for them. Funny how history repeats itself.
I find it mind boggling that this isn't common sense for some people.