She is working in 2 sites she didn't say which one it was or maybe even both but one is in the Penge region the other in the St Mary's Cray area.

I agree it is out of order if you sneeze of cough must decent people cover the mouth or nose. Is it too much to ask that when they go to the doctors feeling ill and demanding help they wear a mask?

One more point

Smell molecules can be much smaller in size that viruses, and so being able to smell through a mask often has little relevance to whether it's effectively working on not. That said certainly it's known that some masks work much better than others.

It'd certainly a sensible and considerable act to wear a decent mask in shops and on public transport, however plenty of people didn't bother in recent month and covid was humming along at a manageable level with low hospitalisations.

I would say the importance of masks going forward may well relate on the specifics of the omicron variant, but that it pays to see them as more than solely an act of conformity that we must act against. Buy a decent n95 / ffp3 one and it's certainly much better than not.

Edited by BlueJay (30 Nov 2021 11.50pm)

Fortunately, we have a live-running experiment that shows us the effect masks and other such restrictions have on case numbers and hospital admissions.

Looking at the plot I attached, If they made the slightest bit of difference, I suppose the dark blue line might be England (no masks) whilst the other two would be Scotland and Wales (masks). The data starts at the point the mask / vaccine papieren bitte polciies came into place.

Unfortuntely for the narrative, the data show no such thing. The dark blue line is in fact Scotland (masks), whilst Wales (masks) and England (no masks) seem to track each other pretty well over the past 2 months.

Reconcile that with your assertions on mask efficacy please. You will need to explain how, despite masks working to limit the spread, they simultaneously perform worse than no masks (Scotland) and make no difference (Wales).

Edited by davenotamonkey (01 Dec 2021 12.02am)

Attachment: masks.jpg (81.09Kb)

A lot of how we feel about the response to the virus and individual approaches really comes down to how used to having significant daily control over nature we have become. There's little point in shaking a fist at the sky so it's directed elsewhere. Even this far in we can't really say with certainty that this or that approach would've been for the best, as that'll only be something that can truly be said if and when we're out of the other side of this. There may well be twists and turns yet, and though logically they should eventually lean towards the positive, it's still currently a coin toss in an interconnected world. My home is that we'll carry on as normal (unless unthinkable numbers of people start dropping dead everyday, in which case I won't suppose we will).

Emergence of new variants that are resistant to current vaccines available will prove to be the major hurdle to tackle - all the easier to create if % of population remain unvaccinated either through lack of access or personal choice ( for those who choose to believe that they'll never be affected, it is worth absorbing the following case study given that even the very fittest can succumb to the virus: [Link]

I won't repeat all the previous reasoning. Please refer to earlier posts. As there is though a lot more impacting trends than just mask wearing, you are attempting to extrapolate a conclusion from just one contributory factor. Masks are an important element in many ways, but they aren't the only one.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.