Yesterday Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said we need not worry about Covid any more as we are 'past its peak'.
Dr Rachel Clarke has made her name during the Covid crisis due to her accurate and forthright commentary on what is happening in the NHS and beyond. She posted this last evening:
There have, apparently, never been so many Covid patients in hospital in Scotland as there are now. And they're just ahead of us with the latest wave.
Purely anecdotally, three out of the five homes in the cluster of houses in which I happen to live have a person with Covid in it right now (mine is one of the two exceptions).
Sajid Javid is talking nonsense about Covid and the chance that the NHS will cope with demand in the next year. I very strongly suspect that he knows that. But like the Chancellor, he is a man who does not care.
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So, let’s minimise hospitalisation by always wearing a good quality mask in all crowded places.
Be wary of all new Covid variants – we don’t yet know where and when they will arise and how virulent and severe they will be. https://theconversation.com/deltacron-what-scientists-know-so-far-about-this-new-hybrid-coronavirus-179442?
Vaccines will lag behind the spread of any new variant, so ditch your surgical masks – they provide very little protection and only buy FFP3 masks. Learn to fit them well and always wear one in all crowded places. Never wear a mask with a valve. That way you will minimise the risk of infection for your self and others.
If you’ve had Omicron recently maybe you can relax, but do you want to take the risk of being hit by a new variant?
Much of the £32 billion spent on test and trace could have provided us all with good masks and have saved many deaths and the huge pressure on NHS staff.
Geoff, what does the research say about the relative difference between no mask, a surgical or cloth mask, and FFP3?
For what it is worth, I’m below the age of 50, vaccinated three times, had COVID at least once (a few months ago), and still cutting back on work and social interaction (and wearing a cloth mask when in most indoor places with other people), but not keeping myself quite as much a hermit as before.
Cloth masks are almost useless
I never use less than an ffp2
That is not what the WHO is still saying. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-masks
What does the research say? Is there much?
I am referring to opinion from Indy Sage members
Andrew – I was surprised that aerosol transmission was not considered to be a major mode of transmission for Covid when I did my own risk analysis in April 2020.
It took a year before there were significant papers in the science literature confirming my own opinion based on my early days as a microbiologist e.g. https://scitechdaily.com/its-not-just-covid-19-most-respiratory-viruses-actually-spread-by-aerosols/
I ran a risk analysis to identify the critical control points for minimising transmission and identified the wearing of a good quality mask without a valve to be absolutely essential – i.e. it was the critical control point.
FFP3 masks (often called respirators) are routinely worn in the NHS to minimise transmission in rooms where there are highly infectious viruses . These masks were difficult, but not impossible, to obtain as hospitals tried to deal with the pandemic, but simple surgical masks were everywhere.
In 2008, the HSE studied the masks with regard to influenza transmission and concluded “our findings show that surgical masks provide around a 6-fold reduction in exposure. Live viruses could be detected in the air behind all surgical masks tested. By contrast, properly fitted respirators could provide at least a 100-fold reduction”. https://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr619.pdf
More recent studies have verified this comparing surgical masks with the slightly less effective FFP2 masks – https://www.mpg.de/17916867
The WHO and our own government guidance was woefully inadequate – the primary risk is inhalation of aerosols in crowded spaces or spaces with fewer people, but inadequate ventilation.
A good quality, well-fitted mask – minimum FFP2 – is essential.
That’s why I use them
I will be in London tomorrow – masked…
Thanks Geoff. Much obliged. For what it is worth, in my irregular trips on public transport or trips to the shops, I’ll take a quick and simple six fold reduction (If everyone else wore one too, that might be a 36 fold reduction) although I can understand why you might want to aim for 100 fold. I fear you will find, Richard, that the general prevalence masks in London is down well below half, perhaps one in four, if that.
Hence the particular need for an ffp2
@ Andrew
Can I just ask why the reticence to wear ffp3? I understand that cost may be an issue.
If it helps at all, I bought a box of 20 ffp3 masks at the start of the year and I still haven’t used more than 10 of them. The cost was about £25, if I remember correctly
I find that ffp3 masks are absolutley fine (and actually more comfortable than cloth surgical masks) unless I’ve been working really hard – read, running up stairs.
Of course, you have to spend a couple of seconds each time you put it on re-organising the nose-wire, but it’s no great issue, especially for such an increase in protection. (And 100-fold is so much more than 6-fold, it would be almost funny to ignore the difference if the stakes weren’t quite so high)
Cost, convenience, a desire to avoid piles of additional single use waste. I am triple vaccinated, and had Covid a few months ago, and have no significant risk factors, so personally feel I am toward the lower end of the risk spectrum.
As I said, I am content that the masks I wear make a contribution towards reducing the risk of infection of myself and others. I wish everyone else on the public transport I use a few times a week, or at the shops, or the school event I attended the other week, was wearing one too. But I am not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The MGP links acknowledges that “the way a mask is worn makes a huge difference” and “even medical masks significantly reduce the risk of infection compared to a situation without any mouth-nose protection at all”.
We are being failed on many fronts. Not just by government but the collective establishment. It feels as if the country is falling apart. Sorry, haven’t got anything positive to add.
Well, the number of friends & family who have caught it recently is rather high
There was a plane crash in China yesterday which killed 132 people. It was very unfortunate, but in the UK very nearly 100 people have been dying of COVID every day since last August. That is the best part of 8 months.
For significant chunks of time – three weeks in September, four weeks in October/November, and seven weeks from December to February – I make that about half of the last 7 month – the daily death toll has exceeded that plane crash. Every day, for weeks on end.
The number of people in hospital with COVID has not dropped below 10,000 this year. It is approaching around 10% of the total number of NHS beds again. How can we expect any normal health service to continue under this continuous pressure, let alone catch up on backlogs?
The NHS has not a hope with this government in charge…..
Atlas shrugged.
🙂
Sunak shrugged