Decision in the dead of the night.

The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 38 (1905). When those officials “undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Marshall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974). Where those broad limits are not exceeded, they should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary,” which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people. See Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 545 (1985).

Meanwhile, the religion of “Home repair and lawn maintenance” remains unabated, with my local Lowe’s and Home Depot parking lots filled to capacity and wall-to-wall people in the aisles.

Welcome to the FUSA.  We have to be medical providers and professionals in order to interpret the first amendment to the constitution.  We’ll leave that to the bureaucracy.

Remarkable decision, with Roberts proving where his fealty lies.

SARS-CoV-2 remains a troublesome virus for some small fraction of patients, mostly the elderly and those with co-morbidity.

I’ve followed this channel for a long time.  The elderly are especially at risk.  This means that Cuomo and Whitmer did all the wrong things by forcing nursing homes and assisted living centers to accept Covid patients.  But we knew that already.

For those who are interested.  Doctors are still learning treatment protocols for this disease.  You can thank Fort Detrick, Anthony Fauci, gain-of-function research and the Wuhan virology lab for all of this.

Do you recall that I said this?

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

Then I got a little more detailed and discussed particle sizes.

HEPA filters will remove particles down to 0.3 µm in size (to usually 99.95% efficiency, depending upon the filter – here I have used data for nuclear grade filters).  The SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80 nm in diameter.  A few viruses out of a million might be intercepted by electrostatic force, but that’s essentially zero.

If the particle you’re trying to intercept is spittle, stay away from coughing people anyway.  But those particles drop by sedimentation, diffusiophoresis, etc.

0.3 µm versus 80 nm.  A nanometer is 1E-9 meters, and 1 µm is 1E-6 meters.  This means that a SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80E-9 / 0.3E-6 = 0.27 the minimum size necessary for even the most expensive nuclear grade HEPA filters to remove it from an air stream.

I need to caveat these statements and observe that because of the serpentine flow of air through a HEPA filter, it’s possible that there is some removal efficiency due to electrostatic force (i.e., that it’s not zero), assuming a charge on the shell of the virus.  But it’s still low.  While I’m not perfect, I won’t mislead readers.  And while there is some small probability that there will be some small effect, any very small particulate eventually re-evolves into the air stream.

One of my major gripes with how America has turned to the medical bureaucracy during this pandemic is treating medical doctors like experts in every field of science.  They’re not.  A doctor isn’t an air flow and filtration engineer.  A doctor isn’t an industrial hygienist.  A doctor isn’t a physicist.

But it’s still nice to see that eventually they conform to the truth of what science tells us.  This is straight from the New England Journal of Medicine (nejmp2006372).

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

You can read the rest for yourself.  They eventually dive into a discussion concerning the use of masks by medical workers, and I think over-state their case (I still believe, along with my daughter, an NP, that she wears a mask for purposes of protecting herself from blood-borne diseases and spittle in the OR and ER).

However, nits here and there shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that at least they are being honest about this.  Anxiety is the root of the problem, and reflexive fealty to the priesthood of the medical profession is a symptom of real problems in America concerning the lack of STEM education and knowledge.

Remember that I said this to you?

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

I’m certainly not perfect, but I won’t mislead you.  I stumbled upon this video and thought it might be enlightening that someone else thinks the same way.

This information is true because: HEPA filters will remove particles down to 0.3 µm in size (to usually 99.95% efficiency, depending upon the filter – here I have used data for nuclear grade filters).  The SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80 nm in diameter.  A few viruses out of a million might be intercepted by electrostatic force, but that’s essentially zero.

If the particle you’re trying to intercept is spittle, stay away from coughing people anyway.  But those particles drop by sedimentation, diffusiophoresis, etc.

You’ll have to forward to about five minutes in the video to get past the rambling. I think some inspired readers could add to all of this by linking video or citing URLs where Fauci now claims that the wearing of masks is merely a sign of respect.

“You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:32).

News from New York and the Northeast on how they have treated the elderly.

Health policy expert Avik Roy noted on Twitter Tuesday morning that if you remove New York from the national statistics, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths attributed to nursing homes jumps to 52%. Roy also reminds us that “only 1.8% of U.S. residents live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, meaning that people in one of those facilities are 23 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than anyone else.

This isn’t without background.

Those deaths have occurred as Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.

And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries.

GNYHA – a lobbying group for hospital systems, including some that own nursing homes – said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.

Prior to the budget language, Cuomo had already temporarily granted limited legal immunity to doctors and nurses serving on the medical frontlines. But the carefully sculpted passage buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.

One of the most hideous things done in American history, second to abortion.

News from the NIH.

455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.

The median contact time for patients was four days and that for family members was five days. Cardiovascular disease accounted for 25% among original diseases of patients. Apart from hospital staffs, both patients and family members were isolated medically. During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test.

In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection and we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak.

If someone doesn’t feel bad and exhibits no symptoms of disease, he can generally go about his business without harming others.  If you feel bad, you should stay home.

If you feel bad, stay home.  If you feel okay, report to school or work.  So what have we learned in this study that our mothers didn’t teach us?

Virtually everything the government (federal and state) has done has been ass backwards through this epidemic.

They began by saying the virus led to ARDS.  That myth was completely shattered early on by Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell who treated many patients in New York, and continues to be debunked by more doctors.  And yet, I have in my possession a 60+ page PowerPoint presentation sent to medical workers in North Carolina just several weeks ago restating the ARDS mythology.

The very term “happy hypoxia” came from this treating this disease, and it is now clearly isn’t an ARDS disease, and attacks the blood and CNS/PNS.  All that’s required to ascertain this is a little reading and investigation, and being open to learning from the rest of the world.  But apparently that cannot be done in my home state of N.C., where our awful governor surrounds himself with awful people.

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

Next up, Hydroxychloroquine.  Even the most recent trial of Hydroxychloroquine don’t include the administration of Zinc, and thus the trial is probably useless (a fact that had to be pointed out by Glenn Reynolds).  And despite the medical bureaucracy panning the use of Hydroxychloroquine, they didn’t back in 2005, when they said exactly the opposite.  And while we’re on the subject, while they also pan the use of Hydroxochloroquine for not having their control group and “double blind” study, Anthony Fauci’s much heralded Remdesivir lacks the very same thing.  But Remdesivir is better, because shut up.

Next up, I’ve lost count of the number of times the medical bureaucracy has told us not to put our hopes in “snake oil” or natural remedies.  And yet, we now know that China began pushing Vitamin C in their military as soon as this outbreak occurred.  I’ve sent myself articles on the effectiveness of Vitamins C and D3 in combating this virus, or at least, in showing how those most badly affected by the disease were low in those vitamins (see for example this study, this post, and this study).

Next up, what we did with the elderly will go down as one of the most inhumane things every done to people in American history.  We should have sent them home to be with loved ones, or if they couldn’t, sent them out on field trips into the sun and given them vitamins.  Instead, we sent more diagnosed patients to live among them.

Finally, the number of deaths in America from cancer, suicide and other diseases that haven’t been treated while we’ve been locked down will far outnumber the deaths from this virus when all is said and done, and that, after the economy has been utterly smashed on the rocks, rendering a brand new sector of Americans in poverty after working their entire lives to build small businesses.

Again, virtually everything the medical bureaucracy has done has been ass backwards.  Most of them deserve to be frog marched into the city square and put in stocks.  Sadly, many of them aren’t political appointees and cannot be fired.  They are lifers in the FedGov or StateGov, those seeming repositories of incompetence and malfeasance.