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Ireland to impose 5km travel limit in strict new Covid lockdown:
Ireland is to close much of its economy and society in a second Covid-19 lockdown that imposes some of the severest restrictions in Europe.
Non-essential shops will close and people are asked to stay at home, with a 5km (3 mile) travel limit for exercise, to curb surging infection rates, the government announced on Monday evening.
From midnight on Wednesday the country will move to its highest lockdown tier for six weeks. Visits to private homes or gardens will not be permitted and there are to be no gatherings except for tightly controlled weddings and funerals.
A graduated fine system for those who breach the 5km travel limit – with exceptions for work and other purposes deemed essential – will be announced later this week. People who live alone or are parenting alone can pair with one other household as part of a support bubble. Two households can meet outdoors within the travel limit. Public transport will operate at 25% capacity.
Non-essential retail will close along with barbers' shops, beauty salons, gyms, leisure centres and cultural amenities. Pubs, cafes and restaurants will be allowed to serve takeout meals only, a devastating blow to an already weakened hospitality sector.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday October 26 2020, @12:52PM (9 children)
I agree, I can't see mask wearing being successful for school children - even reasonably old ones. In UK this issue has been mitigated by stopping school children moving between year groups and class groups.
Also, in the workplace, it is hard to imagine wearing a mask for long stretches. This issue can be mitigated by mask wearing in communal areas only (e.g. while moving through buildings to office). There is, of course, a "risk versus hassle" balance to be struck.
However, transmission elsewhere can be prevented by mask wearing. For example, in shops, in communal areas at workplaces, etc. It's not such a great burden, although it does make one look a bit silly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 26 2020, @04:08PM (6 children)
We have real world data on that too. Mask wearing was 30% or under after quarantine around here and has since increased to 60%.
Its trivial to look at the ratio of number of infections at date X vs number of infections at date X plus two weeks. Obviously the increase or decrease in infections at time X+ must depend on behavior; else why bother trying to regulate behavior? In theory, if masks work, and the number of people wearing them doubles, then the number of new infections should fall.
It does not.
Therefore increasing mask wearing percentage from 30% to 60%, had no effect, so lowering mask wearing from 60% to 30% would also have no effect.
Given that there was no change in infection rate going from 30% to 60% mask wearing, there seems little hope that going from 60% to 90% would have a different effect.
There just seems to be no point in wearing masks. Without a benefit, why bother?
The real cost is in lying to the population to encourage negative behaviors. For example the local school district opened under the promise that wearing masks would prevent the spread of the disease. The result was a tripling of case count. If people did not have a blind faith in mask wearing as a religious totem or whatever, there's MANY infected people right now who wouldn't be infected.
I had to visit a walmart over the weekend and it was pretty creepy; store full of people wearing a mask thinking they're protected, but the actual historical data shows they may as well not bother. I shouldn't have been in that store and neither should they.
Mask mandates are like mandating a safety lever be installed on guns with the full awareness based on deployment data that the do not work and provide a false sense of security; regardless of any authoritarian pronouncements of how well it worked in CAD draftings or how high ranking the official making the announcement that it works. Mother nature cannot be fooled; masks do not work in practice and provide a false sense of security.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 26 2020, @04:13PM (3 children)
Or rephrased, if you look at the infection vs mask graphs of a four week period where mask wearing went from 30% to 30% to 30% and new infections dropped, whereas we also have data where mask wearing went from 30% to 40% to 50% and infection rate ... increased ... that is not looking very good for the effectiveness of mask mandates.
You can run similar statistical analysis on lockdown. Interesting how where I live the infection rate was lower after lockdown ended despite social distancing graphs based on cell phone data clearing showing a difference of 50% in subscriber mobility. Its almost as if lockdowns don't work.
I suspect the people in power understand this fully and are in damage control mode telling people if they just suffer enough nonsense now, everything will be better. But a scientist who looks at the graph can tell lockdowns and masks have been no more effective than faith healing at reducing viral infection. Essentially the powers that be are wasting peoples time and effort to make them feel less powerless, despite being quite powerless indeed when one looks at the graphs.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday October 26 2020, @05:19PM (2 children)
Point taken. Studies like these obviously demonstrate that mask usage "should" prevent covid spread:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabd3083 [sciencemag.org]
There are a lot of confounding factors so it is hard to do a good study of covid "in the wild" as you propose. But I take your point, and similar comments can be made about UK. I couldn't find a good study since July or so (face masks became mandatory in UK since August or so).
> You can run similar statistical analysis on lockdown
Well, the original covid lockdown did work - i.e. the first wave did subside. Are you positing some other reason for that success?
> I suspect the people in power understand this fully and are in damage control mode
Not really - publishing is fairly easy, it is hard to suppress thousands (tens of thousands?) of epidemiologists who are working on this. You should be able to find a journal reference if there is good data.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:22PM (1 child)
Also plenty of historical data that wearing masks in operating rooms and similar areas work great at preventing disease spread.
Yet, looking at recent results in the data, they're just not working at all in the general public.
Obviously some difference in quality (public health "mask" equals bandana, neurosurgeon's OR mask is heavily govt regulated both in manufacture and use).
Maybe the virus just isn't bothered by masks for whatever weird reason even if in the lab, abstract tests seem to work.
Maybe the data is weird / bad / fake. All data is "bad" in the sense of being imperfect, but screwing up this bad would be epic level mistake which seems unlikely.
Could be application layer, like after 40+ hours of using the same mask the media is saturated and its actually worse than not wearing a mask. Its "engineering plausible" although just a random brainstorm. Certainly logic would dictate that after spitting into something enough, it would become, essentially, spit. Perhaps people need to switch masks more often or wash masks or disinfect them. If this wild hypothesis were true, it would explain why masks work great in operating rooms on doctors faces for less than 10 hours at a time, but have no effect on disease reduction when the general public wears the same mask for a month at a time.
Could be application layer like excessive exercise makes masks worthless due to high air flow. After all not many mask wearing heart surgeons climb three flights of stairs in the middle of a transplant. Again, wild brainstorming of a hypothesis. But that hypothesis would certainly explain why masks work in operating rooms and fail in the general public. Certainly, in the general public everyone carrys something heavy or climbs stairs once in awhile so if the heavy air flow of doing that made masks worthless at disease prevention, that would explain a lot.
At any rate, "clearly it doesn't work, so we need to do more of it so everyone is unified and it looks like we're doing something" is the usual political madness so naturally thats what we're implementing.
Peer review, publishing delays, grant money, meetings, the usual academic delays. I'm sure in about two years there will be some interesting journal articles about how masks were observably worthless at disease prevention despite working in the lab.
The hypothesis game is fun, but just talking about pure observation, for fun we'll assume first derivative of social distancing would affect first derivative of total infected people aka new case numbers. Also we'll assume covid19.healthdata.org is not fake data. We'll assume the news stories about the incubation time being two weeks are also true.
Lets look at Illinois:
March 8 social mobility 0% baseline standard estimated daily new infections 900
March 22 social mobility in this interval dropped from 0% baseline to 51% lower. Estimated daily infection count 8705 which is So first derivative of social distancing is 51 and case load change is 7800
May 13 lockdown seemed to begin to end around now in the data. Social mobility -44%, new daily infections 10012.
May 27 two weeks social mobility score now -36%, so a first derivative of 8 percent less social distancing should result in many more cases. Actual new daily infections reported 7259 which is a drop of 2753 not an increase.
So two datapoints, (social distancing, change in daily infection rate) are (+51, +7800) and (-8, -2753)
This can be repeated over many locations and over a long period of time. Then combine into best fit.
The best fit of a pitiful two datapoints is (change in infection rate two weeks later) = 178 * (percent increase in social distancing) - 1322
Now the y-intercept is "small" compared to case totals and may as well be ignored. But we were promised that killing the economy would save us from infection, yet it seems that every percent decrease in social mobility in Illinois actually increased the number of cases by 178 two weeks later. Huh. Big brother said that number would be negative for sure, and thats how we'd save everyone from infection. Of course the TV and our political leaders would NEVER lie to us, would they?
There are other oddities. There's a long flat period in Illinois from July and August where nothing changed in disease spread yet mask use varied by ten percent. The mask average is only about half. So we can predict that if 10% change in mask use is invisible in disease spread graphs, why not estimate 0% or 100% mask use would also be invisible in the disease spread graphs?
Daily infections since the start of the school year have tripled. Yet mask use is 100% mandatory in my kids schools (admittedly not the hellhole of Illinois, but...) and mask wearing among the general public increased 4% over the same time interval. So increasing mask wearing 4% resulted in a tripling of infection rate. Interesting.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday October 29 2020, @07:53AM
I don't quite know what your data source is or what "social mobility" means so I can't comment on your stats. To pick a couple of random data points from Europe:
Lockdown looks like it has a pretty strong affect in UK (lockdown 23 March)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK-lockdown+lifting.png [wikipedia.org]
and France (lockdown 16 March)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_France#/media/File:COVID-19-France-log.svg [wikipedia.org]
This UK graph on linear scale and also shows second wave (sorry for long URL):
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom/0/183efc7192d9478f9bbfce3b6bc54a9baaa87d54.png [wikipedia.org]
In second wave the lockdown measures have been staged/implemented locally, so harder to really parse the data.
Can't comment on masks from this data...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @06:25PM (1 child)
> Mask wearing was 30% or under after quarantine around here and has since increased to 60%.
There's your problem (the problem in your area), right in your numbers. Here in NY, where (as noted elsewhere) we are doing pretty good at the moment, mask wearing in public places (like stores) is up above 90%. That's what it takes to keep our new cases rate down to 1%-2% of tests, because no one knows if they are contagious.
If your school kids are near 100% (as are our kids in NY State), then they are not the cause of your local cases going up. 60% is not nearly high enough.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:36PM
covid19.healthdata.org disagrees with your numbers. In NY peak mask wearing was July thru August around 80% and since declined to about 75%.
I donno man. Its possible to build castles of dreams mathematical models where 60% mask use has zero impact on disease spread not showing up in the slightest whereas 75%, a mere 15% more, knocks the disease out entirely. That just doesn't sound reasonable as a disease model ...
Its possible to get boxed in with that strategy.
Minnesota has been running just a hair under 70% and has had a tripling of cases since school started. So masks are completely ineffective at preventing disease spread at 68% of the population like MN, but are effective at wiping the disease out like NY at 75% use.
New Jersey's case load has been flat since school opened and mask wearing is at 70%.
The math model is looking kinda ridiculous at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:51PM
Except it has been (at least here [nytimes.com]) successful:
That's a 0.17% (zero point one seven percent) positive rate. Which is ~6x less than the overall positive test rates in NYC.
What's more, as of *yesterday (26 October 2020), there have been 892 positive tests among staff (488) and students (404) [nyc.gov].
And since ~26% (286,000) of NYC school students are participating in in-person learning [nytimes.com], that's a 0.14% (zero point one four percent) positive rate among students. Even more, if you add in the staff numbers of positive cases (although it's somewhat less because I don't have numbers of staff to add to the total population, but let's go with it anyway) that's still only 0.31% (zero point three one percent).
So yes, it *can* be successful. If it can be successful in the most densely populated city in the US, it can be successful across the US, but *if, and only if* both the schools and the larger community work together to protect each other via aggressive testing/tracing and isolation of those who are infected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:53PM
I know. And since it's so important not to look silly, grandma should die instead.
Please.