Corona recap

States are beginning, slowly, to re-open from the Moo Goo Gai Panic and we're seeing some lightly-reported lessons.

• We've suspected that CV19 is wildly contagious, but we're now discovering that it's only wildly contagious in certain circumstances, viz. close contact with a symptomatic infected person over an extended time frame;  some (like the New England Journal of Medicine) are suggesting upwards of 10 minutes is required for transmission.


• asymptomatic infected persons appear to not be carriers of CV19.


• casual contact, even with an individual exhibiting symptoms, presents nearly no danger of infection.


• N95 masks, touted as the gold standard for PPE, trap particles with a minimum size of 0.3 microns (E-6);  the diameter of the CV19 virus is 80 nanometers (E-9), about 1/4 the minimum size an N95 mask will collect.
  


• mask use, therefore, provides close to zero protection for ordinary people going about their ordinary business.  They only protect against droplet infection when someone coughs into your face or sprays blood on you — which is why medical professionals use them on the job.  For you shopping for groceries?  Fundamentally useless, but perhaps comforting.


• To die from CV19, you first have to catch it, then be part of a susceptible population, someone whose immune system won't successfully fight it off, and then have some co-morbidity (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, immunosuppressed, etc.).  If your immune system is working and you're in reasonable health otherwise, yes, you're going to catch it eventually, but you won't die from it.

None of this is meant to deter you from wearing a mask, even a cloth mask that is nowhere near as useful as an N95 mask, if you feel that it makes people around you more comfortable.  Just understand that it isn't really providing any measurable benefit.

Second, states that started reopening early, around May 4, are not showing indications of increasing hospitalization.  There's some confusion here because the news media bleats about "increase in cases" and lets you draw the (incorrect) conclusion that CV19 is resurgent.  The (reported) increase is typically an increase in individuals reported as infected after being tested, not 'individuals complaining about symptoms and/or being admitted for treatment'.  Most people who become infected with CV19 show no symptoms (asymptomatic), and perhaps don't even know they have it until they get tested and...  surprise!  Eventually everyone will be positive for CV19, but with a death rate in the neighborhood of 0.03%, look for the real death-from-CV19 number to come out around 100,000 — which is approximately what happens in flu season.  All those deaths where a mugging victim was discovered on post-mortem to have CV19 don't count.

It appears FDR was right: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.