To add to this, there is a book called The Body Keeps the Score that dedicates several of its chapters to exploring the physiological consequences of trauma. Some of the changes are quite profound and I have a hard time believing that just one or two hundred years of evolution would have an appreciable effect in this matter. We can't teleport a combat veteran from antiquity into an fMRI but either the findings would be the same or something very profound changed in the human brain in a very short period of time and it went unnoticed.
I think it is far more likely that people either didn't discuss these things due to stigma, or they conceptualized it as the haunting of demons and ghosts since severe cases of PTSD can cause split personalities and convulsions and things like that.
I think it is about filtering. Even simple cotton t-shirt cloth is about 50% effective at filtering 23nm microbes. Definitely not good enough to give to a healthcare worker in a high exposure environment, but also definitely good enough to flatten the curve when used at a population level.
I read a paper on this last week but I can't find it at the moment. However I recall them polling people on mask usage, and pre-SARS it was single digits percentage, post-SARS it was 85-90%.
We could improvise them though. I know in Hong Kong they have asked people to improvise using layered paper towels and tissues because those are readily available nonwoven fabrics.
It isn't as good as the real thing, but done at the population level I expect it would lower the reproductive value of the virus and thus help flatten the curve.
I have been asking myself the same question. I think it comes down to two reasons:
1. Masks are in short supply and they believed they could save them for healthcare workers by convincing the general population they don't work.
2. If you are measuring efficacy, the general population won't reach the same level as a healthcare worker because they have not been professionally fitted and trained in on/off procedures. So instead of reducing risk by 95% the average person would see something like a 70% reduction, and they decided "perfect is better than good enough".
Agreed. The US surgeon general lied to the population about the efficacy of masks to try to preserve them for healthcare workers. It would have been better to ask people to preserve N95 for healthcare workers and instead improvise their own. Any reduction in droplet transmission is going to drop the R0 of this and help flatten the curve.
Regardless of whether or not you are right, this is just not an appropriate way to respond to someone who has just shared a trauma. This is a case of "if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all".
If they already have the batteries and they are this revolutionary, then why wait a year to give a demonstration? Surely a demonstration of such batteries right now would cause the value of their company to skyrocket.
One of these days I'm going to have to rig up something to start the house fan when the CO2 goes above 800 ppm and I think you'd need a different sensor with a realtime output port for something like that.
Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour?
There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.
Wow reading this just brought a kindergarten memory for me.
We had laminated apples on the wall, and if we were bad we got a worm sticker stuck on it for a week, we called it getting a "wormy apple".
One day I was listening to an audio book with headphones and didn't hear the teacher call us back, so all at once she snatched the headphones off me, asked me why I don't listen, and gave me a wormy apple. I remember it to this day, I felt so wronged because I was doing an "approved activity" and felt I was punished for it. Seeing the worm on my apple made me cry and I never listened to audio books in that classroom again.
So I don't know if making that sort of stuff electronic will be better or worse but I know I didn't like systems like that at all.
The left brain / right brain thing is wrong, but different functions of the brain are definitely localized. This is seen in studies of people with unusual brain damage, and sometimes when sticking an electrode in a certain part of the brain has an effect.
I think it is far more likely that people either didn't discuss these things due to stigma, or they conceptualized it as the haunting of demons and ghosts since severe cases of PTSD can cause split personalities and convulsions and things like that.