I sense confusion about the purpose of masks as well - it isn't for your your immediate protection, it's to help (as one tool among a bundle) prevent others from possible being exposed to something you might be unintentionally offering them. Being a caregiver, I find myself in a lot of medical facilities, so I always wear one at work despite my coworkers being completely disinterested in doing so. That, sanitizing what shared things I handle, and keeping some distance is nothing more than courtesy and consideration these days.

If I want this, I'll go pull up a "TASTES GREAT!!! LESS FILLING!!!" light beer commercial from years ago.

The fact remains that the science surrounding this pandemic is NOT "settled" as folks want to insist.

I can point you to places where mask wearing compliance is 100% and people still come down with the disease (not just testing positive). I can point you to places openly defying mask wearing where no one has come down with it, or at least shown any symptoms. I can show you Draconian suspensions of liberties in "hotbeds" like the Navajo Nation--that don't work to stop it.

We've long ago abandoned really trying to defeat this disease. All we're engaging in now, even in this thread, is a worldwide "Kabuki dance" of scapegoatting, of blaming people, of trying to affix rationale to the truly random. We all approach this with our own set of blinders affixed, affixed by belief systems that range from the religious to political dogma. And we're being exploited by those who wish to turn this political.

Imagine if we kept engaging in this "blame game" to this level internationally, instead of letting political propagandists exploit it to turn us against one another in this fashion. We would have nuked Beijing and Wuhan by now.........

Sandy, work isn't the only place where people interact, it's just theoretically easier to enact a policy which may help reduce transmission in a workplace, assuming it is enforced, which is a whole other issue..... so judging on a basis of work only isn't rational. As Robert explained, the early science was very impressively carried out, somewhat stumbling after, but it's the only science we have so why even consider it from a political perspective at all when deciding on a rational course of behavior? It isn't as if we were being asked to remove all our toes, for example..... completely reversible and painless to wear a mask and give space when in public venues.

Back when Hydroxychloroquine was being touted as a treatment for Covid all the scientists (or at least those at Google, Facebook, CNN, and most of the rest of the mainstream news) were quick to point out that you couldn't use anecdotal evidence in medicine. YouTube went so far as to take down videos by actual doctors who were stating very real positive observations when it came to the drug.

At the time were all told back then that only clinical trails which choose one group at random to get the treatment and another that was the control could decide the effectiveness of a medical measure. Now these same groups are pushing masks when the the evidence they have is 100% anecdotal. Furthermore these same groups are now censoring others who counter with their own real examples of the masks just not working!

As far as I can tell the only actual real nonbiased study of masks is the following;
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

Summary results were as follows;


In other words the best scientific test we have today on this shows in a real world trail of masks vs none there was a very slight benefit of them but not statistically significant enough to make a conclusion.

I am a little more pragmatic, in the middle of a new crisis I think it makes sense to use anecdotal evidence. If loved one had no better options based on how many doctors were coming forward and saying the hydroxychloroquine worked I would say it would make sense to give it a shot, just as I think it probably doesn't hurt to try masks out.

However as far as I am concerned any group that is relying on masks as part of their Covid prevention measures are on as shaky scientific ground as the people who thought that Hydroxychloroquine was the cure to this thing.

All this scientific debate is fine and dandy but please take this from someone who has watched first hand Covid move thru his workplace (where everyone wore masks) like fire thru a dry Colorado forest. Any organization who is counting masks as part of their Covid prevention plan is crazy, and putting their most at risk eldery members in danger by giving them a false sense of security. At this point with the vaccine so close at hand just as any seriously at risk individuals to stay home for a few months or provide significant distance (as I am also not too sure that 6ft is enough and we all know in practice it is +/-3 1or so) and keep everyone safe.

adammil1, I think you may have misinterpreted the study. The two groups, one with masks and one without were within a population where mask use was uncommon. Wearing a mask won't necessarily keep you from contracting COVID, but it does catch a more than fair amount of aerosol particles on someone who already is carrying and exuding the virus. That's where the protection lies. In other words, you wear the mask not to keep from getting the virus but to reduce the chance of spreading it.

The probability of whether or not you contract COVID is likely also dependent on the viable viral load you inhale either without a mask or what comes in around it when you inhale. You also need to wash hands after touching community items and not touch your eyes, nose or mouth until you have disinfected your hands. Science supports all this.

That said, masks are mandatory at our facilities in case someone is present that is asymptomatic. The mask helps to deter the spread.

N95 masks are available with vents & without.

The vented ones, just like respirators, don’t filter your exhale and should be avoided.

This from Trains website. This is already starting here. Sorry if it has previously been posted:

https://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2 ... -railroads

I also think that masks give people a false sense of security. I practically never hear people talk about washing hands anymore, but I do hear stories about people getting all bent out of shape about someone not wearing a mask. I also remember reading that some cloth masks are practically worthless while others work much better, yet we seem to be fine with anything as long as it looks like a mask.

I see almost universal mask wearing in the usual retail outlets that I have been to, yet the virus continues to spread. There must be something else that is going on. Maybe to do with the aforementioned variety of mask efficacy? But I do know that the collateral damage from the covid response will certainly cause more long lasting harm than covid itself will. The stimulus bills have increased the money supply by 66% in this past year. That is something that will dramatically reduce everyone's standard of living for the foreseeable future. How many people were put permanently into poverty by just that? It is a double whammy. First they lose their job. Then the value of their money is slashed.

The US has been declining in standard of living for the middle class ever since the collapse of our industrial base. The response to covid may be what finally wipes out the American Dream for the vast bulk of our citizens as the dominoes continue to fall.

Rail preservation can only exist in a society that has disposable income. Our museums are luxuries only afforded to an affluent society. If people only knew what they were permanently saying goodbye to in their zeal to shut it all down.

The thing about it though. There is nothing to prevent anther virus from doing the exact same thing a few years down the road. And given how we completely screwed up the response to this one, I'm not sure we have the cushion to respond the same way again. There are only so many trillions that can be created before the money is completely devalued.

This is a really good point. The state where I live, with their vast "science" resources and comprehensive book of rules (and fines to go with them), completely fails to recognize this, and considers virtually any type of manufactured mask, or cloth rag you wrap around your head, to be an acceptable "mask" for the purpose of complying with the rules.

PC

And it looks like we are soon going to find out how many trillions it takes. The St. Louis Fed chart of the M1 money supply confirms what Rick has posted. Available on the internet if you care to take a look.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1

PC

I remember a banker friend saying in the mid-2000s that the United States was on a course toward financial collapse through the booming real estate market and "unlimited" borrowing. His words rang true in 2008.
Then Obama had "quantitative easing" -- another way of saying unlimited printing of money. Remember when they were talking about minting a trillion dollar coin to maintain the federal budget?
There are now some worries about inflation. Again, remember the late 1970s and early 1980s with 20+ percent interest rates? People left their keys in their front doors and walked away from their homes.
The USD stands mainly because it is the world's default currency. However, it has been devalued and degraded for several decades.
In this area, right now, you can't buy a property for under $700,000. As the wealth is sucked out of our economy, is this sustainable?
As you Americans say, we are between a rock and a hard place. We do not want people to die, but we do not want to decimate our way of life. As ugly as it sounds, we may have to choose an option.

Adding insult to injury perhaps, on November 5th banks were quietly allowed to open accounts in cryptocurrencies.

I doubt we're going to see a 'depression' style permanent closure of enormous portions of the accessible economy. Most of the 'familiar' things will open back up at some point after unrestricted socializing and work is again deemed possible -- it will just be with new owners. Large number of people, including a currently-unrecognized huge percentage of what used to be the American middle class, will have been stripped of both their wealth and reasonably likelihood to recover it in equal measure. I have some suggestions to deal with that without runaway inflation ... but they require society-building, not idiot celebration of diversity as separating difference.

The science regarding the disease was never in doubt. I started typing a long, complicated post before I realized that's not necessary. The importance of 3CLpro inhibitors was recognized a year earlier, in connection with a 'miracle' cure for feline infectious peritonitis, which is a progressive autoimmune condition not dissimilar from ARDS, produced by a lethal clone of a common virus. By no later than the beginning of February, ul-Qamar et al. had taken the sequence information of the virus, isolated the 3CLpro specifically involved in the infectious clones and 3D-modelled it, then conducted a docking analysis and compared a library of known plant botanicals to determine effective inhibitors. Several were isolated with high affinity, including myricitrin and a chemical found in California mountain laurel. Right around this time the structure and binding of the specific spike protein 'specialized' to ACE2 was described by Lan et al. in Nature, and by April Zhang et al. (in Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy) had published a review article containing explanation of most of the effects of viral infection -- with references back to the individual research starting up with respect to those various areas. What was lacking was not the science,or the understanding of what were correct approaches to treating the major issue, which was lethality in the comparatively small part of the population at severe risk from infection. 3CLpro treatment alone stands to relieve a great many cases of ARDS within the same 12-to-14-day timeframe in FIP ... provided we don't kill them with witch-doctor homemade ventilators, which we enthusiastically demonstrated we can do very well. It doesn't take a scientist to recognize you would no more expect to oxygenate an ARDS patient with mechanical ventilation than you'd perfuse a patient with significant myocardial infarct by massive forced perfusion of blood through the heart vasculature. Strangely, the 'correct' version of artificial heart was introduced (and largely ignored, then forgotten about, in the pandemic craze) that was the perfect counterpart to the kind of interleukin-6 dialysis that was developed and published in 2012.

I was put onto chloroquine by a psychology professor on one of the Kalmbach forums; at first I thought I'd misunderstood the drug, as that is an antiparasitic (plasmodial) and not in any sense an antiviral. But there was in fact research, and efficaceous results, from coadministration of hydroxychloroquine and a particular kind of small molecule antiinflammatory -- which made sense of a kind for ARDS. Strangely however, when the time came to 'disprove the President's claim' the research that was started up involved hydroxychloroquine with a completely different associated class of molecule: either an antiviral of the kind associated with AIDS treatment, or a chemical like Tamiflu. Neither of those makes better sense than looking for the quarter down the block where the light's better, and in fact Tamiflu in particular was observed to actually worsen some of the autoimmune reaction to SARS-Cov-2 infection in some of the early outbreak-treatment cases, so you have to wonder about actual education of some of these clinicians; it quickly became evident what it was that the hydroxychloroquine did, and the part of the other molecule: they modified the attachment site between the viral envelope and the ACE2 between the time of spike protein attachment and the time the viral genome could enter the cell through the formed complex. What wasn't taken up, thereafter, was the interesting question of what half-arrested changes in ACE2 might do to angiotensin conversion and other parts of the enzyme system ... or whether there were also signalling pathways involved with ACE2 that might be chronically triggered by the 'arrested state of penetration' after the stuff had screwed up infection. This was called for as early as March ... but alas! in China, not here. And of course that was a palliative therapy, not a 'cure'.

Then we were treated to the Cure-Vac fiasco, which does not seem to have been presented very accurately. As I understand it, Trump found out that a small German company was supposedly close to understanding how to make an effective vaccine (as I recall the details, it was specific for the especially infectious spike protein, with together with systemic 3CLpro treatment would have arrested the infection in individuals and then prevented recurrence. Trump proposed what was basically the grandmother of all SBIR programs, which would give Cure-Vac access to all government resources and labs for furthering development of a viral vaccine ... subject to the condition, common to all SBIRs, that the United States Government get a nonexclusive license to any results so developed. When word of this got back to the Germans on the Cure-Vac board, they couldn't scramble fast enough to disavow that, 'somehow' managing to spin the story into a claim that Trump and his cronies had made a secret deal to restrict the entire vaccine production to 'America first' -- then adding a nose-tweak of chutzpah by announcing 'they were going to make vaccines for the world, not for America'. Note the tremendous job they did producing a quick and effective vaccine without the American assistance.

We know reasonably well what actually spreads the infections, although the critical importance of shouting and talking as a common-mode facilitator has not been promoted with the same zeal that feel-good mask policies have been. There are established mechanisms for safe mask design and wear -- but those have been deprecated in favor of 'inclusive' policies on what constitutes an politically-respectful response, which then becomes divorced in a number of respects to the actual engineering or medical purpose the mask serves, or ought to serve.

Meanwhile, there appears to be appallingly little change to many of the the 'preexisting pathological conditions' in nursing-home care or visitation, or in happy return to large family gatherings as soon as mass death is no longer in public view, or in a large number of people in cohorts recognized at special risk who gleefully go back to shouting at each other maskless in groups and gabbling on phones unrestrictedly when things start to be opened back up. I in fact thought almost for sure we were about to have further outbreaks around the Christmas break period ... which doesn't seem to have happened. Yet. But I am carefully watching how the 'new clone' from Europe -- which was really poorly kept out of the United States, after everything painful we had to squirm through with the original response to close borders and quarantine traffic from Wuhan by any route to the States or to a population that might bring it here on a more expedited basis.

I think the Trains article sums up the situation well but may be a bit rosy for some. Everyone I talk to is fretting for their continued existence. We’re lucky enough to have no long term debt and have so far been able to get pretty creative working our contacts getting donations, chasing some grants and we have a fantastic group of volunteers (can’t say enough about that). I think we’ll make it through this mess (fingers crossed) but only by the skin of our teeth. My big concerns are how much economic recovery we’ll see with our patron base and how long it will take. Only time will tell.

I never said a word about "work."

Your friendly moderators have discussed this thread and wish to keep it unlocked but focused on Covid-19 as it is related to railway preservation. Feel free to continue discussion and use the examples below for guidance.

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