March 5, 2020

Do as I say... don't touch your face.



I think I'm getting really good at not touching my face, but what I need help with is avoiding surfaces outside of the safe zone of my own house and decontaminating myself whenever I return to my house. It's not easy! What about when the mail arrives? Is the mail suspect? I've long avoided touching doorknobs and stair railings, just the usual avoiding of colds and the like. But with coronavirus, I'm avoiding touching tabletops and counters, I have a problem handing over my credit card and taking it back, I don't want to pet a dog. If I go out and sit somewhere, when I come back, I want to systematically wash all my clothes. I want to wash my shoes! Not just want to... I am washing a pair of shoes right now.

222 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 222 of 222
Inga said...

“The way the who handled this thing, fills you with confidence does it?”

The WHO actually had better protocols than the CDC did.

Achilles said...

Inga said...
“I posted information taken from the Diamond Princess Cruise ship and a more likely scenario.”

Your scenario is flawed. Think about what might be wrong with it. Take off your aluminum foil hat first, that might help.

The aluminum foil hat argument was a step up over the copy and paste effort you made earlier where you drooled on yourself and posted random numbers derived from statistics out of a murderous communist regime.

I will give that a 2/10.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Give it a rest, Bedpan Betty. We understand you are giddy about this virus.
We know how to read the news and we understand the situation.
We don't need your blow by blow statistical analysis.
Blame Trump and F off.

Inga said...

Hey Tin Foil Tilley...

“We know how to read the news and we understand the situation.”

Some of you don’t apparently.

“We don't need your blow by blow statistical analysis.”

Not when you have Trump and his “hunches”! LOL.

Doug said...

I guarantee that if I were at a podium, telling the American public not to touch their faces, the minute those words escaped my lips, i would have an inexorable itch in the tip of my nose, and I would have to be taken out of the room in a straight jacket.

Doug said...

What if you just took your shoes off outside, or in the garage or mudroom, before entering your house?
What if the government don't give no housing with a m*****f***ing mud room or m*****f***ing garage? What about that, yo?

LA_Bob said...

Yancey Ward said, "During those months, it was all but certain that the virus traveled by aircraft all around the world long before anyone knew it was out there."

Let's riff on this logic a bit.

The virus, traveling by aircraft all over the place, means lots of travelers exposed, lots of travelers leaving the virus in airport washrooms for others to pick up, lots of people taking it home to loved ones, and / or taking it around the country and around the world if they travel often..

Lots of people touching their faces, petting dogs, attending Trump rallies, going to bars, sneezing at the grocery store, coughing on the bus, coughing the in subway, spreading the virus at schools and workplaces, and so on.

If Yancey's premise holds, this means a hell of a lot of exposure, well, almost everywhere. This probably means some disease cases. Clearly most of these cases were mild and attracted no attention.

It also means antibodies. There might be more "herd immunity" available than PresbyPoet speculated above. Over time the concentration of virus increases and with it the risk of "outbreaks" of sometimes serious disease.

But as the concentration of virus increases, the risk is that some subset of infected and contagious persons visiting doctor's offices, nursing homes, a family member in the ICU, etc, might kick off an epidemic among some very fragile people. That potential 3,000,000 dead Americans (over a short period time) will not be randomly distributed.

Just speculating here, of course. And also, I'm not a medical person or an epidemiologist. But, maybe, just maybe, the precautions people are trying to take now are a matter of closing the barn door long after the horses have run wild.

cf said...

Althouse, you are not wrong to want to clean clean clean. This report out South China Morning Post measures how much contamination one patient can generate and how the sanitizing was crucial and effective.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3065129/coronavirus-can-be-killed-disinfectant-beware-high-touch

Otto said...

Lets all stop the horseshit and stick to the facts .As of 3:0 GMT
Total cases reported 98421
Total deaths 3,385.
That is a mortality rate of 3.439%
Total American cases 226
Total American deaths 12
That is a mortality rate of 5.3 %
To early to predict American mortality rate, infinitley small samples size.
Just go to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and get the facts.


exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

The WHO seems more concerned with being woke than in actually combating the outbreak.

It scolded people for saying travelers from China, Iran and other hotspots may be "infecting" people. That's racist talk, you see.

Along with washing our hands and not touching our faces, we need to be concerned with using the proper terms and not offending the sensitive.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Good point, green eyed devil. Do we know what pronouns Covid-19 prefers?

Drago said...

Inga: "The WHO actually had better protocols than the CDC did."

Yep.

The obama/biden protocols truly sucked.

That's why over the last month the Trump admin has been changing the CDC protocols to pre-obama/biden standards.

Well, at least we won't be so hamstrung by these dem rules if another virus pops up somewhere in the future.

MayBee said...

What is it about America and our hunger for a health panic every 4 years or so?

Don't you all ever look back at the prior health panics and reflect on how scared they made you and how it wasn't the 1918 Spanish Flu Remix after all?

Birkel said...

People keep saying 12 out of 226 have died in the U.S. Sure, that's true as far as reported cases go. But the reported deaths were almost all in the highest risk populations. The younger and healthy average American has not been diagnosed even if they are positive for the virus. After all, their symptoms are likely insignificant compared to a common cold.

The diagnosed cases are the worst cases. Of course the death rate appears relatively high.

Let's all hope that I am correct.

Inga said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Inga said...

“THE FACTS: It’s not true that an Obama-era rule limited laboratories run by companies, universities and hospitals from developing and running tests for the coronavirus during an emergency. No such regulation existed.

The Trump administration’s action Saturday only undid a policy that its own Food and Drug Administration put in place. The new action lets labs develop and use coronavirus diagnostic tests before the agency reviews them. Previously, the FDA had only authorized use of a government test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Under a 2004 federal law, the FDA has wide power to authorize drugs, tests and other therapies during emergencies. That means no legal authority was hindering the Trump administration when it earlier decided to limit testing to public health labs using the CDC test.

“All they did was reverse a policy that they themselves set,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, an FDA official during the Obama administration who is now a vice dean at Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health.”

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-03-05/ap-fact-check-trumps-mislaid-blame-on-obama-for-virus-test

Achilles said...

Inga said...

“All they did was reverse a policy that they themselves set,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, an FDA official during the Obama administration who is now a vice dean at Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health.”

Just another blatant lie by a former Obama official parroted by a blatant liar.

Yancey Ward said...

The "confirmed cases" are an example of a drunk looking for his keys in a certain area because that is the only place he can see from the street lamp.

There is a large pool of infected people, we have firmly identified a small fraction of them, and that will always be the case.

We often hear the number of yearly flu sufferers of 40-70 million, but we don't conduct that many tests viral tests for influenza, do we? That number is an estimate only- probably a pretty good one, but an estimate. And yet, with COVID-19, we suddenly want to deal only with "confirmed cases" when talking about the numbers, and for conflicting poltical reasons. One group wants to minimize the "number" of infected, while another group wants to maximize the percent mortality.

Freeman Hunt said...

I carry sanitizer in my pocket and sanitize after touching anything that could have had germs on it, including my credit card. I also sanitize randomly in case I touched something without thinking about it. And if I absolutely must touch my face, I sanitize first.

I did wash my clothes and immediately take a shower after going to a hospital.

itzik basman said...

Seems like you’re somewhat overreacting.

A friend wrote me this:

.... Am I missing something re: coronavirus? Over 10,000 have died in the US in the past year from the flu, only a dozen from coronavirus and they were old people who most likely would have died from a regular flu. The death rate is less than 2% for corona and again mostly old people or sick people. Is this some kind of hysteria? Thousands die from opioid addiction, thousand die from gun violence, thousand die in car accidents but corona virus is the big problem. I know it is infectious but it's not ebola. What am I missing?...

I wrote him back:

... It looks like there’s some mass hysteria operating here mixed with a spreading serious illness with a death rate, as I understand it, higher than the flu.

My daughter at our urging just canceled her trip for a week to Southern Italy. Travel advisories suggested that.

And we’ve just canceled a trip to Nashville scheduled for the end of this month.

My reasoning was that for now I’d prefer to avoid airports and airplanes, that if I’m going to get sick I’d rather be in Toronto with it, plus being away from home while all this is peaking would make a trip stressful.

I couldn’t get hand sanitizer today at my local Shoppers.

But hey, it all fits in with my reclusive way of life.

A cranky old recluse. ...

tim in vermont said...

"Do the math.”

Math is easy. Getting your assumptions right is hard.

CStanley said...

It’s foolish to think you can sanitize all the objects in your environment. The point of frequent hand washing and avoiding hand contact with your face is that your hands are potential points of contact with your mucous membranes (eyes, mouth, and nose.)

You’re not going to lick your shoes, so even if they’ve come in contact with Coronavirus (which seems unlikely anyway), just take the shoes off and wash your hands.

«Oldest ‹Older   201 – 222 of 222   Newer› Newest»