One of the things I don’t understand in professional sports is the blase attitude towards COVID (or towards other respiratory viruses, for that matter. Leaving aside a small, but not negligible, chance of long-term illness, if you get a symptomatic case of COVID, it’s going to be hard to perform at elite athletic standards. When it comes to something like the Olympics, why wouldn’t they mask, considering they’ve spent most of their lives trying to get there?
Bizarre.
mikethemadbiologist
Aug01 link on nakedcapitalism “Victoria’s new ‘clean air’ project could help end the COVID pandemic”
question for the Covid experts:
Even in the best scenario, could air filtration/UV light (referred to here as air cleaning devices (ACD)) at indoor public buildings “end the pandemic” in a given nation/subnational region
or
be a new & best “piece of swiss cheese with the smallest hole” that would still need to be used in conjuction with other NPI “pieces” to “end the pandemic”?
I imagine the best case ACD scenario being
1 consider the regions that to date had the best (or least bad) Covid performance, like China, New Zealand, or Western Australia
2 The Federal government enacts a CAND (Clean Air New Deal), funding a new FCAA (Federal Clean Air Agency) to install & maintain this ACD at all indoor private & public building establishments, free to the establishment. The equipment would run automatically 24/7 or be programmed by the FCAA. The FCAA would levy SEVERE fines for an establishment manager tampering or disabling the ACD the FCAA had installed.
Even in this “best case scenario”, would this “end the pandemic” by driving the Covid reproduction number R to permanently decrease to below 1.0 in say New Zealand?
My guesstimate is that for this ACD to actually “end the pandemic”, it would have to be done with
3 adequate waster testing at the metro area or county level, which if it exceeds the equivalent treshhold of X (50/100K?) current COVID cases, the following would temporary mandatory mitigation measures:
4 universal N95-type mask mandate at all indoor public establishments
5 ban on persons crossing international borders.
What do you think?