History shows that taking strong steps now to slow the spread of coronavirus will help communities and individuals.
healthblog.uofmhealth.org
Catching the coof later on when we have more resources available and a better understanding of how to treat the fucking thing sounds like a way better jam than dying on a ventilator when we have no idea what we're fucking doing. You do understand what the "novel" part in the name means, right?
Good job at actually proposing a purpose, I honestly didn't expect such a rational response from someone like you. As I said in an earlier post that you literally quoted, resources are fully available and have been for months, hospital capacity is not even remotely a concern and barely was at the disease's height, and our understanding has been plateaued for some time too. The gathering of resources and data was indeed a useful goal during march and april, when we had little of neither; however, the benefits to be found now are minuscule.
Indeed, from your phrasing you seem to be under the impressing that it is still early March. It isn't, it is now in fact mid July and in the previous 3 and a half months we have come up with dozens upon dozens of treatments as well as the data to suggest that the people dying on ventilators were an extreme minority and most likely on the cusp of death from their numerous health problems regardless.
There is the possibility of treatments improving in the coming months; however, the improvements offered by a treatment discovered tomorrow is only the margin it provides over the treatment we discovered yesterday. Given all the data suggesting how safe the disease is anyways, and the quality of treatment already archived, I personally find it very hard to believe that any benefits provided outweigh the material cost of the masks.
The only points that exist to be scored are those who:
1) Have not already had the disease (This weeds out a rather large group of people)
2) Would in fact have a negative outcome (And here we weed out the vast majority of people)
3) Would not have that negative outcome mitigated by one of the treatments discovered before they would get it with mask wearing (And this now weeds out a sizable chunk of those left because we do in fact have some treatments)
4) Would be saved by a treatment discovered between when they would get it with mask-wearing and when they would get it without mask-wearing. (A timeframe that I propose would in no case ever exceed the length of total mask-wearing time, and likely be a rather small percentage of it. I'd ballpark it at 1/3, so 3 months of mask wearing to buy on average to buy 1 month of R&D)
5) Would not die anyways of other causes between now and when the required treatment is developed. (relevant because multiple contributing factors old people have a tendancy to randomly die.)
So what are we down to at this point, something like 0.005% or so? Maybe 0.01% if you're optimistic about treatments that take a total of 4 to 5 months to develop?