You are definitely not supposed to have papers printed out for them. You might refer to a study you read, yes, but bringing print-outs is over the top even if you are a colleague of some sort.
This is the right advise for more unproven or controversial stuff like supplements or certain diets, but it's the wrong advice for other stuff like medications. For instance, if your doc says that one med (which doesn't work for you) is just as effective another med that you want to try but that he's unwilling to prescribe, the only way to change your doc's mind is to...
Here's my take about docs and specialists based on personal experience:
During a high-mortality (from 10% to 100% lethality) epidemic or pandemic, most people might not trust some of the pathogen-agnostic defenses that you mentioned such as far-UVC lamps, because it would be extremely difficult to verify that they were correctly installed (e.g., adequate amount of lamps per room), maintained (e.g., far-UVC emitter still works at adequate efficiency), and run (e.g., adequate air mixing which would depend on fans or HVAC systems). After decades of use, this trust issue might be resolved, but unfortunately, we may not have the lu...
Targeting humans with bioweapons may have been genuinely difficult but will probably become much easier for several reasons like the following:
Another reason to doubt the "noble lie" theory is that it was easy to make masks out of commonly available materials like cloth.
The real reason that requests to save PPE for health care workers were made was that these workers needed N95 respirators to protect themselves from procedures (like intubation) that were already know to aerosolize (and thus make airborne) any respiratory virus or bacteria, and surgical masks were needed for protection during medical procedures unrelated to Covid.
What disturbs me more than the fact that the transmission question hasn’t been settled yet is that public health policy still seems to assume, even after Covid, that fomite and droplet transmission are the only ways for the common cold (and other respiratory viral infections like the flu) to spread, entirely ignoring the possibility of airborne aerosol transmission.
Even without definitive evidence of how a particular strain of common cold virus is transmitted, we know that respiratory viruses can only spread through three possible routes: fomites, droplets...
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn't be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn't LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
I don't blame politicians as much as the infectious disease experts they listened to. These experts were slow to recognize that aerosols were the primary mode of transmission and failed to drop support for stuff that was of dubious value such as surgical masks and lockdowns in favor o...
Wouldn't a respirator with a exhalation valve be more comfortable?
...EN argues that any sufficiently expressive cognitive system—such as the human brain—must generate internal propositions that are arithmetically undecidable. These undecidable structures function as evolutionarily advantageous analogues to Gödel sentences, inverted into the belief in raw subjective experience (qualia), despite being formally unprovable within the system itself.
...Rather than explaining subjective illusions away in third-person terms, EN proposes that they arise as formal consequences of self-referential modeling, constrained by the exp
We keep getting better at curing disease and preventing death, but this makes little difference in our fight against aging, due to its exponential nature.
Almost no age-related disease or condition can currently be prevented or cured. They can be somewhat slowed, but that's about it. A rare exception is cataracts; it can be cured by replacing the eye's lens.
This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships.
But those systems weren't designed with the survival of humanity in mind, and so, they're obviously going to be much less robust.
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios.
...My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, thi
I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already "contaminated" and another problem is that the world isn't contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there's actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don't see any way...
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
I'm not sure what you're describing here. Unless you're talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you're trying to describe?
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
It might not be a major issue for ...
This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.
Points of failure:
Showstoppers:
There would still be term limits: violent death, revolutions, invasions, and so on.
You might want to consider adding additional protection measures (like a respirator), as the effectiveness of some vaccines can be moderate to non-existent. The effectiveness of the flu vaccine in years when its well-matched to the circulating strains is between 40% and 60%, and when the vaccine is not well-matched, it's protection against illness plummets, although it may still offer some protection against complications such as pneumonia. Vaccines don't exist for bad colds and the stomach flu.
Reusable respirators will work well against any fast-spreading pandemic (assuming no ridiculously-long, asymptomatic incubation periods).
There seems to have been plenty of papers on airborne aerosol transmission of the flu and experiments with human subjects strongly suggested that the common cold is transmitted via aerosols. So, this makes it even more surprising that the experts got transmission so wrong and took forever to correct their mistake.
Yes, but your post seemed to focus on the individual, and that's why I didn't mention future humanity.
For humanity, it did go from no doom to maybe doom which is worse. And perhaps it's worse for the individual in the long run too, but that's a lot more speculative.
In any case, there's still some hope left that our luck will last long enough to avoid doom, even if it will be by the skin of our teeth.
Many docs might dig in, and if they don't change their attitude and opinion when they should, you'll just need to switch docs until you find a decent one. The doc I brought the print out to didn't dig in and prescribed the med I requested after he read it. This had nothing to do with any study; it seemed that it was widely known among experts (the print out quoted expert opinion), but this doc just had the wrong opinion about it. I asked another doc about a combination of meds that's usually not prescribed often (but probably should be) to younger age grou... (read more)