Yeah but someone in the government would have to organise that, and they would take the blame if even one tiny thing went wrong.
Telling people to wash their hands is very safe and requires no effort. It is also helpful advice because some people actually have poor hand hygiene.
As I said, Far-UVC from 200-220nm is supposed to be safe to humans because of our layer of dead skin. This is kind of the whole point of the post and is in the references.
254nm has less energy per photon but it penetrates further through skin, meaning that 254nm is definitely dangerous.
the number of photons per second per watt of power is a lot greater for UVC than for gamma radiation.
Are we overemphasizing touching rather than breathing?
I suspect that governments are favoring actionable advice over accuracy.
The west in general ran out of masks due to government incompetence and complacency, therefore they told us that masks don't work, because telling people that masks work but oops we don't have any would contribute to panic and discontent.
The virus spreads mostly through the air, but people can't easily stop that, so they emphasize hand-washing because it is actionable and gives people something to do and thereby reduces their anxiety. It is probably also slightly helpful - people already don't wash their hands enough and a bit more hand-washing has a low cost.
It's happened before. In WWII, they told people to collect various materials for the war effort, at least some of which were totally useless.
But I mean do we know what fraction of Wuhan Healthcare Workers were rendered useless by exhaustion and/or disease? It looked pretty bad, and I imagine it would have been much worse if the *whole* of China was going through the same thing as there would have been no outside help.
It's almost a shame that some country isn't doing mitigation because I would like to see just how much of a clusterf**k is turns into and how optimistic assumptions are crushed by reality. Of course in reality I don't want that because I think it would be very bad
So the downside of this approach is that if everyone below 40 gets the disease you are entering a situation where the disease is all over the place, and it will be hard to keep the 40+ people fully safe. For example many older people need to be _in a hospital_ for various reasons, which is exactly where the virus is.
In addition you might be inflicting death and long-term disability on quite a lot of those under-40-year-olds.
And I think at the end of it, under 40s immune might not even be enough for herd immunity. You need something like 80% I think.
The idea of Far-UVC is that it is supposed to be safe due to the dead skin layer. Until we know for sure it's difficult to make the tradeoffs.
re (2), I suspect that melanin is not effective against UVC.
re (3), it's an interesting line of thought, but my suspicion is no.
I would love to see a more quantitative analysis of what this dance would look like in a western country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfpeDzcsd1s
No, I mean being serious there is a danger here of being scared into not telling people the right answer because they won't listen. But that's wrong. Tell people the right answer, and then when 5 million people die, tell them to listen to you next time.
If the drugs save 80% of critically ill people from dying, then even if the remaining 20% overload the hospital system it might still be worth not trying to flatten the curve, just to avoid the economic damage from the lockdowns.
One would have to do a detailed analysis, but right now I seem to be getting the impression that the drugs actually aren't that good.
Anyway I still stand behind the point that there is likely to be a strategy bifurcation where it's best to either go pretty all-in on containment or go pretty all-in on herd immunity/deliberate infection, depending on just how bad it would be.
A 0.1% chance of death is worth about 1-3 months of lockdown, but age-weighting of deaths towards older people and lockdown damage skews this.
Without any change in the numbers I definitely still support containment.