Same experience. I heard a few folks tell their kids "don't touch him" and kids ask why. I endure it because I consider it education to wake people up that the virus is here.

My years in cleanrooms and a postdoc in a shared appointment in biochemistry have taught me to see gloves as contamination distributors.

It's literally not okay to be wearing gloves in a chemistry/biochemistry building when you push an elevator button.

I wore a p95 (similar in performance to the n95) today while shopping. I'm in the Midwest, and the number of looks made me think I had two heads.

My daughter is also sewing cloth mask using a pattern from https://www.craftpassion.com/face-mask-sewing-pattern/

I know these aren't as good, but they probably improve my chances of avoiding SARS-CoV-2 by at least 10% when I have to go outside. I plan on using them once, then leaving them in a bucket in the garage. Once I've used them all up, I'll wash them and by that time (and hopefully the detergent + bleach action), the virus will be dead.

I disagree with gloves. Gloves may serve as a psychological signal, and they can be put on and taken off, but I haven't heard of hands being an infection route.

Several states fairly recently passed laws requiring food preparers to wear gloves. Then they backtracked when they realized that they actually decreased safety.

Yes, but fundamentally that's still just bargaining with the problem. If spread is supercritical, the hospitals fill up regardless of how protected healthcare workers are.

My comment was in the context of "what can time fix", which would mean supplying healthcare workers and everybody else with masks before letting up. Retail workers wearing masks would go a long way to creating some peer pressure to act differently.

There is a very succinct explanation by Michael Osterholm [1][2] where he says that the virus is spread both by droplets & aerosols, and that sharing the same air with another person is the primary vector (that isn't intended to sound as alarmist as it probably does).

From what I understand the best prevention is to reduce face-to-face contact with other people where possible, but an N95 mask would definitely help prevent contraction in public spaces.

Of course, these measures seem extreme since ~80% of people will barely notice they are infected / have mild symptoms, but it's all about peak-load reduction.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1xBiBVH7U4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw&t=7s

They do both. But I was saying that at the very least masks would also remind people to actually keep distance from one another.

Wearing a mask to prevent contracting it is like wearing medieval platemail to protect yourself against an M16.

It gives you very limited protection. There's no replacement for just avoiding people, 15 feet away from everyone.

They're mainly good for people who are infected to not transmit pathogens.

When doctors operate on infectious people, they wear hazmat suits. Full face mask, air filter and body condom. You can get a virus through your ears, eyes, mouth, nose, or microabrasions on your skin.

You can wear a mask, but I fear that people will start thinking it's anywhere near full protection. False sense of security is probably not worth even encouraging in a situation this dire.

Masks definitely helpful to stop spreading it from those who are contagious. If they help prevent contracting it depends a lot on how disciplined you are at using them. If fiddling with a mask, you're more likely to contaminate it and yourself.

They’re helpful for both, but even if they were only helpful for one, it’d still be worth doing.

The "Best endgame" you describe is exactly the goal. We lockdown now so that we can buy time to get tests and tracing systems setup. Then we can start to open up everything again and control hotspots with aggressive testing and individual quarantine (as opposed to the blanket quarantine we are doing now). With good testing/tracing coverage, we can stop the virus from spreading exponentially for more than a few hops.

Also locking down everything DOES stop the exponential spread. That's the whole point. If you don't see other people, you aren't spreading the disease, reducing the rate of new infections. If each infected person infects less than 1 other person on average, we'll have stopped the spread. China and SK have already succeeded in this.

There are two sides to an exponential. If R0 is >1, it just keeps going up. However, if R0 is <1, it just keeps going down. The point of the lockdown is to get it <1 so it keeps going down for a while, until the case counts are low enough that we can adopt a different strategy.

Slowing down infection rate whether exponential or not is good because it lets more time for medical system to prepare and because it spreads cases over long period of time.

Just a feeling. I used to work in medical device testing, so I'm familiar with the layers of regulation that weigh down the pipeline. Even in normal times there's debate about whether it's too onerous. But now a lot of that shit's going to be cut out. For example, Moderna is skipping the animal safety trials, and starting with phase 1 human testing straight away. They say animal testing will proceed in parallel if a special new breed of mouse is ready in time.

This, along with recent advancements in bioengineering will, I believe, lead to surprisingly rapid progress.

(The best current mouse models for human coronavirus are not very good; the mice are generally resistant to the virus, so it's difficult to determine whether a vaccine or treatment is working.)