Covidiots - Rishi Sunak Waives the Rules

The chancellor served customers at a Wagamama restaurant in central London on Wednesday.

Photograph: Simon Walker/HM Treasury

About half of health care workers positive for COVID-19 by serology have no symptoms | VUMC Reporter | Vanderbilt University

The discovery by a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, that almost half the healthcare workers tested for Covid-19, tested positive but displayed no symptoms is evidence, if any more were needed, of the importance of wearing a face-mask in all public places.

Among 249 front-line health care workers who cared for COVID-19 patients during the first month of the pandemic in Tennessee, 8% tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies by serology testing, suggesting they had contracted COVID-19 in the first several weeks of taking care of COVID-19 patients. Among these health care workers with positive serology results, 42% reported no symptoms of a respiratory illness in the prior two months. This suggests that front-line health care workers are at high risk for COVID-19 and that many health care workers with the virus may not have typical symptoms of a respiratory infection. These results were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on July 6.

About half of health care workers positive for COVID-19 by serology have no symptoms | Vanderbilt University

Latest new case figures for USA where right-ring Christian groups have campaigned against social distancing measures and wearing face-masks.

These were people who would have seen no reason to self-isolate, would have been shedding viral particles - the very thing that a face-mask, properly worn, will reduce. This may explain the 54% of the 350 patients in 11 medical centres who tested positive but reported that they had had no close contacts with anyone with Covid-19 symptoms.

In a separate study, the IVY investigators studied 350 patients across 11 medical centers in the U.S. who tested positive for COVID-19; 54% of these patients reported no close contact with another person known to have COVID-19 in the two weeks before getting sick.

“With over half of COVID-19 patients not identifying a clear source of their infection, this study reinforces the need for practical measures to reduce the spread of the virus, such as social distancing and the use of face coverings when out in public,” [Wesley] Self said.

Wearing a face-mask is not a display of political correctness but of social concern for the welfare of others. Something that was sadly lacking when UK Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, posed for a photo-opportunity in a Wagamama restaurant across the road from the Commons on Wednesday, when he ignored Wagamama's own rules and served food to customers with no face-mask on.

If anything, wearing a face-mask signifies the very qualities that we would to expect a real Christian to display, if only the evidence from the USA weren't so contrary.

Despite this now compelling evidence that airborne transmission of the Covid-19 virus, greatly reduced by wearing face-masks, is the major means by which it spreads, conservative Christian and right-wing, libertarian fruitloop covidiots continue to campaign against it and, in a spectacular failure of leadership, Donald Trump refuses to wear one even as the infection rate in America is spiraling out of control towards 100,000 new cases a day and a possible eventual death toll of 20 million.

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