Sometimes the mathematician in me want to tear my hair out when I listen to the news. A 50% effective vaccine won’t stop the Pandemic, better drugs won’t stop the pandemic, the only<\/em> thing that can stop the pandemic in both the short and long run is to bring the effective transmission rate r _{t<\/sub> and raw transmission rate r0<\/sub> both below 1.<\/p>}

There are many ways to do this but hoping for herd immunity with a 50% (or even 75%) effective vaccine isn’t one of them – given that many people won’t get the vaccine. The ways that will <\/em>work all depend on changing our behavior and making mask wearing compulsory. But here’s the thing, everyone wearing cloth style masks won’t quite do it. Yes, they cut the transmission rate by probably half according to the best data I have read but that isn’t enough to bring the effective transmission rate r_{t<\/sub> and raw transmission rate r0<\/sub> both below 1 – they do get you close though. And, of course, as a reopened economy and social distancing aren’t really compatible, we can’t use that to get over the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}

So how to get to over the top? After reading this paper: https:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/369\/bmj.m2195, the answer is obvious, get N95 masks on everybody. Of course, in the United States, we don’t even have enough N95 masks to protect all health care workers and first responders, five months into the worst pandemic in 100 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then I was reading about how fast we ramped up production of planes in WW2. Making N95 masks is a whole lot easier than building planes that is for sure. I betcha if we throw a couple of billion dollars at the problem, we could be producing enough masks to send one to every American every day in two or three months. Then put serious fines into place for not wearing the mask in a public place, and poof, the virus goes away a few weeks after you start distributing N95 masks to everyone and requiring people to wear them with real penalties for non-compliance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas, the likelihood of this happening is pretty close to zero – but it is a nice mathematician’s fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the mathematician in me want to tear my hair out when I listen to the news. A 50% effective vaccine won’t stop the Pandemic, better drugs won’t stop the pandemic, the only thing that can stop the pandemic in both the short and long run is to bring the effective transmission rate r t … Continue reading “We can end the pandemic – if people would wear the N95 masks we need to produce by the 100’s of millions!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-pandemic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}