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Sorry, I was a bit slow on the uptake of your humour! Yes, I get it!

Of course it is contradictory. Obviously masks are vitally important to protect frontline medics, who are surrounded by a high density of infected people in the coronavirus wards and ICUs. The only difference with the general public is that the density of infected people around them is lower...

It seems that the WHO are publishing self-contradictory statements that lack common sense. In that 6 April document they say: In other worlds, masks are effective and vital for healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus patients, as they prevent viral transmission. But then according to the...

You raise a good point. Thinking about what you said, perhaps it could be argued that we have two sub-populations co-existing in the same country: group one which are those still working, and thus are subject to a higher transmission rate; and group two which are locked down at home, and are...

Unfortunately the virus does not care too much whether the NHS can cope; the virus will continue on its own course. So it's only the maths that we can consider here. The crucial figure in the maths is the time it takes for the death toll to double. If you look the Worldometers death toll graph...

Would anyone agree with my calculation that in the UK, this pandemic will be over in around 6 weeks' time? If you look at the UK death toll graph at Worldometers, the number of deaths is doubling every 4 days. This may slow down a little as the effect of lockdown kicks in, so let's say in the...

The new Masks4All website champions the universal wearing of masks or improvised face covering in order to halt or slow the coronavirus pandemic.

I think guidelines are important, not just for best allocating the very strained and limited hospital resources, but also to preserve the sanity of doctors. If doctors have to decide who lives and who dies in a time of limited resources, it puts them in a terrible position emotionally. Nobody...

Yes, it's just commonsense that masks are likely to make a substantial difference. The death toll is 100 times higher in countries which do not use masks for the general populace. I expect the WHO experts who say masks do not help are probably the type who may understand studies and statistics...

Sure, agreed. I thought about testing being a possible factor, but looking at this graph of testing per capita by country, some countries like Italy and Germany had high levels of testing, comparable to South Korea (although South Korea did more testing in the early stages) : Although of...

The useful Worldometers website graphically demonstrates the dramatic power of universal wearing of surgical masks to slow down the pandemic: Countries where the populace are not generally wearing masks: UK Coronavirus Worldometers — Deaths: 4,934 France Coronavirus Worldometers — Deaths...

There's no clinical trial evidence in that particular paper, but one of the studies we were discussing a while ago is about the efficacy of a povidone-iodine iodine gargling trial in a school, to see if it would reduce absenteeism due to colds. It did, but not to any amazing degree: the absence...

I think some of the medical scientists in labs are doing very well in their response to the pandemic. I was watching a news article about a company rushing to make a vaccine, and they are coming up with all sorts of innovative ideas to speed up the vaccine creation process. So no lack of...

Possibly the topic for another thread, but how would change the administrative culture of the NHS to allow these guys raring to try new things some free rein?

Great article!

I gave the bouncing bomb as an example of lateral thinking, creativity and the willingness to try out an idea when it looks like there's a reasonable chance it might work. Whether it was ultimately a military success is not so important: many ideas tried out in WW2 were failures, and others...

That may be so, but in a situation like this, we don't really have the luxury of time, to conduct a study on the efficacy of surgical masks specifically for coronavirus. It costs nothing to instruct the populace to cover their faces with cloth or improvised masks, as the US finally did...

Appreciate that point, and certainly doctors may have been more experimental in the past. But in countries like the UK, where evidence-based medicine has been practiced for many decades now, so medics can only do what NICE and the NHS stipulate they are allow to do, perhaps this not the right...

One general observation about how the world is dealing with this coronavirus pandemic: Obviously this is a medical issue, so the medical profession are the main players. However, by nature the medical profession is conservative and evidence-based, which is good in general, but may not be...

Glad to see the CDC are more on the ball with this. The UK are still saying that there is no need for the general public to wear masks or to place a cloth covering over their face.