I’ve not seen a single engineer or aerosol scientist that is making asinine statements like, ‘stop wasting time on vaccines, we only need ventilation and filtration’. I have seen multiple MDs and medical researchers arguing the reverse.
Today I installed three bundles of fiberglass insulation. Since fiberglass dust is a respiratory irritant, I wore a vented N95 for 7 hours.
Things that did not happen: CO2 build up
Hypoxia
Failing to live my best life
Inhaling fiberglass dust
Respiratory irritation
Acne
Private bill in the Quebec assembly to ensure health and safety of students by regulating air quality.
6 months after assent, every school must have CO2 sensors in every classroom. Data collected and forwarded to Minister weekly, made public on the ministry website.
Well, not sure engineers are the ones who should be telling you about PPE, that would be occupational hygienists. That said, I’ve been trained in & used far more forms of PPE than an ID doc who has never worked in a BSL4 lab.
@CathyMarksKrpan
@JanetKasperski
I'd lecture a class of engineering students periodically. No or v rare questions or dialogue. The school introduced a live chat system so they could anon post questions/comments. After that every lecture had to be called overtime as there was so much engagement.
A push-back on those who continue to say randomized controlled trials (RCT) are the "gold standard" for answering questions in science.
They are not. This statement gets tossed around often today, some are just careless, but others actually believe this is true.
A class with an immunocompromised child should have everyone in N95 along with high quality supplemental filtration. That’s actually what equity looks like. And that includes requiring the non-compromised to mask as well, as they each have a role in bringing equity for all.
In my last job I was approached by media to ask if I could educate them about filtration in HVAC. I said, ‘Here’s a quick overview from an informed person, but I am not qualified to provide technical commentary on filtration or hvac. Happy to refer you to a competent engineer.’
Public Health New Zealand:
-Cognitive impairment after mild infection (not a cold), assess pilots, drivers, technical staff
-Long Covid to increase in the population due to rapid evolution
-Each infection a throw of the dice
-Unknown natural history of Cov2
Yet I repeatedly see infectious disease MDs offering sweeping opinions in public about the effectiveness of respirators mitigating disease transmission.
Being an expert in disease does not qualify you to speak about a highly engineered device whose function is based in physics.
Still seeing these posts that assert with complete confidence, "respirators can't stop viruses".
To someone who understands the physics of respiratory protection, this is a bit like repeating "there is no sun" at noon on the equator.
Science or flat earther? Your choice.
The fact that some medical types are happy to mock experts in ventilation and filtration and their engineering colleagues tells you a lot about our relative professional ethos.
I do not practice medicine, I’d appreciate if MDs would stop practicing engineering.
@CDCDirector
JFC I say as an Indigenous person you need to delete this. Heroizing research subjects who couldn’t give consent cause they didn’t know they were in a trial.
Next tell me how much you respect the sacrifice of the children in the nutrition/dental in Canadian Residential Schools.
Engineers always, always take a layered and blended approach to dealing with risk in design and operation. It is core to our training and philosophy of design. Fail safe, layered defence, graceful degradation are all engineering concepts.
I’m using the sound of the respirator to imagine I’m Darth Vader.
I’m picking someone up at the airport who just flew internationally without masking.
And maybe it actually none of your business.
What we are advocating for is a layered approach to defence that includes vaccines. BUT, the best defence against any hazard is to never be exposed to it in the first place. Grinding beryllium is dangerous, best fix? Don’t grind beryllium. This is not rocket science.
This is just remarkable. SARS-cov-2 rna eliminated from hospital ward air by air filtration. Which also removed a number of other bacterial and fungal pathogens.
The before-after here is amazing. A who’s who of nosocomial pathogens.
@VicLeungIDdoc
Physicians need to think about their ethical obligation to do no harm.
And about the 100,000’s globally who wear N95s all day long at work without endlessly complaining how tough it is.
Your ER patient vomiting regularly is unable to wear a respirator. It falls to you doctor.
This is the same crew who shut down global experts in aerosol transport at the WHO in March 2020, telling Dr Morwaska that her statements on transmission of Covid were wrong. That error literally killed and disabled millions as it delayed introducing respiratory mitigations.
There is an entire profession dedicated to respiratory protection, industrial hygiene. There are engineers and scientists who spend entire careers developing filtration.
This is as symptom of a larger issue which is the dysfunctional hegemony of infectious disease policy makers.
We still see MDs stating respirators do not have much impact on disease transmission. I can’t say anything about that except it’s incredibly ignorant of reality, and reflects a narrow and asinine understanding of a very broad field of science.
Then we’d retreat to a sealed bunker underground to decontaminate, eat and sleep until we’d do it all over again.
So all this “PPE is so uncomfortable” isn’t really compelling. You don’t believe it will save your life, is the real issue.
@arijitchakrav
Highlights the ethical failure of the ‘you do you’ approach.
If catching covid only harmed me then I could ethically choose. But the chance I could infect others who have no choice, means the only moral option is to take all precautions against infection and transmission.
I wore an N95 respirator for 6 hours last week. By the end my rate of breathing and O2 sats were…exactly the same as at the start.
But, but, but trapped CO2!
It’s bollocks. Don’t believe anyone who says CO2 is an issue.
@pleadfiregravi1
That paper makes the same sorts of errors as the past ones. Tldr, using a single measurement of gas concentration inside the mask volume and calling that a hazard.
Seriously, count how many times the 5000 ppm occupational limit is mentioned.
Have a guess at the minimum respirator required for any bioaerosol exposure? An N95, certified respirator.
In fact, surgical or medical masks are not mentioned in the standard. How can that be?
B/c surgical masks are not within the legal definition of PPE.
I’m snippy about this b/c public health and infectious disease MD hubris has killed and disabled a lot of people globally. Started with the WHO refusing to say airborne and continues with thinly disguised droplet dogma today.
Science is about truth, not power and control. Fin
@LauraPowellEsq
See above for an illustration why immunocompromised persons are avoiding dental offices.
Mindless prattling on about rights and freedoms, with no hint of obligation to care for others.
This article shows that use of desk shields to protect students tended, on a statistical basis, to be associated with higher levels of disease. Fluid dynamics to ID policy setters: we told you so.
This is basic: the eddy always concentrates contaminants.
A professional who goes on public platforms and expounds on things they don’t understand is violating the ethics that should guide their professional behaviour.
MD on MSNBC recommends using perfume to fit test N95. This is a basic, basic error of chemistry, high school chemistry.
I’ve done a number of media encounters and my most common answer? I don’t know, that’s outside my competence to comment. It’s easy to defer, and ethical too
"If engineers want to be taken seriously in the medical community they need to learn about RCTs".
If physicians want to be taken seriously by engineers, they need to learn about the multiplicity of methods for generating knowledge, and how to select the appropriate method.
@DrKGregorevic
Love when physicians assert things well outside their competence have ‘no evidence’.
Maybe stick to medical matters and leave CO2 and air filtration to people that actually understand physics who don’t believe that the only source of valid evidence is RCT.
I asked an engineer, “are many of your colleagues still concerned about designing structures strong enough that they don’t collapse?”
Answer: “Yes. Licensed engineers are legally required to protect the public welfare.”
#protectthepublic
It’s not that difficult.
I asked a doctor, "are many of your colleagues masking?"
Answer: No.
"So, given asymptomatic transmission is common, are you basically saying they are fine if they transmit Covid19 and kill or injure vulnerable patients?"
Answer: long pause......"yes."
WTF.
#FirstDoNoHarm
Law firms who are advising clients about risk exposure should be paying close attention to these cases now unfolding. In Canada the frank and frequent violations of occupational health and safety law are going to be powerful grist for litigators representing those harmed.
Nurse wins Long Covid compensation case, picks up infection at work
A healthcare company has been held responsible in court for the financial impact suffered by a worker who developed Long Covid, in the first case of its kind in the Netherlands 👏🏻
What I believe is really at work is a visceral reaction to other professionals challenging the hegemony of medicine, and its presumption that it can speak to any subject with authority.
Seen this again and again, ID docs on media expounding on respirator use incorrectly…
This is excellent.
Adjunct Professor Tarun Weeramanthri, recently told Croakey: “the first decline in life expectancy in Australia in living memory … alone should trigger a rethink and potentially a reset of the COVID-19 Management Plan.”
Reason is in Code of Ethics rule 2, “Professional engineers and geoscientists shall undertake only work that they are competent to perform by virtue of their training and experience.” Speaking to the media about a technical subject is improper if it’s not w/i my practice areas.
A core problem is medicine, as a profession, has no general duty of care to protect the public. It’s there on a physician/patient basis, but no broader. Plus their colleges are reluctant to take on complaints against MDs who are spouting utter nonsense.
The infectious disease expert who specializes in air sampling with baggies needs to read about this quantum advance in sampling technology. Lol
You can prove covid is aerosol with kleenex and elastics and the RAT/LFT. And the CDC is still promoting hand washing.
@DuanesWorld2
Yup. So I tied a Kleenex tissue to my mouth and nose with a rubber band for 15 minutes. Then I cut a strip out of the tissue and stuffed it in a rapid test.
Turns out, COVID can spread just by breathing!
“Sweden sacrificed its seniors to the pandemic and used its schoolchildren as guinea pigs. Its government plied its people with lies about COVID-19 and even tried to smear its critics.”
“”
Supplemental filtration in classrooms reduces the absence rates for students.
Looks like the laws of physics still apply in classrooms, in spite of all the public health declarations to the contrary.
ID docs toss around PPE as a term without understanding what it means. PPE is a legal, legislative definition: “personal protective equipment” means a thing used or worn by a person for protection of that person from health or safety hazards that may exist at a work site;
Why do I still wear a respirator?
Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, who said: “You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”
After a COVID-19 breakout in a 🇯🇵 factory, the ventilation system was upgraded to make it 10 times more effective. Private-sector investments are being made all over the world.
A scientific report in
@Nature
:
A Covid hotel stay. Thanks to
@marwa_zaatari
@DavidElfstrom
@joeyfox85
for teaching a dim electrical all about hotel and building ventilation.
The door has weather stripping but ineffective. I could hear the air whistling inwards through the gap. Painters tape, no more whistle.
Second point is the majority of the natural sciences do not use RCTs. If you can empirically measure something directly, you don't need a highly specialized technique for assessing very low signal to noise (SNR) ratio data.
Said the same thing today when asked about a sore throat and cough. There’s next to no influenza or rsa in wastewater, it’s covid. Hospital beds filling up? It’s covid.
So many accounts of rat not showing positive even with the new sampling approach.
Is your cough and sore throat the flu, RSV or COVID?
Wastewater analysis in EDMONTON
COVID = 190
Influenza A = 0.1 (was 0 before last week) B = 0
RSV = 0 (recent peaks ~0.6)
COVID = 1900X flu or RSV
It's probably COVID, even w/ neg. RAT
#BringBackMasks
"We recommend that the CMOH advocate for a provincial multidisciplinary team consisting of HVAC engineers, medical and public health experts ... to be established to explore the role of HVAC systems in the transmission of viral pathogens including SARS COV-2."
Which legislation? It’s not medically related. That’s the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The Code goes on to define, “respiratory protective equipment” means personal protective equipment intended to protect the wearer from …inhaling airborne harmful substances…
And the Code references a CSA standard, Z94.4, Selection, Use and Care of Respirators.
Yes, a national standard that sets out how you are to select respiratory protection. In all the hand waving about masks, never seen an ID doc acknowledge this.
If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the concept of personal risk assessment is bonkers.
Our PH agencies don’t understand hazard assessment and risk mitigation. After they’ve filled people’s heads with ‘mild’ rhetoric, on what basis will anyone be able to understand risk?
@hans_kluge
This means assessing our own level of risk and our risk to others at every step of our days. And then apply the protective measures that matter most to reduce the chances of catching or spreading respiratory infections.
@hans_kluge
So this group of infectious disease MDs, some of whom swore affidavits declaring that Covid was not transmitted by aerosols in a court case involving Ontario nurses looking for N95 respirators, did a study. The conclusion? Medical masks not inferior to N95 respirators.
EBM is not intended to be used when physical parameters may be directly measured or observed. Engineering uses no RCTs because we use empirical applied science. Our design is based in physically observable properties. And even when we work with low SNR data it’s empirical.
One of the greatest system shocks I’ve observed with others is realizing that institutions and bureaucracies charged with protecting them, in the end are far more interested in protecting the institution.
Any challenge to the institution is met with overwhelming force to silence
Recent release of the N95 vs medical mask study raises a whole bushel of serious issues, ethics to study design to COI failures. There’s a more fundamental issue that isn’t widely addressed: should an evidence based medicine (EBM) approach even be considered valid for such work?
‘Evidence based engineering’ is a nonsensical statement because everything we do is based in empirical evidence.
Like respirators, trusted for decades to protect lungs from all sorts of nasty stuff, including biopathogens.
Some comments popping up from people who aren’t denying LC and enduring impacts from c-vid, but are asking seemingly rationale questions about prevalence and endurance.
It reveals a basic misunderstanding about risk mitigation, something we’ve seen ++ in medical responses.
Is the messaging about “mild” Omicron a bit like old adverts for filtered cigarettes?
Less harsh on inhale but still lots of unmentioned short and long term consequences?
We trained under STO doctrine, survival to operate. This assumed we were generating air power off an airfield either under a fallout cloud or slimed with bio or chem agents like Sarin nerve gas. We’d work 12 hours in a carbon/neoprene suit and full face respirator.
In its latest version Z94.4 contains explicit detail on how to select the appropriate respirator for…bioaerosol exposure. But isn’t that the expert domain of ID docs? Nope. This interdisciplinary standard is made legally binding through the OH&S Code, sets out legal obligations
@dr_musgrave
And that’s why we’ve been fighting this for two years now with public health. MDs who are skeptical even when the research demonstrates clearly the benefits of supplemental filtration.
@CDCgov
@CDCMMWR
Hey, we should try something radical...like mask mandates. Inexpensive, unintrusive and highly effective. Particularly in populations with low vaccination uptake.
The or allows a Director to approve alternatives that are not NIOSH certified.
Every time you hear or read an MD using PPE and surgical mask in the same sentence, remember they are using that term in a manner that is contrary to the OH&S law which binds their workplaces.
I’m going to start blocking people who take clean air advocates to task for not wearing a respirator in every photo.
You’re not there, you don’t know the circumstance or decision making they followed to make that decision.
I’m getting so sick of this blatant compliance bs.
My first comment - science is a very broad field. If you're making pan-science assertions like that, chances are you're displaying your ignorance of other disciplines.
Over 35 years in engineering, practiced several discrete disciplines, and I don't know engineering that well.
I love people that suggest I’m risk adverse and that’s why I’m still wearing a respirator.
Most of them have no idea what risk mitigation and management involves, and so they’re making a moral attack on those who refuse to comply with their idiotic mass infection policies.
Can confirm. Not risk adverse. My previous job required I carry kidnap & ransom insurance. Was once on same day evacuation alert due to violent 'election'. Had malaria. Overnighted solo in Bogota. Attended beach rave in Guyaquil. Did business in Lima.
DO NOT WANT COVID.
All of the public health masking stuff in workplaces should have fallen under OH&S. I asked, they said it did, but then it allowed PH to dictate respiratory control in workplaces. 🤷♂️
And recall medical facilities up until recently would insist you remove an N95 for a surgical
for all employers and all worksites. That includes hospitals and factories both. But the ID community doesn’t use this cause they know better.
If you peruse that Z94.4 you’ll find a ton of peer reviewed rigorous science about bioaerosol hazards.
I said that because I’m aerospace/electrical Eng and not a ventilation engineer.
Do I know more than the average person? Can I interpret standards outside my practice area? Yes and maybe. So why don’t I speak to the reporter and lend my voice?
Wholly sh-t. Don’t worry you can’t be infected with covid as it can’t go through curtains!!!
This is negligence on behalf of every ID in acute care allowing this anti-science to persist as knowledge by front line HCW.
Did you not learn anything from Sars1?
@KashPrime
Both my parents became very sick that afternoon. My dad called me that afternoon and let me listen to the nurse talking to my mom:
"Don't worry. You can't be infected with COVID - COVID doesn't go through curtains. We kept the curtain closed between you and your roommate"...
My estimation of medicine as a profession has fallen dramatically these past two years. I’m at a place where I don’t trust anything I hear from medical policy makers. The bloody UK SAGE is still saying droplet transmission and all we get for a tridemic is wash your hands
And things haven’t changed. Ontario nurses went to court in 2021 to sue for certified respirators and a long list of ID docs signed declarations that Covid was transmitted by droplets only. That lacking any of the “high quality” evidence we hear so much about.
As pre-warning to businesses, if you do this I will not only remove all my dealings with you, I’ll frequently point out your anti-science ableist errors to anyone who will listen.
Businesses are banning masks. If a major bank rolls this policy out nationwide, other banks will follow suit. People need to wake up before we lose our right to mask.
The annual meeting of Bridge Engineers of the World ended abruptly when the bridge linking the conference centre to the street collapsed.
“We were all saying it looked under-designed and sketchy and should be closed, but you know, (shrugs), what can you do?” said one engineer.
Nurse. “I get my medical information from the NY Times podcast”
Patient. “I get my medical information from primary research done by actual medical researchers.”
And there you have the pandemic summed up in one encounter.
@Craig_A_Spencer
Thanks. The failure of medical professionals to accept and respect other discipline’s expertise in mitigating transmission is the most sig failures. Ventilation, filtration and respirators have been pushed aside with assertions of the need for EBM type proof of efficacy.
I would never make assertions about the process used by chemists or biologists to create knowledge, as I don't know anything about the methods of those fields.
Please stop with the broad, unconditional "gold standard" comment.
Aerosol researcher Jose-Luis Jimenez added, “The Cochrane Review is scientific garbage.” He continued, “There is high-quality evidence from many angles that shows that, of course, N95 masks are better.”
Jimenez, was also critical that HICPAC is...
Yet this is what we hear repeatedly about PPE from ID docs. Who apparently don’t care that they’re speaking to a population that includes a bunch of us who rely on respiratory PPE to stop us from dying on a daily basis. Yet this is epistemic trespass as soon as it’s in a hospital
This dynamic was a factor in the 2003 Sars1 outbreak. Not in Vancouver where interdisciplinary work was part of life, but in Toronto. Justice Campbell’s report is explicit that the public health and ID establishment resented the authority of Labour playing in the medical sandbox.
that is religion speaking not science.
Every one trusts our lives dozens of times daily to engineered systems that have never been subject to an RCT or EBM. In an urban area you literally can’t do anything without encountering an engineered system that is life safety impacting.
Insisting that the body of work which literally transformed our lives entirely is ‘low quality mechanistic or observational evidence’ only reinforces to all of us outside EBM how awfully I’ll informed you all are. Those statements are continuing today, BTW.
Medical staff who continue to insist that paper droplet protection is adequate for a known aerosol risk are no longer operating in the realm of science and evidence based decision making.
So ‘expert’ saying N95 don’t filter viruses cause they’re too small, when presented with technical articles saying she’s incorrect responds how?
Don’t listen to anything she says about respirators and pathogens.
That opinion is only sustainable by ignoring any knowledge that is produced outside the exceptionally narrow and highly specialized framing of evidence based medicine EBM. EBM is designed to detect low signal to noise ratio SNR signals in complex systems, like drug trials.
In fact the “high quality” evidence (speaking as a scientist and not an EBM evangelist) demonstrated exactly the opposite, as did the consensus of a huge community of aerosol scientists and engineers.
We need more physicians willing to call out the lies and distractions we hear from public health leaders. It needs to come from within.
It takes valour to do this.
It takes nothing at all to sustain the status quo and defend the lies.
Yet more damaging misinformation from one of Canada’s most influential public health officials.
Btw: if you’re a senior BC public health official planning to email me about this tweet, save it for someone else. Thanks.
Here we are. 2022. Literally hundreds of papers showing the limiting of disease transmission by cleaning the air.
And we still have ID physicians calling for RCTs.
This is where we should be doing blinded randomised trials. It would be easy to have one group with functioning purifiers and another with ones that look the same, but not functioning.
It’s very unclear how much additional benefits will be derived from these, so we need studies
In fact, one of the fascinating things about evidence based medicine (EBM) and RCTs is how the RCT evangelists portray them as a universal method that can be applied to any question.
Had a couple tell me I can't prove seatbelts work w/o an RCT. To an engineer, that's ignorant