Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)

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Abominable

Major
Registered Member
Higgle said:
The real story is complicated and the defects were partly due to perception, partly due to problems all along the supply chain.

I know because I was in China last year working with a mask factory. I exported several hundred thousand masks for them.

On one hand there was a demand-vs-supply imbalance. It was easy to procure medical (K)N95s pre-pandemic, but when COVID broke out they were the first to sell out. It is easy to increase production BUT the medical-grade certification is extremely difficult to get. NIOSH certification for N95 (any grade) was also difficult. So almost all factories did not bother making them, as non-medical KN95s did not require certification, they only needed a simple test report to show they meet certain filtration and fitting standards.

This caused a large supply of KN95 to flood the market but buyers kept refusing them as they believed KN95s to be defective or inferior to N95s. The only options were to buy non-medical KN95s, or go maskless. You know all the stories about hospitals running out of masks in the US? Not because there was no supply, but because importers refused to buy KN95s. In July 2020, the waiting list to buy N95s from 3M extended all the way to March 2021. Yet there were millions of surplus, "inferior" KN95s in Chinese warehouses that could have saved thousands of lives abroad if they had been purchased instead of being ignored because the media called them inferior.

Some of the "defective" reports are true. Because of the insane increase in mask production, melt-blown filtration fabric (especially high-grade melt-blown for KN95s) became impossible to find. At one point in June 2020, a lot of people claimed to sell 90% or 95% PFE melt-blown, but when we tested the fabric samples, they reached only 20 to 30%. Several batches of masks were made (all across China) with this low-grade, uncertified melt-blown before factories realized they were being scammed.

But for the most part, the masks were perfectly fine. Western media completely blown the defects out of proportion, and incorrectly compared non-medical KN95s with medical N95s. Chinese customs went to incredible lengths to only allow certified masks to be exported. At one point, for every shipment going out, I had to submit over 20 pages of documents and certificates for customs clearance and hope that it doesn't get impounded. By August 2020, unless you were a dedicated medical supplies company, you were prohibited from exporting PPE.
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I was working in the first wave here in the UK. The quality of masks we had were abysmal throughout it. At the same time the PM was talking about sourcing PPE being a number one priority, the media tracking cargo planes coming from Turkey, there still was a massive shortage of everything.

In theory we can buy anything we want but normally would go with with the "national" procurement system. Normally they are quite good quality but during the pandemic everything became a mystery box.

With our first delivery. The first boxes of masks we had were out of date, someone put a sticker with a new date over it. I half peeled it off and took a picture of it - I'll save it to show my grandkids one day how much of a mess the system was. I'm sure it was found in some abandoned warehouse somewhere and pressed into service.

After that the masks quality of the masks actually became worse. They'd often tear when you're putting them on. Around October last year the quality improved, but there were still so many of the old ones that fell apart. I believe someone bought so many of them and now it was too late. No one wanted to toss them away. It took months for them to be used up.
 
SteelBird

SteelBird

Colonel
KYli said:
Tsai can keep playing politics.
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Another possibility is that she and her party are trying to make money out from the pandemic. I heard from one report that the Japanese parliament was interrogating its foreign minister why only donate 1.54m doses to Taiwan. He answered that the Taiwan side only request that many doses because they will have enough production by July. If these are true, Tsai's administration clearly want to wait for their local vaccine.
 
SteelBird

SteelBird

Colonel
First images of Covid-19 victim cremation emerge on Facebook. This is said in Kampot province. If my eyes serve me right, they are using rubber tires instead of wood or electricity. Burning rubber tires is havoc to air quality.

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S

supersnoop

Major
Registered Member
Abominable said:
Yep. You're right on all points. It's important to publish so methodology can be scrutinised. Studies on all these have shown that the time gap between doses can have a big impact on efficacy, as can age and other demographics.

The third point I'd add is that there's no mention of a comparison with western vaccines. Imagine if a newspaper made the same claims about a AstraZeneca quoting a small south American paper? I'm sure they would be ostracised for publishing "fake news".

There's been a general lack of constructive criticism in the western media - 99% percent of it is "trust the government". Not a single article has questioned the decision of using experimental mRNA over a vaccine based on more established vaccine technology.

I agree Pfizer/Moderna seem to be more effective than Sinopharm (Astrazeneca is about equal), but at what cost?

Vaccines normally take years to develop, and a big reason for that is to monitor for long term side effects.
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Totally agree, the lack of constructive criticism is essentially lying by omission.

1. J&J efficacy is likely worse than Sinopharm, but nobody mentions this. However, it is a widely distributed shot in the US and EU. Comparisons are almost always made to Pfizer and Moderna.

2. The main function of vaccines has been totally mischaracterized. It is not necessarily to stop infection. It is to strengthen the immune system to improve survival. We are spoiled by some of the modern success of things like vaccines for Polio and Measles which are particularly effective. However, if we think back to the history of smallpox vaccination, then we remember that people would usually still have a mild infection. For the poorer countries lacking health infrastructure, then keeping people out of the hospital or off ventilators is a critical metric. Not every country can be like the US and just throw away new ventilators because they don't need them anymore.

3. Personally I also have a fear of possible long-term side effects, but my only choice was mRNA vaccines. This is no different than the boatload of stories about Chinese people only having the choices of Sinovac, and Sinopharm for the most part.

The western media loves to portray itself as an arbiter of truth, freedom, and justice. This is how they are "better" than Russian or Chinese media which is portrayed as serving the states' interests. However, if the western media betrays the truth as above, then they are no better, and therefore have no moral high ground.
 
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