Tag: coronavirus

New Technology Refuses Entrance To Shops If You’re Not Wearing A Face Mask

A new technology being used in shops in Thailand and other countries to enforce coronavirus restrictions conducts a face scan to check if the customer is wearing a mask and refuses entry if they don’t have one.

“My local shops in Thailand. In 2 seconds scans my temperature and to see if wearing mask. Doors don’t open if not. 3 cases in 100+ days here. Removes awkward mask arguments for staff as well,” tweeted Niall Harbison.

The system resembles something you’d see as part of airport security. The customer walks up to a screen which displays the words ‘Face Detector’. The system then scans to check if the customer is wearing a mask before allowing them to pass through a barrier.

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‘Twindemic’ test: Massachusetts, many colleges mandate winter flu shots

Protesters have swarmed downtown Boston and the state Capitol in the seven weeks since Republican Gov. Charlie Baker issued the first-of-its-kind requirement for students from preschool through college.As the Massachusetts mandate plays out, other states have weighed similar requirements while colleges throughout the country pile on their own orders to prevent flu patients from clogging doctors offices and emergency rooms alongside people infected with coronavirus this winter.

State laws across the country already require various vaccines for students and health care workers, while allowing a host of exemptions. Governments still have broad authority to implement new flu shot orders, potentially paving the way for mandatory inoculation against the coronavirus in a country where vaccine skepticismis spreading and President Donald Trump has resisted many public health protocols during the pandemic.

“This is a brave new experiment by the state of Massachusetts,” said Lawrence Gostin, who heads a university-based center on health law that serves as an official collaborating institute with the World Health Organization. “If it turns out to be a wholesale success, that should influence other states to go a similar route, not just with flu but with other vaccines. But if it causes a backlash and only marginal benefit, states might be hesitant to adopt that model in the future.”

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Did The WHO Just (Accidentally) Confirm COVID Is No More Dangerous Than Flu?

The World Health Organization has finally confirmed what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.

The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board on Monday October 5th, it’s just nobody seemed to really understand it.

In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves.

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Lockdown has caused a mental-health crisis

What’s strange is that a mental-health lobby that has spent years redefining mental illness to include more and more people, and spent years discussing the potential social causes of this supposed ‘crisis’, is strangely hesitant to criticise lockdown. This is despite the fact that lockdown forces us into circumstances pretty much guaranteed to increase anxiety, depression and debilitating mental illnesses

A major survey by Mind, the mental-health charity, has found that two thirds of adults and three quarters of young people with existing mental-health problems have experienced worsening mental health over the course of the pandemic. In addition, more than one in five adults with no previous experience of such problems described their mental health as poor or very poor. One in four of those who tried to access support was unable to get it from the NHS.

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Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders

In early august, the first kids in America went back to school during the pandemic. Many of these openings happened in areas where cases were high or growing: in Georgia, Indiana, Florida. Parents, teachers, and scientists feared what might happen next. The New York Times reported that, in parts of Georgia, a school of 1,000 kids could expect to see 20 or 30 people arrive with COVID-19 during week one. Many assumed that school infections would balloon and spread outward to the broader community, triggering new waves. On social media, people shared pictures of high schools with crowded hallways and no masking as if to say I told you so.

Fear and bad press slowed down or canceled school reopenings elsewhere. Many large urban school districts chose not to open for in-person instruction, even in places with relatively low positivity rates. Chicago, L.A., Houston—all remote, at least so far.

It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be a major spreader of COVID-19.

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Dutch Government Will Not Mandate Masks, Says ‘No Proven Effectiveness’

The Dutch government announced this week that it will not be mandating that citizens wear masks to halt the spread of COVID-19, arguing that their effectiveness remains unproven.

Speaking at a press conference at The Hague, the Netherlands’ Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark said that a recent review by the country’s National Institute for Health (RIVM) showed that social distancing rules prove more effective at combatting the virus than masks.

“Because from a medical perspective there is no proven effectiveness of masks, the Cabinet has decided that there will be no national obligation for wearing non-medical masks” Van Ark said, as reported by U.S. News and World Report.

Though RIVM chief Jaap van Dissel acknowledged studies indicating that masks may be useful in slowing the spread of COVID-19, he argued that incorrectly worn masks coupled with weak social distancing guidelines could help the virus spread.

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