This essay was created by Aatish Bhatia in collaboration with Henry Reich. Check out our companion video for a snappy visual take on the math of masks! The video was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Here's the mask math calculator shown in the video Suggested Essay Topics; Characters Character List Characters Character List. Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, Henry V exists in two different early printed versions: the Folio version of and an earlier Quarto version. There are many differences between the two versions, the most important of which involve the assignment of the speeches Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, – March 27, ) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents.. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and
We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children – Quote Investigator
We now know that masks have an outsized effect on slowing the spread of COVID And yet, some people oppose wearing masks because they view this as a personal choice rather than a public health issue. This misses the big picture because masks protect the wearer and the people around them. This two-way protection makes widespread mask-wearing a powerful way to extinguish an epidemic. When a person exhales, they spray out saliva particles of various tiny henry v essay. If they're contagious, then this 'mouth spray' is loaded with viral particles.
This virus-laden saliva spray is the main way that COVID spreads. When a contagious person breathes, they spray out roughly a thousand viral particles every minute. The more viral particles travel from person to person, the higher the chance of infection.
And if infected, people exposed to more viral particles generally experience more severe symptoms, henry v essay. Henry v essay reduce the mouth spray traveling between people — by blocking or by redirecting the spray — thereby reducing the chance of infection.
It's worth keeping in mind that no mask is perfect. Masks don't guarantee safety, they reduce risk. This is a lot like how an umbrella doesn't guarantee that you'll stay dry, but it does reduce your chance of getting wet.
Like umbrellas, masks only work if you use them correctly. But unlike umbrellas, which only protect people who use them, masks also protect people around the wearer. By '50 percent effective', I mean that wearing this mask cuts in half the chance that they'll infect a nearby susceptible person. Well, the first mask cuts the chance of infection in half, and the second mask once again cuts the chance of infection in half. So when both people wear masks, the chance of infection is half of half, i.
This is possible because when both people wear masks, the chance of infection is halved twice. This double protection makes masks much more effective than you might intuitively expect. So far, we've only looked at disease transmission between two people. How do we go from here to understanding disease transmission in the entire population? So we'd only have to consider the first route of disease transmission, and the population would see no drop in disease transmission, henry v essay.
So when everyone wears a mask or when no one wears oneit's straightforward to calculate the drop in disease transmission in the population, because there's only one route involved. Which means the virus can spread through a mix of all four routes. How likely each route is will depend on how many people wear masks.
Similarly, you can work out the chance of the other three disease transmission routes. When exactly half the population wears masks, it turns out that each route is equally likely.
Can you convince yourself why this has to be true? We can now calculate the average drop in disease transmission in the population.
Meanwhile, people who do wear masks henry v essay infected via the last two routes. But mask-wearers benefit much more, thanks to the added protection their masks provide. And since the population consists of both mask-wearers and non-mask wearers, the average benefit lies in between the benefit to these two groups.
Let's apply this logic to any values of mask usage and mask effectiveness. Vary the sliders below to see how masks moderate the spread of disease. This interactive lets you answer these questions. By filtering inhaled air, henry v essay, masks provide first-hand protection to those who wear them.
And by filtering or redirecting exhaled air, masks provide second-hand protection to everyone — including people who don't wear masks.
You put out a fire by starving it of oxygen. But you don't need to get rid of all the oxygen, you only need to reduce it enough to stop the fire from growing. If you lower it just enough to stop the disease from spreading, henry v essay, you can extinguish the epidemic. You've probably heard of the epidemiology term R0, pronounced R-nought or R-zero. This is the number of people that a contagious person can infect in a population with no prior immunity to the disease.
When R0 exceeds 1, the disease will grow exponentially until either enough people get vaccinated, or enough people get infected and develop immunity to the disease.
But, as Ed Yong writes in the Atlantic, "R0 is not destiny". R0 is a product of henry v essay numbers: the average number of people that a contagious person encounters, and the chance of infection upon contact. Social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns decrease the first number. And masks decrease the second number. The goal of all these public health strategies is to bring the epidemic under control by pulling R0 beneath 1.
With this in mind, let's re-express the impact of masks in terms of R0, henry v essay. The graph below shows how R0 henry v essay as mask-wearing increases, henry v essay. You can use the first slider to vary R0, which for COVID is between 2 and 3 that's in the absence of other public health measures such as social distancing, which further reduce R0. By varying the effectiveness of the masks, you can see how masks can help bring an epidemic under control.
To stop the spread of COVID, we need to keep R0 beneath 1. When this happens, on average, a contagious person will infect less than one person, and the epidemic will grind to a halt. This interactive lets you predict answers to these questions.
We henry v essay take our understanding one step further by expressing the power of masks in more human terms. Masks save lives by reducing the chance of infection which, in turn, shrinks the extent of the epidemic.
As more people wear masks, R0 decreases. And as R0 decreases, so does the number of infected people, henry v essay. So we can get a henry v essay picture if instead of visualizing R0, we visualize the infected fraction of the population.
By using a widely-adopted mathematical model of epidemics known as an SIR modelwe can relate R0 to the fraction of people who will eventually be infected. To learn more about SIR models, I recommend watching this excellent video. Although this model is a considerable simplification e, henry v essay.
it assumes random mixing between people and no lockdownsit offers us a ballpark estimate of the human cost of not wearing masks. This hill-shaped curve shows us how masks influence the size of an epidemic. As more people wear masks, the number of infections plummet. When very few people wear masks, we're at the top of the hill, and most people will eventually get infected.
But every step to the right moves us further down. So even partially effective masks, when partially adopted, can help reduce the spread of COVID To completely stop the spread, we need to get to the bottom of this hill.
But there's a silver lining: as more people wear masks, the hill grows steeper. Which means masks provide greater returns to society as more people wear them. If enough people wear masks, we can reach the bottom of the hill, where the chance of infection is zero.
This is henry v essay masks can end an epidemic. But masks can only end an epidemic if enough people wear them. You might wonder how henry v essay people have to wear masks to end an epidemic.
Well, that depends on how effective the masks are. The more effective the mask, the faster we can descend the hill. That's why it's important to wear a mask that tightly seals your mouth and noseand is made from an effective filtering material.
We all want to get to the bottom of the hill and stop the spread of COVID But you can't get there by yourself. Each person can only take a tiny step downwards.
This essay was created by Aatish Bhatia in collaboration with Henry Reich. Check out our companion video for a snappy visual take on the math of masks! The video was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Here's the mask math calculator shown in the video.
Many thanks to Upasana RoyManu PrakashDavid FismanMonica Gandhiand Vijay Ravikumar for their helpful feedback on drafts of this essay. If you found this essay valuable henry v essay would like to see more work like this in future, you can support my work on Patreon.
Here are some informative resources on the filtering ability of common mask materials. For the algebra enthusiasts among you you know who you arehere's a writeup covering the math in more detail. The henry v essay in this essay extend the work of Brienen et al to account for the bidirectional effectiveness of masks.
The bidirectional model of masks underlying henry v essay essay was to my knowledge first published in a preprint by Tian et al Table S3 and Fig S4. This was highlighted by Howard et al in their review article and accompanying essayand further popularized by Zeynep Tufekci, Jeremy Howard, henry v essay, Trisha Greenhalgh in the Atlantic, and by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker, who writes, "The more effective the mask, the bigger the impact.
This text is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4. The source code is available on Github, henry v essay. The emojis are created by Twitter and were modified to include a custom mask design.
When they talk, they spray out roughly ten thousand viral particles every minute.
The Faces of Shakepeare's Henry V - Video Essay
, time: 6:22Henry Adams - Wikipedia
This essay was created by Aatish Bhatia in collaboration with Henry Reich. Check out our companion video for a snappy visual take on the math of masks! The video was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Here's the mask math calculator shown in the video Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, – March 27, ) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents.. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and Henry Lawrence Garfield (born February 13, ), known professionally as Henry Rollins, is an American singer, actor, presenter, comedian, and activist. He hosts a weekly radio show on KCRW, is a regular columnist for Rolling Stone Australia, and was a regular columnist for LA Weekly.. After performing in the short-lived band State of Alert in , Rollins fronted the California hardcore
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