@padi*0409 wrote:
@mobileempireau wrote:
Why is it wrong to import these supplies from China (not necessary identifying them as certified medical products but products made to a specific standard),
Can I assume from that that you were selling "surgical masks" as giving protection against Covid19 ?
Unless you were selling N95 (or their equivalent) then you were falsely selling them, so no wonder you have over 100 sales in the month but no completed items to show for that. Interesting that you had all those sales as "private listings"..............
I was selling my only remaining ASTM F2100 Level 2 masks. You have absolutely no idea what you talking about on the protection against the virus.
Go ahead and dispute the below.
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Current evidence from an Australian study is that masks can prevent 60-80% of influenza infections in a home setting if used routinely. This means masks could be a useful tool in fighting viral outbreaks like the CV.
Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/
There is also other scientific evidence showing that wearing a surgical mask does provide some level of protection against respiratory infections.
Case in point, Uchida et al (2016) suggested that "wearing of masks were effective in infection control." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...
Systematic review conducted by Barasheed et al (2016) suggests that "Facemask use seems to be beneficial against certain respiratory infections at MGs (mass gatherings)". https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(16)31010-4/fulltext
While it might not be able to provide the same level of protection as a P2 / N95 respirator, surgical masks themselves appeared to be able to provide at least some protection to their wearers.
In fact, research conducted by Radonovich et al. (2019) indicates that "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31479137
You may also want to look at some other evidence provided by Siddharth Sridhar, who is a Clinical Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong here - https://www.facebook.com/siddharth.sridhar.5/posts/101583870...
Encouraging people who are displaying symptoms to wear masks and enabling asymptomatic population to wear masks in public / mass gatherings should not be mutually exclusive.
Furthermore, the current advice appeared to be triggering unnecessary hatred towards those who choose to do so to protect themselves or others - case in point: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-20/coronavirus-hong-kong...
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The only thing I agree with you is N95/P2/KN95 respirators that will protect yourself INDIVIDUALLY more effective than medical-grade face masks. However, they are by no mean useless and these medical-grade face masks are made with electrostatically treated middle layer meltblown PP fabric that can filter <0.3 micron particles. The cheap, more commonly made, civilian grade masks imported from China (GB15979-2002 standard) may have a meltblown PP Fabric but are not electrostatically treated, so they can only filter against bacteria at 3 microns.
HOWEVER again, that's what the majority of the people in SE Asia countries use because there is no other choice (lack of raw material supply).
Almost all Australians have never lived through a pandemic, so obviously you have no idea what is effective or not. The ignorance I am seeing from local medical experts ignoring their counterparts in SE Asia countries who have been through SEVERAL pandemics are absolutely staggering.
eBay should be doing a community service by allowing as many people to import as many face masks as possible to bring down prices and massively increase supply, so everybody in the community gets to wear them if they need to go out in public over the next few months. This is the same as what Taiwan has been doing by establishing war-time measures to fast track their own government production and ration them to every citizen.
