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> in the hands of the public You do realize that's an extremely important distinction. A shitty mask in use by a medical professional will do more "social" goo
by NoOneNew 6y ago
> in the hands of the public
You do realize that's an extremely important distinction. A shitty mask in use by a medical professional will do more "social" good than a good to great mask used by a moron (the general public).
A way to prove that, how do you wash your hands. Unless you're a medical professional or know of one, you've probably been doing it wrong to prevent the spread of germs. Look up how a surgeon is supposed to wash their hands. One important note, put your hands up so the water drips down your arm instead of to your fingers. Germs flow with the water, so the idea is, they can get locked into the creases in your fingers if they drips down there. People just "wash their hands longer"... which is not that effective to the proper way of doing it.
The masks... good God... the people who yell at folks not wearing masks typically have their nose exposed.
But hey, there's then the fact of infected moisture droplets on your clothing. Depending on the study, it can live for some amount of hours. Especially after it was found to be airborne anyways. A tshirt being pulled over your face with covid on it, that's okay?
Look, it's more that this whole thing is far more complicated than the general news has us believe. Perfect action to stop the spread by "the general public" is sort of like wishing for peace on Earth. Yea, we can do our little bongo circles and poster signs with glitter, signing whatever stupid treaty in random city... there will still be war. There will still be tons of people spreading whatever contagion because of not understanding the fundamentals of germ prevention. Which no one will ever bother learning or doing. To be fair, the whole process of perfect prevention or at least truly effective is super difficult and requires constant dedication without fail.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoDon't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Yes, it'd be nice to get R to 0. But any number below 1 is good enough.
- NoOneNew 6y agoYea, but the problem with that, contagions don't work linearly. It doesn't take many missteps to screw up the whole thing. That, and the whole mask thing is starting to smell more like the crap from the 1950s, "If you see a nuclear flash, jump underneath your desk for protection."... yea... false hope is good and important. But only for a little while. And don't get me wrong, I technically want to be wrong. But science and human nature butt heads. People are human, perfect lab conditions don't imitate human actions that well. Relying too much on lab condition results and ignoring the idea of, "How will Joe Schmoe fuck this up?" means you wasted lab time. Hell, how many UI folks here? Or any programmers that have to deal with user testing? In your perfect locked away testing, everything is "perfect". Admit it. You think you solved all the ways users will screw up. Then it goes out into the wild, only to find out how incredibly stupid humans are. How many times have you said, "That's not the way you're supposed to use that!" regarding software and a random person? Why is the HN community so willing to think this behavior doesn't apply outside computers?
- cameldrv 6y agoA lot of that stuff from the 50s was actually pretty good advice. It wouldn't help if you were a mile from the blast, but if you were say 5-10 miles away, you have at least 20 seconds between the flash and when the blast wave hits. There may be glass and debris flying everywhere, and you have a much better chance of survival if you're under a desk with your head covered.