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Not that this will settle anything. Anecdotally, I've not gotten even a slight cold while being socially distanced while consistently masked.
by splitrocket 5y ago
Not that this will settle anything.
Anecdotally, I've not gotten even a slight cold while being socially distanced while consistently masked.
- michaelhah 5y agoWell, that may be due to other people social distancing enough to keep the level of colds down. It might have nothing to do with masks.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoanecdotally, I have very little social contact normally anyway, I've worked from home since before winter, and always wear masks in closed public spaces - have had 3-4 colds in that time. I do have kids though.
- space_ghost 5y agoMy frequency of colds has increased 10x since I've gotten married and had kids.
- jackfoxy 5y agoAnecdotally, since taking vitamin D3 supplements I haven't been getting colds. Added daily nutritional zinc supplements in 2020 as soon as they were available after I heard the anecdotal evidence D & zinc are effective in Covid prevention. Throughout winter and early spring last year you couldn't get zinc supplements for love or money. A lot of anecdotes there :). The American medical establishment has a long history of not getting behind nutritional disease prevention. Some of it is for good reason, but I think there is also a systemic bias.
- andrew_ 5y agoMy 2yo would like to sneeze on you and flip that anecdote on its head.
- MrDunham 5y agoParent of a 1.5 year old here. Can confirm - several colds. To the parent comment's point though, I haven’t had any colds in the last year where my daughter wasn’t sick first
- poutine 5y agoThey seem to have perpetual runny noses when they’re really young.
- awb 5y agoYears ago my entire family got sick and I was determined not to contract it through distancing and frequent hand washing and sanitizing. It worked until I bent down to tie my toddler’s shoes only to look up and mid-sentence have him cough directly into my open mouth. All it takes is one mistake. Needless to say I got sick shortly after.
- samatman 5y agoI wonder what the result would have been if you immediately gargled with vodka. I've used that successfully in the past to chase colds out of the throat before they get into my nose and lungs.
- awb 5y agoI’ll try that next time!
- Marsymars 5y agoA few years ago I went on vacation for a week with a half-dozen friends in an Airbnb and spent the entire time miserably sick with some kind of respiratory illness. I was similarly determined not to get anyone else sick (and I was sick from the start, so avoided any asymptomatic period). I was fastidious about distancing and sanitizing, and any time I needed to cough I'd step outside of the house. Nobody else got sick. Is the sample size here large enough to determine anything? No idea, but I like the anecdote.
- jMyles 5y agoIt's more plausible, at least in my view, that this is the result of suppression of several endemic respiratory pathogens by viral interference (something that has been observed in previous pandemics). https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-unexpected-case-of-the-disappearing-flu-64fd1fa5e909 https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-unexpected-case-...
- freeflight 5y agoIt's not just an anecdote, it's measurable on a global scale [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3
- neither_color 5y agoAnecdotally I haven't had a cold in years. I work out 4 days a week and while I wouldn't call it a strict diet I have an upper limit calorie "budget" that I never exceed. While it's certainly possible that masks helped some people avoid all airborne transmissions last year, lots of people were also able to exercise more and make better food choices without the rush of breakfast and lunch commutes.
- poutine 5y agoGet kids. They are plague carriers.
- dctoedt 5y agoMy dad used to refer to day care as "your friendly local disease exchange," because he and my mom would get sick whenever they visited grandchildren. And a former colleague, then childless, called them "petrie dishes."
- XorNot 5y agoI made absolutely no changes 1 year, but because my workspace at work was in an alcove next to an air conditioning vent that pulled air from the outside, I completely dodged the office cold because I basically had my own positive pressure environment. It's more likely your lifestyle is simply keeping you away from people and places that experience high levels of foot traffic.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI also wonder if some people just don't have as strong as immune response and so they get barely a sniffle from a typical cold virus.
- goatcode 5y ago>got a cold That's because the cold virus is spread by surfaces, and you likely touched something with it, then scratched your eyes. You can be 80 miles from someone, but if you touch something he touched, you're potentially getting his cold.
- jMyles 5y ago> That's because the cold virus is spread by surfaces Stop. There is no one virus called "the cold virus", and several of the viruses that do cause colds (including, for example, the other four endemic coronaviruses) are not known to spread by fomites.
- goatcode 5y agoYou stop. Looks like we're both wrong: https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html It's either surface contact or ghosts coughing in the poster's face.
- jMyles 5y agoI didn't say that there aren't other viruses that cause colds that can be spread by fomites. I said that: 1) There isn't a single virus called "the cold virus" 2) In addition to SARS-CoV-2, there are other viruses that cause cold-like symptoms that are not spread by fomites. Your comment gave the impression that there's a single "cold virus" for which fomite transmission is the primary vector. That's not so. There are a bunch of viruses (in fact a bunch of families of viruses) bunch that cause cold symptoms, and only a few of them are commonly spread by fomites. None of the five endemic coronaviruses are known to be among these, nor is influenza. Also, even though the CDC appears to be correct to my eyes in this case, I urge that, after the disastrous departure from anything resembling science in the past year and a half, we stop regarding it as a credible source.
- goatcode 5y agoStop again. Then read the link I posted.
- rootusrootus 5y agoIt has been a pleasant year in that regard. We finally went on a domestic trip to Atlanta a couple weeks ago, after having been fully vaccinated in the middle of April. Guess what we came back with? A cold. Dammit!
- listless 5y agoObjectively, it doesn’t seem to matter if an area is masked or not. The virus won’t be stopped. Just compare Florida to California or Georgia to Washington state. I know what the models say. But my eyes deceive me.
- irq11 5y agoAnecdotally, I spent an entire week, unmasked, in an apartment with someone sick with symptomatic Covid, and never caught it. Anecdotes are not data.