17 ms·

I hope I am mistaken here, but... are you saying that it would need to kill 1/6th of the population every year (instead of 1/600) before you will consider putti

I hope I am mistaken here, but... are you saying that it would need to kill 1/6th of the population every year (instead of 1/600) before you will consider putting a piece of cloth over your face? What's so terrible about wearing a mask?

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
Not OP but my 2 cents is that we'll look back at this (and the time before covid) and wonder why we never mandated masks in places like doctor's offices and hospitals long before this. With Covid in the equation, maybe you extend that to places like grocery stores as well. I think the thought process around this greatly changes if you look at the problem on a societal or individual level. For example (with fake numbers) if a cloth mask protects is 50% effective, it's worth it on a societal level (prevents 50% of infections which makes a huge impact on hospital load) but not on an individual level (you only need 1 infection to catch the disease and die). However my problems with masks long-term on an individual level are: - Where's it's theatrical such as outdoors; why do i need to wear a mask when running outside by myself, or when playing soccer outdoors. My city required this for a while and many people still choose to do this even while walking their dogs by themselves. Bars/restaurants; Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't seem very helpful to wear mask for 30 seconds while you walk to your table then sit there talking/yelling for hours while eating and drinking without the mask on. Or (something i know much less about) if simple cloth masks are really less effective (on an individual vs pandemic/societal level) then N95 masks, then why is the mandate just to wear cloth masks. - The philosophical problem of shifting the burden of protecting immune-compromised people onto all of society rather then finding a solution that is centered on them directly. Why should everyone at a concert be forced to wear a mask when a) it's a dangerous environment to be in if you don't have a health immune system. it was before the pandemic and it will be afterwards as well. b) why don't you just create an immune-compromised "vip" section instead (maybe with whatever technologies required to ensure the virus doesn't cross the boundary. c) If (again not sure on this) wearing something like an N95 mask "100%" protects the immune-compromised, why do the rest of us need to take action as well. Relying on 99% of people to protect 1% seems like it should be the last resort solution in a long-term endemic sense. I don't think it's worth debating the details of this today because the answer will require lots of nuance and data that doesn't and cannot exist today. What variant(s) become endemic? How much of the population is considered vulnerable to those variants? What technologies are available to protect people at an individual level? How prevalent is testing 5 years from now? How effective are the vaccines over long periods of time? ect...
betwixthewires 5y ago
You're misdirecting and missing the point entirely. While I'm not quite anti mask like the parent comment, it is an important question to consider, it is always a trade off. What severity warrant what measures? If there's still covid like now in 10 years, will we all have to wear masks at work until we retire? Is this feasible? If not, then when do we stop? Will the people advocating it ever tell us to stop? If not, do we stop without their blessing? All very important considerations that everyone should be thinking about for themselves.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Exactly! I think we can all disagree about preferences and risk-tolerance and that's fine. Society is about learning to live with compromise. But what I don't like is how nobody will pre-commit ahead of time about what the acceptable tradeoffs are. What are the targets? How long do we expect restrictions to stay in place for? If we miss those targets, where do we go from there? Can we just all be clear about this up front, pre-commit and stick to the plan. I'm not even saying that unexpected conditions may necessitate calling an audible. But the burden should be on those who are asking for it to explain why they screwed up. Right now it just feels like policymakers are making it up as they along, and virtually nobody feels like its leadership in any sense of the word.
  - kungito 5y ago
    I'd say the policy makers are making political decisions because it's a political problem in their eyes. If more people are pro mask they are going to enforce masks. If people get scared they are increasing restri tions. If people get annoyed the loosen restrictions. All they are focused on are the next elections
- ivanhoe 5y ago
  > will we all have to wear masks at work until we retire It's really funny to watch all the push back against masks considering how many uncomfortable things people put on themselves every single day, and usually just because someone told them it's cool thing to do. High heels, bras, neckties, etc. and not to forget things that we do to our bodies like implants and piercings and tattoos - most of that is way less useful and a lot more uncomfortable and even more dangerous to our bodies than wearing masks, and yet we not just accept them, we love having it. Acceptance of masks as a regular part of clothing is just a matter of making it a cool thing to do.
dcolkitt 5y ago
The Covid death rate among vaccinated people is under 0.01%[1]. One hundred times worse than the current situation would make Covid not significantly worse than seasonal influenza for the vaccinated. Sure, one hundred times worse among those who refuse to vaccinate would be significantly worse. But if a significant proportion of the population voluntarily refuses to vaccinate, I see no reason why the rest of society should bend over backwards to protect them from their own choices. [1]https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough-cases-data-from-the-states/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...
- mynegation 5y ago
  I know it may all look like small potatoes, but this is HN and you are two orders of magnitude off. 0.01% is pretty close to annual death rate from flu in pre-COVID years [1] so the situation that "one hundred times worse than the current situation" will make it 100 hundred times worse (i.e. significantly worse) than seasonal influenza. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Okay, fair enough. But a major difference is that flu deaths are much more heavily burdened on the the young, whereas Covid is on the very elderly. The death of a 6 month old from flu results in approximately 20 times more QALY loss than an 85 year old. Let me approach it from another angle. Pre-vaccine, it appears that Covid roughly doubled everyone's all-cause mortality.[1] Like it killed 30 year olds at a much lower rate than 90 year olds, but 30 year olds have a much lower baseline mortality to begin with. This isn't an exact relationship, but approximately about double mortality across the board. (Even interestingly enough men's excess Covid death rate is about in line with their general mortality vis-a-vis women.) The vaccine appears to reduce the mortality risk of circulating Covid by about a factor of 100X. There's very little reason to believe that it substantially shifts the relative mortality burden between groups. So, post-vaccine Covid increases all-cause mortality broadly by about 1%. That translates into less than 1 month of lost life expectancy.[2] [1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33412438/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33412438/ [2]https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/10/mortality-and-life-expectancy/ https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/10/mortality-...
gwbas1c 5y ago
> What's so terrible about wearing a mask? They're uncomfortable. I wore a KN95 mask around a maternity ward while waiting for my wife to deliver, and after a few hours it smelt bad. The cloth masks get all sweaty when worn all day, in the summer, at an amusement park. The mask gets in the way when getting a haircut. (FWIW: I have some friends who really like wearing their masks, and continue to wear them because they like hiding their faces.)
- jrockway 5y ago
  > The cloth masks get all sweaty when worn all day, in the summer, at an amusement park. You can put an extra one in your pocket.
Sunspark 5y ago
People with hearing problems lose the ability to communicate in many cases if they cannot see the other person's lips.
henrikschroder 5y ago
> What's so terrible about wearing a mask? Their efficiency at stopping the spread is extremely small, and the whole debate takes energy away from things that actually work that we should be doing instead. Masks are virtue-signaling talismans at best, just look at how people are actually using them.
- elif 5y ago
  If masks are used at a distance outdoors in the context of essential services during a lockdown with no shared indoor spaces they are ~extremely~ effective at preventing viral spread. I agree though they are contributing arguably more harm than good now by encouraging people to feel safe making unnecessary contact.
zpeti 5y ago
Can all the people advocating for an IMO completely dystopic society where everywhere our faces are covered, point me to some peer reviewed, legit studies about masks actually working? Especially cloth masks that 80% of people use? The only legit study ive seen is the danish one that shows masks basically do nothing to stop the spread of aerosol transmission, which COVID is.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Well, that took me much less time than I actually expected. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 It does note that non-medical (e.g. cloth) masks may be less effective, but whether those are used a lot seems to depend on environment (nobody seems to use them here). Edit: One more for cloth masks https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642 https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642
  - zpeti 5y ago
    I’m sceptical. This study measures aerosols going into a funnel centimeters away. It is also done with 10 people. This is a highly artificial situation. They even admit that they didn’t measure aerosol escapes at the top and side of masks. What happens when you spend 15 minutes in a small room with a COVID infected person with a mask? When all side escaped aerosols spread in the room? Or in a shopping center with 10 COVID infected people? That’s the real life situation. And in that situation I’ve not seen any studies done. To me this is basic physics. Aerosols float in the air. Any particles escaping the direct surface of the mask will float into the air. Just like dust. Except viruses are even smaller and float more. Any closed environment is likely to be saturated with virus fairly quickly, and if they aren’t filtered by a kn95 mask you will breath them in. Edit: and I think with the new variants we are in a worse and worse situation. The initial variant needed 15 minutes of exposure to infect you apparently. I’m pretty sure delta is much much less. A few minutes or under a minute in a saturated room, mask or no mask, is prob enough
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      I agree with you, and think it’s kind of obvious, which is why nobody is testing for that I think. If you spend long enough in a small room, even with someone wearing a mask the mask is not going to do much to prevent transmission. I think that’s why the first rule of COVID is to not stay together in small rooms. The important part is if you’ll be instantly infected by someone talking with you over the counter for a minute, and for that scenario masks are (apparently) pretty great. The only way would be to wear N95+ masks yourself.
peakaboo 5y ago
Wow. I hope you realize how ridiculous that statement is. In the real world, 99.99% at least survives covid. In Sweden 99.995%.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  While your are forgetting long COVID, I'll have a go at it. A lot of people on Sweden are vaccinated. Hospitals know better on how to handle covid. As always, the danger comes when hospitals are overpopulated. Ps. What's the source of your % ? Is it case fatality rate ( CFR ), crude fatality rate or infection fatality rate?
a0-prw 5y ago
I agree with you that 1/6 would be unacceptable, if that's what the post you replied to intended. On the other hand, 1/600 means between 16 and 17 dead for every 10000 people infected. Of those 16 to 17 people, the vast majority have one or more comorbidities, mostly caused by lifestyle choices, and probably have little time left anyway. I have nothing against wearing a mask. I quite enjoyed the anonymity ;) I do not think cloth masks are very effective against a respiratory virus (it even says so on the box of the ones most people wore in Denmark). I do think lockdowns are very damaging and we are going to have to live with the virus.

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago

Not OP but my 2 cents is that we'll look back at this (and the time before covid) and wonder why we never mandated masks in places like doctor's offices and hospitals long before this. With Covid in the equation, maybe you extend that to places like grocery stores as well. I think the thought process around this greatly changes if you look at the problem on a societal or individual level. For example (with fake numbers) if a cloth mask protects is 50% effective, it's worth it on a societal level (prevents 50% of infections which makes a huge impact on hospital load) but not on an individual level (you only need 1 infection to catch the disease and die). However my problems with masks long-term on an individual level are: - Where's it's theatrical such as outdoors; why do i need to wear a mask when running outside by myself, or when playing soccer outdoors. My city required this for a while and many people still choose to do this even while walking their dogs by themselves. Bars/restaurants; Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't seem very helpful to wear mask for 30 seconds while you walk to your table then sit there talking/yelling for hours while eating and drinking without the mask on. Or (something i know much less about) if simple cloth masks are really less effective (on an individual vs pandemic/societal level) then N95 masks, then why is the mandate just to wear cloth masks. - The philosophical problem of shifting the burden of protecting immune-compromised people onto all of society rather then finding a solution that is centered on them directly. Why should everyone at a concert be forced to wear a mask when a) it's a dangerous environment to be in if you don't have a health immune system. it was before the pandemic and it will be afterwards as well. b) why don't you just create an immune-compromised "vip" section instead (maybe with whatever technologies required to ensure the virus doesn't cross the boundary. c) If (again not sure on this) wearing something like an N95 mask "100%" protects the immune-compromised, why do the rest of us need to take action as well. Relying on 99% of people to protect 1% seems like it should be the last resort solution in a long-term endemic sense. I don't think it's worth debating the details of this today because the answer will require lots of nuance and data that doesn't and cannot exist today. What variant(s) become endemic? How much of the population is considered vulnerable to those variants? What technologies are available to protect people at an individual level? How prevalent is testing 5 years from now? How effective are the vaccines over long periods of time? ect...

betwixthewires 5y ago

You're misdirecting and missing the point entirely. While I'm not quite anti mask like the parent comment, it is an important question to consider, it is always a trade off. What severity warrant what measures? If there's still covid like now in 10 years, will we all have to wear masks at work until we retire? Is this feasible? If not, then when do we stop? Will the people advocating it ever tell us to stop? If not, do we stop without their blessing? All very important considerations that everyone should be thinking about for themselves.

dcolkitt 5y ago
Exactly! I think we can all disagree about preferences and risk-tolerance and that's fine. Society is about learning to live with compromise. But what I don't like is how nobody will pre-commit ahead of time about what the acceptable tradeoffs are. What are the targets? How long do we expect restrictions to stay in place for? If we miss those targets, where do we go from there? Can we just all be clear about this up front, pre-commit and stick to the plan. I'm not even saying that unexpected conditions may necessitate calling an audible. But the burden should be on those who are asking for it to explain why they screwed up. Right now it just feels like policymakers are making it up as they along, and virtually nobody feels like its leadership in any sense of the word.
- kungito 5y ago
  I'd say the policy makers are making political decisions because it's a political problem in their eyes. If more people are pro mask they are going to enforce masks. If people get scared they are increasing restri tions. If people get annoyed the loosen restrictions. All they are focused on are the next elections
ivanhoe 5y ago
> will we all have to wear masks at work until we retire It's really funny to watch all the push back against masks considering how many uncomfortable things people put on themselves every single day, and usually just because someone told them it's cool thing to do. High heels, bras, neckties, etc. and not to forget things that we do to our bodies like implants and piercings and tattoos - most of that is way less useful and a lot more uncomfortable and even more dangerous to our bodies than wearing masks, and yet we not just accept them, we love having it. Acceptance of masks as a regular part of clothing is just a matter of making it a cool thing to do.

dcolkitt 5y ago

The Covid death rate among vaccinated people is under 0.01%[1]. One hundred times worse than the current situation would make Covid not significantly worse than seasonal influenza for the vaccinated. Sure, one hundred times worse among those who refuse to vaccinate would be significantly worse. But if a significant proportion of the population voluntarily refuses to vaccinate, I see no reason why the rest of society should bend over backwards to protect them from their own choices. [1]https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough-cases-data-from-the-states/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...

mynegation 5y ago
I know it may all look like small potatoes, but this is HN and you are two orders of magnitude off. 0.01% is pretty close to annual death rate from flu in pre-COVID years [1] so the situation that "one hundred times worse than the current situation" will make it 100 hundred times worse (i.e. significantly worse) than seasonal influenza. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Okay, fair enough. But a major difference is that flu deaths are much more heavily burdened on the the young, whereas Covid is on the very elderly. The death of a 6 month old from flu results in approximately 20 times more QALY loss than an 85 year old. Let me approach it from another angle. Pre-vaccine, it appears that Covid roughly doubled everyone's all-cause mortality.[1] Like it killed 30 year olds at a much lower rate than 90 year olds, but 30 year olds have a much lower baseline mortality to begin with. This isn't an exact relationship, but approximately about double mortality across the board. (Even interestingly enough men's excess Covid death rate is about in line with their general mortality vis-a-vis women.) The vaccine appears to reduce the mortality risk of circulating Covid by about a factor of 100X. There's very little reason to believe that it substantially shifts the relative mortality burden between groups. So, post-vaccine Covid increases all-cause mortality broadly by about 1%. That translates into less than 1 month of lost life expectancy.[2] [1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33412438/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33412438/ [2]https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/10/mortality-and-life-expectancy/ https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/10/mortality-...

gwbas1c 5y ago

> What's so terrible about wearing a mask? They're uncomfortable. I wore a KN95 mask around a maternity ward while waiting for my wife to deliver, and after a few hours it smelt bad. The cloth masks get all sweaty when worn all day, in the summer, at an amusement park. The mask gets in the way when getting a haircut. (FWIW: I have some friends who really like wearing their masks, and continue to wear them because they like hiding their faces.)

jrockway 5y ago
> The cloth masks get all sweaty when worn all day, in the summer, at an amusement park. You can put an extra one in your pocket.

Sunspark 5y ago

People with hearing problems lose the ability to communicate in many cases if they cannot see the other person's lips.

henrikschroder 5y ago

> What's so terrible about wearing a mask? Their efficiency at stopping the spread is extremely small, and the whole debate takes energy away from things that actually work that we should be doing instead. Masks are virtue-signaling talismans at best, just look at how people are actually using them.

elif 5y ago
If masks are used at a distance outdoors in the context of essential services during a lockdown with no shared indoor spaces they are ~extremely~ effective at preventing viral spread. I agree though they are contributing arguably more harm than good now by encouraging people to feel safe making unnecessary contact.

zpeti 5y ago

Can all the people advocating for an IMO completely dystopic society where everywhere our faces are covered, point me to some peer reviewed, legit studies about masks actually working? Especially cloth masks that 80% of people use? The only legit study ive seen is the danish one that shows masks basically do nothing to stop the spread of aerosol transmission, which COVID is.

Aeolun 5y ago
Well, that took me much less time than I actually expected. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 It does note that non-medical (e.g. cloth) masks may be less effective, but whether those are used a lot seems to depend on environment (nobody seems to use them here). Edit: One more for cloth masks https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642 https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642
- zpeti 5y ago
  I’m sceptical. This study measures aerosols going into a funnel centimeters away. It is also done with 10 people. This is a highly artificial situation. They even admit that they didn’t measure aerosol escapes at the top and side of masks. What happens when you spend 15 minutes in a small room with a COVID infected person with a mask? When all side escaped aerosols spread in the room? Or in a shopping center with 10 COVID infected people? That’s the real life situation. And in that situation I’ve not seen any studies done. To me this is basic physics. Aerosols float in the air. Any particles escaping the direct surface of the mask will float into the air. Just like dust. Except viruses are even smaller and float more. Any closed environment is likely to be saturated with virus fairly quickly, and if they aren’t filtered by a kn95 mask you will breath them in. Edit: and I think with the new variants we are in a worse and worse situation. The initial variant needed 15 minutes of exposure to infect you apparently. I’m pretty sure delta is much much less. A few minutes or under a minute in a saturated room, mask or no mask, is prob enough
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    I agree with you, and think it’s kind of obvious, which is why nobody is testing for that I think. If you spend long enough in a small room, even with someone wearing a mask the mask is not going to do much to prevent transmission. I think that’s why the first rule of COVID is to not stay together in small rooms. The important part is if you’ll be instantly infected by someone talking with you over the counter for a minute, and for that scenario masks are (apparently) pretty great. The only way would be to wear N95+ masks yourself.

peakaboo 5y ago

Wow. I hope you realize how ridiculous that statement is. In the real world, 99.99% at least survives covid. In Sweden 99.995%.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
While your are forgetting long COVID, I'll have a go at it. A lot of people on Sweden are vaccinated. Hospitals know better on how to handle covid. As always, the danger comes when hospitals are overpopulated. Ps. What's the source of your % ? Is it case fatality rate ( CFR ), crude fatality rate or infection fatality rate?

a0-prw 5y ago

I agree with you that 1/6 would be unacceptable, if that's what the post you replied to intended. On the other hand, 1/600 means between 16 and 17 dead for every 10000 people infected. Of those 16 to 17 people, the vast majority have one or more comorbidities, mostly caused by lifestyle choices, and probably have little time left anyway. I have nothing against wearing a mask. I quite enjoyed the anonymity ;) I do not think cloth masks are very effective against a respiratory virus (it even says so on the box of the ones most people wore in Denmark). I do think lockdowns are very damaging and we are going to have to live with the virus.