5 ms·

> Wear mask and stay indoors if possible For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilatio

> Wear mask and stay indoors if possible For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

timmf 5y ago
I do agree with all your points, except: > Masks have a very modest impact on transmission They are an effective measure which has lead to significant decrease in infection rates. There are of course parameters like the type of mask.
- mathverse 5y ago
  How many people are even using those masks correctly? There's a lot of people going around with old and contaminated masks or wearing them improperly.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    "People aren't using them properly" is an argument for better education, not ditching the things.
    - mathverse 5y ago
      And I have mentioned ditching the things where? It's an argument for not "relying that much" on an unreliable use of such tool like masks.
dageshi 5y ago
I imagine they mean, avoid leaving home as much as possible.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Masks have a very modest impact on transmission. Please stop propagating this BS. If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one. Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- merpnderp 5y ago
  "Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised. If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    > I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning. They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them. IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it. They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory. Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods. This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.
vaylian 5y ago
> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission Do you have a source for that?
- mrtesthah 5y ago
  Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses. Otherwise in general, they do work. https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-here-are-49-scientific-studies-that-explain-why-they-do/ https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...
- crimsoneer 5y ago
  https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302 It's probably about a 10% reduction in incidence. Which I guess is quite modest in comparison to, say, vaccines.
- incrudible 5y ago
  The (to my knowledge) largest study on community transmission finds ~10% reduction: https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_Second_Stage_Paper_20211108.pdf.pdf https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    I had a quick scan of that paper and read "The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks." So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making. > We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness Why?
dathinab 5y ago
More like: > Wear mask and stay (in your) home. As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends): longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.) Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by. It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc. Or at least that is how I understand it.
smallerfish 5y ago
> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission. False. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/
xphilter 5y ago
If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).
teekert 5y ago
"maximize ventilation", have you seen the gas prices lately ;)
corinroyal 5y ago
Actually, a recent metastudy found that masking reduces transmission by 53%, which is huge. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-new-covid-cases-study https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-n...

timmf 5y ago

I do agree with all your points, except: > Masks have a very modest impact on transmission They are an effective measure which has lead to significant decrease in infection rates. There are of course parameters like the type of mask.

mathverse 5y ago
How many people are even using those masks correctly? There's a lot of people going around with old and contaminated masks or wearing them improperly.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  "People aren't using them properly" is an argument for better education, not ditching the things.
  - mathverse 5y ago
    And I have mentioned ditching the things where? It's an argument for not "relying that much" on an unreliable use of such tool like masks.

dageshi 5y ago

I imagine they mean, avoid leaving home as much as possible.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>Masks have a very modest impact on transmission. Please stop propagating this BS. If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one. Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
merpnderp 5y ago
"Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised. If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  > I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning. They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them. IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it. They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory. Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods. This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.

vaylian 5y ago

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission Do you have a source for that?

mrtesthah 5y ago
Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses. Otherwise in general, they do work. https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-here-are-49-scientific-studies-that-explain-why-they-do/ https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...
crimsoneer 5y ago
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302 It's probably about a 10% reduction in incidence. Which I guess is quite modest in comparison to, say, vaccines.
incrudible 5y ago
The (to my knowledge) largest study on community transmission finds ~10% reduction: https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_Second_Stage_Paper_20211108.pdf.pdf https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.
- chimprich 5y ago
  I had a quick scan of that paper and read "The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks." So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making. > We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness Why?

dathinab 5y ago

More like: > Wear mask and stay (in your) home. As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends): longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.) Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by. It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc. Or at least that is how I understand it.

smallerfish 5y ago

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission. False. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/

xphilter 5y ago

If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).

teekert 5y ago

"maximize ventilation", have you seen the gas prices lately ;)

corinroyal 5y ago

Actually, a recent metastudy found that masking reduces transmission by 53%, which is huge. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-new-covid-cases-study https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-n...