5 ms·

>A tiny enough dose may even serve to remind our immune system of a pathogen’s existence, boosting our antibody response to keep us protected against it. This

>A tiny enough dose may even serve to remind our immune system of a pathogen’s existence, boosting our antibody response to keep us protected against it. This article should be required reading, whatever your views on Covid and other conditions. Although the attack method of the infection is significant, and the potential victim’s defenses are significant, the raw quantity of infectious agent and the exposure rate are also both important Nothing is certain. Everything is statistics.

Sakos 3y ago
This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. edit: Imagine this being controversial. I didn't realize there were Covid deniers and skeptics here, because what I've stated is completely within established science.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- elsonrodriguez 3y ago
  The exploration of truth is anathema to those who claim to already have the truth.
- pton_xd 3y ago
  > This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. It would be nice to have some numbers to back this up. Let's suppose the "viral load" to acquire a Covid infection is 18 particles, the same as norovirus detailed in the article. And let's say you're exposed to hundreds of thousands of viral particles every minute you spend near a sick person [1]. If a mask reduces your viral load by 50%, is that a worthwhile method of avoiding infection? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598485/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598485/
  - sfblah 3y ago
    There are good studies on viral load reduction from masking with flu viruses from before 2020. After 2020 the topic became politicized so the studies are probably unreliable.
  - MrLeap 3y ago
    The assertion is that if you dump a gooey grey gallon of pure covid on someone, their symptoms will be more severe than if they only get 18 virions. Do you suppose that wouldn't be the case?
  - Jabbles 3y ago
    From that link: Our simulation also shows that wearing a mask can effectively reduce the spread of the viruses.
    - pton_xd 3y ago
      Sure, by some metric masks are very effective at stopping viral particles. After all, in my example the mask will stop tens of thousands of viral particles from reaching you every minute. Another metric is, will that stop you from getting sick? The threshhold is only 18 particles!
  - epivosism 3y ago
    All the factors you mention are scalar. You can wear 0,1,2,3 masks. You can be 1,2,3,10,20 feet away from the person for 0,1,5,10 minutes. I can come up with any number of such factors involving wind, lifetime of virus, the person's shedding rate, etc. Given that, there will always be a border at which having an additional 50% coverage is useful. Where the actual line is, we don't know. But as long as protection is monotonic in the factors above, it's always valuable to have more protection, which implies even <100% effective masks are useful. Trivial proof: Imagine someone with literally 10k masks all around them. You have to admit this is more safe than 1 mask. QED. You can call in meta factors like "in reality nothing matters" but you're arguing by consequences then, not actually disagreeing with the facts, just claiming they don't matter.
- User23 3y ago
  RCTs show surgical and cloth masks to be ineffective or nearly so for reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. Obviously the kinds of masks used in BSL labs do work to prevent spread. However there are statistics that areas with more masking had less severe illness. However that’s uncontrolled and some other factors or factors might account for both increased masking and reduced spread. That’s probably the case otherwise the RCTs would show efficacy. All of the subsequent work is just computer models and doesn’t actually tell us anything empirical. Obviously it’s easier to create a model that produces the desired result than it is an RCT.
- sfblah 3y ago
  What you said isn’t controversial. It’s definitely right. The issue with masks is one side started treating them like a talisman that makes infection impossible, which provoked the other side to say they do nothing. On a population level, masks are probably close to ineffective against a viral pathogen. You can read the relevant Cochrane review to see that. On an individual level they obviously do something, but you have to consider other factors as well, such as level/frequency of exposure and the like. Studies from prior to the pandemic suggested that a perfectly fitted N95 mask dramatically reduced flu virus penetration. For a more normally worn N95 the reduction was about 70%. For a surgical mask it was essentially nil. Importantly, a perfectly fitted mask required essentially gluing it to the face of a mannequin. Final point is, with an intervention whose impact is measurable but imperfect, you have to consider the side effects. I personally know several friends of my teenage kids who now have odd (to me at least) social phobias for which the only “cure” is to wear masks everywhere. Just last weekend I was talking to a friend of my daughter who wears masks everywhere except indoors.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    which provoked the other side to say they do nothing. This somewhat excuses their reactionary stupidity. Like they weren't "provoked", the use of masks wasn't directed at them.
    - sfblah 3y ago
      Where I live, in Alameda County, California, masks were required outdoors if you were within 30 feet of another person. This ridiculous policy lasted about a year and provoked all kinds of altercations. It also made exercise, a key way to say fit, much more difficult. So, in this case I would argue mask use was in fact “directed at” people.
      - maxerickson 3y ago
        When you say that, you are saying that the policy was put in place in bad faith in order to inconvenience the people that didn't like it. The argument is more ridiculous than the policy. Here there was never an outdoor mask policy, so I didn't ever have a chance to evaluate my reaction to such a thing. There was apparently a policy banning stores like Walmart from selling seeds (which I interpreted as bureaucratic friction rather than intention, something that was born out relatively quickly in practice, and never in the minds of the reactionaries).
- meowkit 3y ago
  Established science is an oxymoron. Science is an on going process, always open to being overturned. To the point of masks - I agree with your statement here, but a regular mask (filtered masks should help to some extent) will not protect you from an infected person. An infected person with a mask will reduce the chance of spreading their viral load. This detail is where I feel people are talking past eachother. Most of covid denial to me seems to be about a psychological reactance to being told to mask up when they are not sick. One might argue that the extra chance of reduced vectorization is worth mask mandates, but that simplistic purely “scientific” approach is its own problem. You have to argue people where they are at and convince them, not force the “right” view on them and then get upset they are “in denial” or skeptical. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
- mozman 3y ago
  There shouldn’t be any requirements for masks. Want to wear one? Great. Should I have to? No.
  - the_gastropod 3y ago
    It puzzles me that nearly 4 years after the start of the pandemic, this naive libertarian thought fragment is still so widely used. As the saying goes, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins”.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Is fairly common that, if you as an individual are doing something that poses a risk to other people, society will step in to attempt to change your behavior. You can argue that it is “wrong” for society to do that, of course.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    So people shouldn't have freedom of association or control over their own property? Or do you just mean universal requirements imposed by society at large when you say 'any'?
- explaininjs 3y ago
  The simple fact of the matter is that having covid every now and then^ is far superior to wearing a mask always. ^ and the more you have it the less severe it is, until it asymptotically reaches a complete non-issue. As with the common cold.
  - explaininjs 3y ago
    The downvoters might explain their distaste. But I cant expect them to do more than echo what the government told them.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Yeah, there is a weird grouping of rabid anti-maskers here. Seems odd given the nominal audience of this site. I just don't get the rejection of basic facts.
  - JeremyNT 3y ago
    The audience of the site is very entrepreneurial and as such is libertarian leaning by and large. Which is to say you shouldn't be terribly surprised that there is a general strain of "don't tread on me" in the discourse. Simply being told what to do is enough to elicit a strong negative response.
- refurb 3y ago
  No not really. Infection is binary or not. You either get exposed to enough to actually result in replication inside your body or you don't. If you get exposed to a small amount and your immune system immediately eliminates it, that's not an infection. The amount of exposure needed to actually cause an infection is different from person to person depending on their immediate immune response. But it's not like reducing exposure by 50% reduces disease severity by 50%. Biology doesn't work that way.
dorfsmay 3y ago
> boosting ourantibody response What I wonder is if we can develop immunity (not boosting, assuming never been infected before) from being exposed to small doses, or do we need at least one full blown infection.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Not sure why you are suggesting the basic mechanism of inoculation, which has been known for centuries and is the fundamental mechanism behind vaccination, as if it’s a novel hypothesis. Have I misunderstood what you’re getting at?
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    I think your understanding is fine. A friend of my wife once came up with the novel idea of renting books out of big buildins that are loaded with books. Brain farts happen to all of us
  - dorfsmay 3y ago
    Dosage. Vaccines use deactivated viruses, but I don't think they use "tiny amount".
    - kbutler 3y ago
      https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html To test his theory, Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into the arm of James Phipps, the 9-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps several times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox. More experiments followed, and, in 1801, Jenner published his treatise “On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation.” ... Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. At some point in the 1800s, the virus used to make the smallpox vaccine changed from cowpox to vaccinia virus.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  Yep that's called vaccination! No need to get a full blown infection it's how we eradicated smallpox
rand0mx1 3y ago
It should be exposure time or do you mean something else with "exposure rate"
- slim 3y ago
  it could mean how many times you have been exposed to the virus in a month, for example
- wtallis 3y ago
  "Exposure time" usually implies you're spending some period of time in proximity to an effectively unlimited reservoir of the pathogen (eg. an infected person coughing frequently) and your exposure is at some level of concentration that depends on the type/route of exposure, so that the total amount of pathogen that ends up in your body to challenge your immune system is proportional to the duration of time you spend being continually exposed. A phrase like "the raw quantity of infectious agent and the exposure rate" is calling attention to the fact that one brief intense exposure vs repeated small exposures over a long time span may have vastly different outcomes despite presenting your immune system with the same number of microbes to deal with.

Sakos 3y ago

This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. edit: Imagine this being controversial. I didn't realize there were Covid deniers and skeptics here, because what I've stated is completely within established science.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elsonrodriguez 3y ago
The exploration of truth is anathema to those who claim to already have the truth.
pton_xd 3y ago
> This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. It would be nice to have some numbers to back this up. Let's suppose the "viral load" to acquire a Covid infection is 18 particles, the same as norovirus detailed in the article. And let's say you're exposed to hundreds of thousands of viral particles every minute you spend near a sick person [1]. If a mask reduces your viral load by 50%, is that a worthwhile method of avoiding infection? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598485/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598485/
- sfblah 3y ago
  There are good studies on viral load reduction from masking with flu viruses from before 2020. After 2020 the topic became politicized so the studies are probably unreliable.
- MrLeap 3y ago
  The assertion is that if you dump a gooey grey gallon of pure covid on someone, their symptoms will be more severe than if they only get 18 virions. Do you suppose that wouldn't be the case?
- Jabbles 3y ago
  From that link: Our simulation also shows that wearing a mask can effectively reduce the spread of the viruses.
  - pton_xd 3y ago
    Sure, by some metric masks are very effective at stopping viral particles. After all, in my example the mask will stop tens of thousands of viral particles from reaching you every minute. Another metric is, will that stop you from getting sick? The threshhold is only 18 particles!
- epivosism 3y ago
  All the factors you mention are scalar. You can wear 0,1,2,3 masks. You can be 1,2,3,10,20 feet away from the person for 0,1,5,10 minutes. I can come up with any number of such factors involving wind, lifetime of virus, the person's shedding rate, etc. Given that, there will always be a border at which having an additional 50% coverage is useful. Where the actual line is, we don't know. But as long as protection is monotonic in the factors above, it's always valuable to have more protection, which implies even <100% effective masks are useful. Trivial proof: Imagine someone with literally 10k masks all around them. You have to admit this is more safe than 1 mask. QED. You can call in meta factors like "in reality nothing matters" but you're arguing by consequences then, not actually disagreeing with the facts, just claiming they don't matter.
User23 3y ago
RCTs show surgical and cloth masks to be ineffective or nearly so for reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. Obviously the kinds of masks used in BSL labs do work to prevent spread. However there are statistics that areas with more masking had less severe illness. However that’s uncontrolled and some other factors or factors might account for both increased masking and reduced spread. That’s probably the case otherwise the RCTs would show efficacy. All of the subsequent work is just computer models and doesn’t actually tell us anything empirical. Obviously it’s easier to create a model that produces the desired result than it is an RCT.
sfblah 3y ago
What you said isn’t controversial. It’s definitely right. The issue with masks is one side started treating them like a talisman that makes infection impossible, which provoked the other side to say they do nothing. On a population level, masks are probably close to ineffective against a viral pathogen. You can read the relevant Cochrane review to see that. On an individual level they obviously do something, but you have to consider other factors as well, such as level/frequency of exposure and the like. Studies from prior to the pandemic suggested that a perfectly fitted N95 mask dramatically reduced flu virus penetration. For a more normally worn N95 the reduction was about 70%. For a surgical mask it was essentially nil. Importantly, a perfectly fitted mask required essentially gluing it to the face of a mannequin. Final point is, with an intervention whose impact is measurable but imperfect, you have to consider the side effects. I personally know several friends of my teenage kids who now have odd (to me at least) social phobias for which the only “cure” is to wear masks everywhere. Just last weekend I was talking to a friend of my daughter who wears masks everywhere except indoors.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  which provoked the other side to say they do nothing. This somewhat excuses their reactionary stupidity. Like they weren't "provoked", the use of masks wasn't directed at them.
  - sfblah 3y ago
    Where I live, in Alameda County, California, masks were required outdoors if you were within 30 feet of another person. This ridiculous policy lasted about a year and provoked all kinds of altercations. It also made exercise, a key way to say fit, much more difficult. So, in this case I would argue mask use was in fact “directed at” people.
    - maxerickson 3y ago
      When you say that, you are saying that the policy was put in place in bad faith in order to inconvenience the people that didn't like it. The argument is more ridiculous than the policy. Here there was never an outdoor mask policy, so I didn't ever have a chance to evaluate my reaction to such a thing. There was apparently a policy banning stores like Walmart from selling seeds (which I interpreted as bureaucratic friction rather than intention, something that was born out relatively quickly in practice, and never in the minds of the reactionaries).
meowkit 3y ago
Established science is an oxymoron. Science is an on going process, always open to being overturned. To the point of masks - I agree with your statement here, but a regular mask (filtered masks should help to some extent) will not protect you from an infected person. An infected person with a mask will reduce the chance of spreading their viral load. This detail is where I feel people are talking past eachother. Most of covid denial to me seems to be about a psychological reactance to being told to mask up when they are not sick. One might argue that the extra chance of reduced vectorization is worth mask mandates, but that simplistic purely “scientific” approach is its own problem. You have to argue people where they are at and convince them, not force the “right” view on them and then get upset they are “in denial” or skeptical. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
mozman 3y ago
There shouldn’t be any requirements for masks. Want to wear one? Great. Should I have to? No.
- the_gastropod 3y ago
  It puzzles me that nearly 4 years after the start of the pandemic, this naive libertarian thought fragment is still so widely used. As the saying goes, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins”.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  Is fairly common that, if you as an individual are doing something that poses a risk to other people, society will step in to attempt to change your behavior. You can argue that it is “wrong” for society to do that, of course.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  So people shouldn't have freedom of association or control over their own property? Or do you just mean universal requirements imposed by society at large when you say 'any'?
explaininjs 3y ago
The simple fact of the matter is that having covid every now and then^ is far superior to wearing a mask always. ^ and the more you have it the less severe it is, until it asymptotically reaches a complete non-issue. As with the common cold.
- explaininjs 3y ago
  The downvoters might explain their distaste. But I cant expect them to do more than echo what the government told them.
verve_rat 3y ago
Yeah, there is a weird grouping of rabid anti-maskers here. Seems odd given the nominal audience of this site. I just don't get the rejection of basic facts.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  The audience of the site is very entrepreneurial and as such is libertarian leaning by and large. Which is to say you shouldn't be terribly surprised that there is a general strain of "don't tread on me" in the discourse. Simply being told what to do is enough to elicit a strong negative response.
refurb 3y ago
No not really. Infection is binary or not. You either get exposed to enough to actually result in replication inside your body or you don't. If you get exposed to a small amount and your immune system immediately eliminates it, that's not an infection. The amount of exposure needed to actually cause an infection is different from person to person depending on their immediate immune response. But it's not like reducing exposure by 50% reduces disease severity by 50%. Biology doesn't work that way.

dorfsmay 3y ago

> boosting ourantibody response What I wonder is if we can develop immunity (not boosting, assuming never been infected before) from being exposed to small doses, or do we need at least one full blown infection.

jameshart 3y ago
Not sure why you are suggesting the basic mechanism of inoculation, which has been known for centuries and is the fundamental mechanism behind vaccination, as if it’s a novel hypothesis. Have I misunderstood what you’re getting at?
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I think your understanding is fine. A friend of my wife once came up with the novel idea of renting books out of big buildins that are loaded with books. Brain farts happen to all of us
- dorfsmay 3y ago
  Dosage. Vaccines use deactivated viruses, but I don't think they use "tiny amount".
  - kbutler 3y ago
    https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html To test his theory, Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into the arm of James Phipps, the 9-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps several times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox. More experiments followed, and, in 1801, Jenner published his treatise “On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation.” ... Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. At some point in the 1800s, the virus used to make the smallpox vaccine changed from cowpox to vaccinia virus.
vikramkr 3y ago
Yep that's called vaccination! No need to get a full blown infection it's how we eradicated smallpox

rand0mx1 3y ago

It should be exposure time or do you mean something else with "exposure rate"

slim 3y ago
it could mean how many times you have been exposed to the virus in a month, for example
wtallis 3y ago
"Exposure time" usually implies you're spending some period of time in proximity to an effectively unlimited reservoir of the pathogen (eg. an infected person coughing frequently) and your exposure is at some level of concentration that depends on the type/route of exposure, so that the total amount of pathogen that ends up in your body to challenge your immune system is proportional to the duration of time you spend being continually exposed. A phrase like "the raw quantity of infectious agent and the exposure rate" is calling attention to the fact that one brief intense exposure vs repeated small exposures over a long time span may have vastly different outcomes despite presenting your immune system with the same number of microbes to deal with.