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Ah, this is the perfect summary to explain to people when they ask "why are you still wearing a mask? COVID is over" or similar queries invalidating my caution

Ah, this is the perfect summary to explain to people when they ask "why are you still wearing a mask? COVID is over" or similar queries invalidating my caution around this virus. Worth noting is it was the 4th-leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021. Not sure why this is being downvoted into oblivion, as I regularly get some hassle from people about my strict adherence to wearing a mask indoors around people, and the more I can say beyond "I don't feel like getting COVID", the better. Otherwise I have to go into a story about how, directly via COVID infection, a friend's mom died, a coworker's wife is left wheelchair-bound and can't even complete a phone conversation without being left breathless, one of my favorite musicians has called it quits after a complete loss of hearing in one ear.. etc... As a programmer I highly value my clarity of thought and am not going to risk that because people apparently feel the need to bother me about being cautious. Honestly cannot figure out why anyone feels the need to even comment on it, as it has no effect on them, and in fact helps keep them safer.

graphe 3y ago
The air on a plane circulates and causes illness to many people, like people who have had plastic surgery are advised not to travel too soon for fear of infection. Have you found that it helps there?
- prirun 3y ago
  I read an article about masking and airplanes that seemed reasonable: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/covid-omicron-ba5-wave-airplane-masks/670565/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/covid-omi... The basic advice is to unmask when it is okay to use your laptop. The plane is cruising and cabin air is completely exchanged with outside air every 2 minutes. The biggest risk, according to the article, is when the plane is on the ground.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Thanks, this is a great article.
godshatter 3y ago
This is just something to think about. After I was called back in to the office and started seeing people more often I came down with what I would have sworn was covid three times. Absolutely the worst flu-like symptoms I'd ever had that I could recall, each affecting me in a novel way, but negative on covid each time. They could have been false negatives, of course, but I suspect I just hadn't been training my immune system for many months and it wasn't prepared to handle the normal cold or flu viruses I would normally be able to handle otherwise. Since that period of time, I haven't come down sick since. Not saying that covid is nothing to worry about, but it's something you might want to consider down the road. I don't know your situation or what health concerns you might have, but being too protective can have it's downsides as well.
- Reki 3y ago
  There is no scientific evidence for being able to "train your immune system". There is plenty of evidence the opposite happens. Covid especially can cause permanent immune damage.
  - ryathal 3y ago
    There's actually pretty good evidence that being overly clean and sterile is bad for an immune system. Yes, getting exposed to highly dangerous diseases like Ebola, polio, measles, small pox, etc. is bad, covid with a vaccine doesn't really rise to that level.
  - godshatter 3y ago
    We have an innate immune responses and adaptive immune responses. Innate immune responses look for common attributes of certain pathogens and then trigger an adaptive immune response if needed. Adaptive immune responses are highly specific to certain pathogens and can provide long lasting immunity to some of those pathogens, such as measles. How would vaccines work if we only had innate immunity? So being exposed to certain pathogens can trigger a lasting effect, the length of which depends on the pathogen. If that effect has gone away or lessened severely over many months then it makes sense that only the innate immune response would be available against those pathogens, and the adaptive response would need to be learned again. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21070/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21070/
tptacek 3y ago
People shouldn't bother you about wearing a mask, or bother storekeepers who request patrons mask, but a reason to push back on state-mandated masking isn't that COVID isn't serious (it clearly is), but rather that the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak
- graeme 3y ago
  >the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak If you're wearing an N95 or KN95 the filtration efficacy is quite high. Most of the mask studies looked at whether mask policies lowered covid. If you wear a mask in class but then take it off in the cafeteria or outside of school, the mask no longer has an effect. If, however, you wear a mask with high filtration efficacy while outside of the house, that's a different story. To my knowledge we have no challenge trial of people wearing such a mask when exposed to an infectious agent. It is folly to ignore the physical mechanism of such masks when reasoning about them, and defaulting to only considering the studies we have, which simply cannot measure efficacy when the mask is worn. This study on parachutes is a good analogue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
  - tptacek 3y ago
    N95 vs. KN95 seems like an instructive example: people equate the two based on the effectiveness of the filtering media, but the salient difference is in the attachment mechanism --- most KN95s are ear-loops, and don't achieve especially tight coverings (similarly: the reuse concerns about N95s are less that the filter media can't be "recharged" or whatever, but rather that the elastic gives out). At any rate: masks as worn in the real world seem pretty performative, for a variety of reasons. If you're wearing them carefully, that's great, and I appreciate it. Nobody should be messing with you regardless. You can look epidemiologically at this stuff and see that states with laxer regulations fared pretty well in the early COVID years, and appear to have fallen off only with the introduction of vaccines, which really seem like the high-order bit of COVID control.
    - 3y ago
chrisco255 3y ago
[flagged]
- amatecha 3y ago
  I'm not seeing the purpose of your comment. You make an unsupported assertion ("Masks don't prevent Covid") and then invalidate my lived experience with some arbitrary speculation. "Probably had COVID"? Okay? I don't believe I have. Not sure what you're expecting to get out of this, should I just stop wearing masks because HN rando harassed me about it like I already experience in-person for the past X years?
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    They don't prevent covid. Everyone gets covid. Just like everyone gets the common cold, with or without a mask. Even if they worked for a time, it wouldn't be ideal to wear them permanently, as your quality of life would be permanently degraded and your natural immunity deficit would continue to grow to the point that ordinary diseases would seriously harm you.
    - Krssst 3y ago
      They significantly reduce the risk. It does not become zero but if masking means I get COVID once every three years rather than twice a year I'll happily take it.

graphe 3y ago

The air on a plane circulates and causes illness to many people, like people who have had plastic surgery are advised not to travel too soon for fear of infection. Have you found that it helps there?

prirun 3y ago
I read an article about masking and airplanes that seemed reasonable: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/covid-omicron-ba5-wave-airplane-masks/670565/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/covid-omi... The basic advice is to unmask when it is okay to use your laptop. The plane is cruising and cabin air is completely exchanged with outside air every 2 minutes. The biggest risk, according to the article, is when the plane is on the ground.
- graphe 3y ago
  Thanks, this is a great article.

godshatter 3y ago

This is just something to think about. After I was called back in to the office and started seeing people more often I came down with what I would have sworn was covid three times. Absolutely the worst flu-like symptoms I'd ever had that I could recall, each affecting me in a novel way, but negative on covid each time. They could have been false negatives, of course, but I suspect I just hadn't been training my immune system for many months and it wasn't prepared to handle the normal cold or flu viruses I would normally be able to handle otherwise. Since that period of time, I haven't come down sick since. Not saying that covid is nothing to worry about, but it's something you might want to consider down the road. I don't know your situation or what health concerns you might have, but being too protective can have it's downsides as well.

Reki 3y ago
There is no scientific evidence for being able to "train your immune system". There is plenty of evidence the opposite happens. Covid especially can cause permanent immune damage.
- ryathal 3y ago
  There's actually pretty good evidence that being overly clean and sterile is bad for an immune system. Yes, getting exposed to highly dangerous diseases like Ebola, polio, measles, small pox, etc. is bad, covid with a vaccine doesn't really rise to that level.
- godshatter 3y ago
  We have an innate immune responses and adaptive immune responses. Innate immune responses look for common attributes of certain pathogens and then trigger an adaptive immune response if needed. Adaptive immune responses are highly specific to certain pathogens and can provide long lasting immunity to some of those pathogens, such as measles. How would vaccines work if we only had innate immunity? So being exposed to certain pathogens can trigger a lasting effect, the length of which depends on the pathogen. If that effect has gone away or lessened severely over many months then it makes sense that only the innate immune response would be available against those pathogens, and the adaptive response would need to be learned again. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21070/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21070/

tptacek 3y ago

People shouldn't bother you about wearing a mask, or bother storekeepers who request patrons mask, but a reason to push back on state-mandated masking isn't that COVID isn't serious (it clearly is), but rather that the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak

graeme 3y ago
>the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak If you're wearing an N95 or KN95 the filtration efficacy is quite high. Most of the mask studies looked at whether mask policies lowered covid. If you wear a mask in class but then take it off in the cafeteria or outside of school, the mask no longer has an effect. If, however, you wear a mask with high filtration efficacy while outside of the house, that's a different story. To my knowledge we have no challenge trial of people wearing such a mask when exposed to an infectious agent. It is folly to ignore the physical mechanism of such masks when reasoning about them, and defaulting to only considering the studies we have, which simply cannot measure efficacy when the mask is worn. This study on parachutes is a good analogue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
- tptacek 3y ago
  N95 vs. KN95 seems like an instructive example: people equate the two based on the effectiveness of the filtering media, but the salient difference is in the attachment mechanism --- most KN95s are ear-loops, and don't achieve especially tight coverings (similarly: the reuse concerns about N95s are less that the filter media can't be "recharged" or whatever, but rather that the elastic gives out). At any rate: masks as worn in the real world seem pretty performative, for a variety of reasons. If you're wearing them carefully, that's great, and I appreciate it. Nobody should be messing with you regardless. You can look epidemiologically at this stuff and see that states with laxer regulations fared pretty well in the early COVID years, and appear to have fallen off only with the introduction of vaccines, which really seem like the high-order bit of COVID control.
  - 3y ago

chrisco255 3y ago

[flagged]

amatecha 3y ago
I'm not seeing the purpose of your comment. You make an unsupported assertion ("Masks don't prevent Covid") and then invalidate my lived experience with some arbitrary speculation. "Probably had COVID"? Okay? I don't believe I have. Not sure what you're expecting to get out of this, should I just stop wearing masks because HN rando harassed me about it like I already experience in-person for the past X years?
- chrisco255 3y ago
  They don't prevent covid. Everyone gets covid. Just like everyone gets the common cold, with or without a mask. Even if they worked for a time, it wouldn't be ideal to wear them permanently, as your quality of life would be permanently degraded and your natural immunity deficit would continue to grow to the point that ordinary diseases would seriously harm you.
  - Krssst 3y ago
    They significantly reduce the risk. It does not become zero but if masking means I get COVID once every three years rather than twice a year I'll happily take it.