6 ms·

I still don't want to get the flu :( I wish we could have a culture of "wear a (good) mask when you're sick". I don't think I'm going to die from the Flu or C

I still don't want to get the flu :( I wish we could have a culture of "wear a (good) mask when you're sick". I don't think I'm going to die from the Flu or Covid, but it is going to make life miserable for awhile.

mcronce 3y ago
Exactly this. I had COVID two years ago, the flu last year, and COVID again a couple months ago. Last year's flu was absolutely miserable; just as bad as COVID was the first time around. I really don't want either one. Putting a piece of cloth on your face when you are/recently were sick really isn't much of a burden. I did.
- basil-rash 3y ago
  Funny, you two purport to agree, but the parent specifically requested a “good” mask (which can be effective, with the right training and protocols, which are almost never followed), and you advocate a “piece of cloth”, which is almost never effective. Two people agreeing in their advocacy for highly visible, yet ineffective, remedies.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    There is a difference between wearing a mask to prevent spread to others and wearing one to protect yourself. The parent was concerned with reducing spread to others. Interestingly, one meta study [1] concludes that cloth masks are actually better than "good" masks if they are not worn and used correctly. [1] https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/46/1/e84/7337687?login=false https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/46/1/e84/7337687...
  - PM_me_your_math 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ipqk 3y ago
    Cloth masks may be still be useful for RSV/cold/flu.
  - CubsFan1060 3y ago
    I don't think this needs to be absolutes. Properly fitted N95 > N95 > Surgical > none. If sick people work an average N95/KN95 mask off of Amazon (which is the 'good' I was referring to), it'd help. It's not perfect, and you can do better, and you can do worse. But it's a reasonable intersection of "easy to do" and "effective".
    - basil-rash 3y ago
      Other comments disagree with you. An N95 that isn’t absolutely perfect would seem to be worse than a piece of cloth, if whatever arbitrary study financed by some unknown group with unknown incentives referenced by said commenter is to be believed. Which it probably isn’t. But it’s as good as any of the other “research” of such heavily politicized topics.
- wrs 3y ago
  Yes, this logic seems like a backwards rationalization. > “Reported deaths involving COVID-19 are several-fold greater than those reported to involve influenza and RSV. However, influenza and likely RSV are often underreported as causes of death," the CDC said. So it’s not that COVID isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s that flu and RSV are much worse than they seem. Seems like the guidance should be about how to spread all respiratory viruses less, not about how to be as bad at controlling COVID as we are at controlling the flu.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > So it’s not that COVID isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s that flu and RSV are much worse than they seem. Seems like the guidance should be about how to spread all respiratory viruses less, not about how to be as bad at controlling COVID as we are at controlling the flu. This would IMO be worth actual study. One would expect that what seem like basic precautions (wear a mask if you feel at all sick, stay home if you have or recently had a flu, RSV or COVID) should meaningfully reduce overall infection rates. But this may or may not be true in different contexts, and any of these precautions have costs as well. For example, keeping kids away from school seems fairly well established as being bad. Keeping kids from getting sick is not entirely obviously good for them. And plenty of people have allergies — making them all wear masks all the time has its own issues. (On the flip side, a decent, clean enough mask can help with some allergies. Choose your poison.) (There are cases that people get wrong to degrees that seem absurd. I know someone who worked at a tech startup pre-pandemic. The founders knew that the startup had a norovirus outbreak and nonetheless kept themselves and everyone who wasn’t acutely sick at the office. If they had closed the office and switched to WFH for a few days to break the transmission strain, they surely would have had happier and more productive employees.)
jeromegv 3y ago
Going through an airport last week was very jarring. Some people do wear mask. But they look healthy, they mostly don’t want to get sick. People coughing like crazy, looking visibly sick with tons of symptoms, none of them had mask. If you know you’re sick, why not wear a mask? How hard it is really?
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  Seems like this is somewhat our culture. Not wearing a mask has zero impact on the person already sick. Them wearing a mask is 100% about being nice to others. There is no benefit to them.
- amluto 3y ago
  Airports are excellent places to get sick, and getting sick while traveling is no fun. Wearing a mask in an airport seems like a great idea regardless of COVID. Airplanes usually have pretty good ventilation and filtration.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    The ventilation is great when you're airborne. When you're sitting on the tarmac, it's not running the same way.
    - amluto 3y ago
      Are you sure, at least as far as keeping airborne critters away? The real nasty part is when the plane is on the ground, engines running, and it’s not a 787 so it has a bleed air system, and it stinks. As I understand it, this happens because the ventilation system does work the same way as it does in the air, and it’s a bad idea!
quatrefoil 3y ago
It still boggles my mind how we managed to make it so politicized. I mean, there's really no clear reason I can pinpoint. I was wearing a mask early on in the SF Bay Area. Back when the health authorities were saying that there's nothing to worry about and that masks don't help anyway. I remember so many people giving me the stink eye for no reason. I guess my behavior was the "anti-science", tinfoil-hat stance back then. Then it all flipped on its head pretty much overnight. And when later, having been vaccinated and having had COVID, I stopped wearing a mask out in the open, I remember the same people getting angry at that. But if you traveled 50 miles outside the SF Bay Area, the reactions were exactly the opposite. It just bugs me so much that we find ways to turn every single thing into a culture war. We go out of our way to find reasons to lash out against others. I'm not sure if social media is the source of it, but it sure provides a positive feedback loop.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  > no clear reason I can pinpoint. The virus has been naturally selected to make people this way. It's like cat owner brain parasites.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Cat parasites: Outrage! Downvote! Cat people: We exist to serve.
  - thinkingemote 3y ago
    There's some (very weak and contentious) evidence that the flu virus makes people more social and outgoing. So in theory Corona might encourage people to spread itself (and therefore not mask) before they get too sick. Getting any type of evidence and research on this theory is impossible ethically and socially and even something like "are cat parasite infected humans more likely to oppose masks" is something that is impossible to test for even though its probably a factor because there's too many other strong social factors. It's a fun science fiction theory at least and worth a think about how infections effect human behaviour.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
alyandon 3y ago
Me too. Flu is annoying to me but nothing I'd have even really considered a major health threat in general. Covid changed my mind with respect to respiratory disease. When I finally contracted Covid (I was vaccinated + boosted in alignment with then current CDC guidelines), I ran the range of all the major symptoms like high fever, loss of smell, tachycardia, drop in O2 saturation, etc. Most of the symptoms persisted for several days before I began to recover and the tachycardia and O2 levels bothered me the most. I was actively monitoring my O2 levels and had they dropped much lower I would have gone to the ER as a precautionary measure. Even after the initial recovery, it took almost two more weeks for me to recover my sense of smell. For me, Covid is no joke and it is absolutely insane to me how basic health precautions like wearing a mask to reduce transmission, isolating, etc have become politicized.
jmspring 3y ago
This is why I also think return to office is insane. I'm fully remote thankfully and haven't had covid. But I have seen many getting sick from coworkers because they feel a need to go in even when sick..
- tebbers 3y ago
  The reverse of that argument is that if you work from home, your immune system doesn’t have a chance to learn about the newest bugs and so you’re more vulnerable in the future.
  - sleigh-bells 3y ago
    Or if you work from home and never go out to restaurants or do anything that you need to be unmasked and around other people for (or hang out indoors unmasked with anyone who does such things), the social isolation can be pretty bad too. I guess there's no real incentive to run studies about that but I bet they'd show all sorts of ill effects of essentially locking down in perpetuity. ...or you're just fine catching covid outside of work but it's so much worse to catch it in an office
  - jmspring 3y ago
    I still go out and about and have a step daughter in high school, so plenty of exposure. I just don't need to sit in a building that likely has insufficient / old hvac/etc. I just consider myself lucky I don't need to sit around a bunch of people for hours on end multiple days a week.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Anecdote: a family member of mine is very COVID cautious and still hasn't had it due to long-term isolation. When he started seeing people a bit, so long as they had tested negative recently, he got sick from someone in my family who had a mild cold. It completely knocked him out, and he said it was one of the top 3 illnesses he could remember (he's a senior citizen). I wondered if the impact it had on him was due to the fact that he hadn't been exposed to anything (no groceries, no offices, no malls) in 3 years.
remarkEon 3y ago
[flagged]
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  > It's just part of life. There are lots of things that used to be "just part of life" that public health and societal-wide behavior changes have entirely or nearly eliminated.
- avarun 3y ago
  Or you could be a decent human being? Neurotic would be to tell healthy people to wear a mask, or to tell sick people they can't be out in public at all. It's not "neurotic" to expect sick people to put a modicum of effort in for a couple days while they're contagious. And trust me, I guarantee I have a higher risk tolerance than you, but I also have enough empathy to think about other people for a few minutes a day.
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  It's interesting that you phrase it that way. I'd phrase it as being courteous to other folks. When I'm sick I don't want to make anyone else feel poor for several days. I guess what you see as neurotic, I simply see as kindness.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  I don't want to live in a society that caters to the most selfish and ignorant among us. People get sick, but we don't have to needlessly do so. If you're not worried about it that doesn't mean you should have the right to bring it to other people.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  I don't want to live in a society that caters to psychopathic techbro libertarian risk junkies, but I think it would be fine if you were all given a nice little island where you try to prove that you're the superior civilization before you inevitably Lord of the Flies yourselves. Would be the first Reality TV show I ever watch.
ghusto 3y ago
I wish we had a culture of just basic common sense. If you are ill, do not come into the office. You are not showing dedication, you are showing how inconsiderate and dickish you are.
tyjen 3y ago
Recently endured a significant case of post-traveling influenza, I was absolutely useless for 5 days and required a full month to recover fully. The flu is definitely nothing to joke about.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
The main problem with this is that half of the infections are asymptomatic. So in the places where immune compromised people go (which is quite a chunk of people about 1 in 50) become really unsafe as they are only getting the benefit of one way masking and people are assaulting those wearing masks. They are being denied access to hospitals and dentists for example as staff refuse to protect them. This has caused an enormous amount of people to be excluded from many public spaces. They are suffering all the consequences of these decisions and being forced into their homes and away from medical care among many other services because people refuse to help. Covid is going to be an all year around infection that hasn't at any point dropped below 1 in 80 people carrying it, we need to use HEPA filters and UV light to clean the air indoors and adopt masking as a mitigation until we have better vaccines or treatments especially for Long Covid.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >The main problem with this is that half of the infections are asymptomatic. I've heard it said that current COVID-19 vaccines are counterproductive, because they only reduce symptoms as opposed to increasing one's chances of catching the disease, or reducing one's infectivity. Someone who has been vaccinated and infected is more likely to go to work or school and thus more likely to spread the disease.

mcronce 3y ago

Exactly this. I had COVID two years ago, the flu last year, and COVID again a couple months ago. Last year's flu was absolutely miserable; just as bad as COVID was the first time around. I really don't want either one. Putting a piece of cloth on your face when you are/recently were sick really isn't much of a burden. I did.

basil-rash 3y ago
Funny, you two purport to agree, but the parent specifically requested a “good” mask (which can be effective, with the right training and protocols, which are almost never followed), and you advocate a “piece of cloth”, which is almost never effective. Two people agreeing in their advocacy for highly visible, yet ineffective, remedies.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  There is a difference between wearing a mask to prevent spread to others and wearing one to protect yourself. The parent was concerned with reducing spread to others. Interestingly, one meta study [1] concludes that cloth masks are actually better than "good" masks if they are not worn and used correctly. [1] https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/46/1/e84/7337687?login=false https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/46/1/e84/7337687...
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  [dead]
- ipqk 3y ago
  Cloth masks may be still be useful for RSV/cold/flu.
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  I don't think this needs to be absolutes. Properly fitted N95 > N95 > Surgical > none. If sick people work an average N95/KN95 mask off of Amazon (which is the 'good' I was referring to), it'd help. It's not perfect, and you can do better, and you can do worse. But it's a reasonable intersection of "easy to do" and "effective".
  - basil-rash 3y ago
    Other comments disagree with you. An N95 that isn’t absolutely perfect would seem to be worse than a piece of cloth, if whatever arbitrary study financed by some unknown group with unknown incentives referenced by said commenter is to be believed. Which it probably isn’t. But it’s as good as any of the other “research” of such heavily politicized topics.
wrs 3y ago
Yes, this logic seems like a backwards rationalization. > “Reported deaths involving COVID-19 are several-fold greater than those reported to involve influenza and RSV. However, influenza and likely RSV are often underreported as causes of death," the CDC said. So it’s not that COVID isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s that flu and RSV are much worse than they seem. Seems like the guidance should be about how to spread all respiratory viruses less, not about how to be as bad at controlling COVID as we are at controlling the flu.
- amluto 3y ago
  > So it’s not that COVID isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s that flu and RSV are much worse than they seem. Seems like the guidance should be about how to spread all respiratory viruses less, not about how to be as bad at controlling COVID as we are at controlling the flu. This would IMO be worth actual study. One would expect that what seem like basic precautions (wear a mask if you feel at all sick, stay home if you have or recently had a flu, RSV or COVID) should meaningfully reduce overall infection rates. But this may or may not be true in different contexts, and any of these precautions have costs as well. For example, keeping kids away from school seems fairly well established as being bad. Keeping kids from getting sick is not entirely obviously good for them. And plenty of people have allergies — making them all wear masks all the time has its own issues. (On the flip side, a decent, clean enough mask can help with some allergies. Choose your poison.) (There are cases that people get wrong to degrees that seem absurd. I know someone who worked at a tech startup pre-pandemic. The founders knew that the startup had a norovirus outbreak and nonetheless kept themselves and everyone who wasn’t acutely sick at the office. If they had closed the office and switched to WFH for a few days to break the transmission strain, they surely would have had happier and more productive employees.)

jeromegv 3y ago

Going through an airport last week was very jarring. Some people do wear mask. But they look healthy, they mostly don’t want to get sick. People coughing like crazy, looking visibly sick with tons of symptoms, none of them had mask. If you know you’re sick, why not wear a mask? How hard it is really?

CubsFan1060 3y ago
Seems like this is somewhat our culture. Not wearing a mask has zero impact on the person already sick. Them wearing a mask is 100% about being nice to others. There is no benefit to them.
amluto 3y ago
Airports are excellent places to get sick, and getting sick while traveling is no fun. Wearing a mask in an airport seems like a great idea regardless of COVID. Airplanes usually have pretty good ventilation and filtration.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  The ventilation is great when you're airborne. When you're sitting on the tarmac, it's not running the same way.
  - amluto 3y ago
    Are you sure, at least as far as keeping airborne critters away? The real nasty part is when the plane is on the ground, engines running, and it’s not a 787 so it has a bleed air system, and it stinks. As I understand it, this happens because the ventilation system does work the same way as it does in the air, and it’s a bad idea!

quatrefoil 3y ago

It still boggles my mind how we managed to make it so politicized. I mean, there's really no clear reason I can pinpoint. I was wearing a mask early on in the SF Bay Area. Back when the health authorities were saying that there's nothing to worry about and that masks don't help anyway. I remember so many people giving me the stink eye for no reason. I guess my behavior was the "anti-science", tinfoil-hat stance back then. Then it all flipped on its head pretty much overnight. And when later, having been vaccinated and having had COVID, I stopped wearing a mask out in the open, I remember the same people getting angry at that. But if you traveled 50 miles outside the SF Bay Area, the reactions were exactly the opposite. It just bugs me so much that we find ways to turn every single thing into a culture war. We go out of our way to find reasons to lash out against others. I'm not sure if social media is the source of it, but it sure provides a positive feedback loop.

jeffbee 3y ago
> no clear reason I can pinpoint. The virus has been naturally selected to make people this way. It's like cat owner brain parasites.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Cat parasites: Outrage! Downvote! Cat people: We exist to serve.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  There's some (very weak and contentious) evidence that the flu virus makes people more social and outgoing. So in theory Corona might encourage people to spread itself (and therefore not mask) before they get too sick. Getting any type of evidence and research on this theory is impossible ethically and socially and even something like "are cat parasite infected humans more likely to oppose masks" is something that is impossible to test for even though its probably a factor because there's too many other strong social factors. It's a fun science fiction theory at least and worth a think about how infections effect human behaviour.
johnnyanmac 3y ago

alyandon 3y ago

Me too. Flu is annoying to me but nothing I'd have even really considered a major health threat in general. Covid changed my mind with respect to respiratory disease. When I finally contracted Covid (I was vaccinated + boosted in alignment with then current CDC guidelines), I ran the range of all the major symptoms like high fever, loss of smell, tachycardia, drop in O2 saturation, etc. Most of the symptoms persisted for several days before I began to recover and the tachycardia and O2 levels bothered me the most. I was actively monitoring my O2 levels and had they dropped much lower I would have gone to the ER as a precautionary measure. Even after the initial recovery, it took almost two more weeks for me to recover my sense of smell. For me, Covid is no joke and it is absolutely insane to me how basic health precautions like wearing a mask to reduce transmission, isolating, etc have become politicized.

jmspring 3y ago

This is why I also think return to office is insane. I'm fully remote thankfully and haven't had covid. But I have seen many getting sick from coworkers because they feel a need to go in even when sick..

tebbers 3y ago
The reverse of that argument is that if you work from home, your immune system doesn’t have a chance to learn about the newest bugs and so you’re more vulnerable in the future.
- sleigh-bells 3y ago
  Or if you work from home and never go out to restaurants or do anything that you need to be unmasked and around other people for (or hang out indoors unmasked with anyone who does such things), the social isolation can be pretty bad too. I guess there's no real incentive to run studies about that but I bet they'd show all sorts of ill effects of essentially locking down in perpetuity. ...or you're just fine catching covid outside of work but it's so much worse to catch it in an office
- jmspring 3y ago
  I still go out and about and have a step daughter in high school, so plenty of exposure. I just don't need to sit in a building that likely has insufficient / old hvac/etc. I just consider myself lucky I don't need to sit around a bunch of people for hours on end multiple days a week.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Anecdote: a family member of mine is very COVID cautious and still hasn't had it due to long-term isolation. When he started seeing people a bit, so long as they had tested negative recently, he got sick from someone in my family who had a mild cold. It completely knocked him out, and he said it was one of the top 3 illnesses he could remember (he's a senior citizen). I wondered if the impact it had on him was due to the fact that he hadn't been exposed to anything (no groceries, no offices, no malls) in 3 years.

remarkEon 3y ago

[flagged]

bigbillheck 3y ago
> It's just part of life. There are lots of things that used to be "just part of life" that public health and societal-wide behavior changes have entirely or nearly eliminated.
avarun 3y ago
Or you could be a decent human being? Neurotic would be to tell healthy people to wear a mask, or to tell sick people they can't be out in public at all. It's not "neurotic" to expect sick people to put a modicum of effort in for a couple days while they're contagious. And trust me, I guarantee I have a higher risk tolerance than you, but I also have enough empathy to think about other people for a few minutes a day.
CubsFan1060 3y ago
It's interesting that you phrase it that way. I'd phrase it as being courteous to other folks. When I'm sick I don't want to make anyone else feel poor for several days. I guess what you see as neurotic, I simply see as kindness.
earthling8118 3y ago
I don't want to live in a society that caters to the most selfish and ignorant among us. People get sick, but we don't have to needlessly do so. If you're not worried about it that doesn't mean you should have the right to bring it to other people.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
I don't want to live in a society that caters to psychopathic techbro libertarian risk junkies, but I think it would be fine if you were all given a nice little island where you try to prove that you're the superior civilization before you inevitably Lord of the Flies yourselves. Would be the first Reality TV show I ever watch.

ghusto 3y ago

I wish we had a culture of just basic common sense. If you are ill, do not come into the office. You are not showing dedication, you are showing how inconsiderate and dickish you are.

tyjen 3y ago

Recently endured a significant case of post-traveling influenza, I was absolutely useless for 5 days and required a full month to recover fully. The flu is definitely nothing to joke about.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

The main problem with this is that half of the infections are asymptomatic. So in the places where immune compromised people go (which is quite a chunk of people about 1 in 50) become really unsafe as they are only getting the benefit of one way masking and people are assaulting those wearing masks. They are being denied access to hospitals and dentists for example as staff refuse to protect them. This has caused an enormous amount of people to be excluded from many public spaces. They are suffering all the consequences of these decisions and being forced into their homes and away from medical care among many other services because people refuse to help. Covid is going to be an all year around infection that hasn't at any point dropped below 1 in 80 people carrying it, we need to use HEPA filters and UV light to clean the air indoors and adopt masking as a mitigation until we have better vaccines or treatments especially for Long Covid.

TMWNN 3y ago
>The main problem with this is that half of the infections are asymptomatic. I've heard it said that current COVID-19 vaccines are counterproductive, because they only reduce symptoms as opposed to increasing one's chances of catching the disease, or reducing one's infectivity. Someone who has been vaccinated and infected is more likely to go to work or school and thus more likely to spread the disease.