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?
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.
> 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.
The difference is that those are worn by choice, and in very specific social situations. A more comparable thing would be to shoes, or shirts, since we are talking about everyone wearing them. It's not just a matter of making it cool, hats are cool and not everyone wears a hat. Facial expression is a very important part of human interaction and I think that will always outweigh any amount of cool that can be pumped into masks.
Waitresses do not wear high heels by choice and there are some jurisdictions that have banned employers from mandating that waitresses must wear heels.
Additionally I doubt that many would chose to wear an uncomfortable necktie to work if they weren't mandated to by their employers.
Oh please enough with this "choice" argument. There's a feral organism out there trying to survive by eating us alive and you're whining about "choice"?
Let me break out the crayons and draw a simple analogy that I hope will drive the point home:
it's like complaining about curfew and how ugly blackout curtains look in your living-room, while the Nazis are trying to bomb your country back to the stone-age. Does that sound monumentally egotistic and ultimately eligible for a Darwin Award?
> Acceptance of masks as a regular part of clothing is just a matter of making it a cool thing to do.
I'm completely shocked to hear someone say this with a straight face. Humanity wearing masks over their face forever as if its a tattoo or a ring. And that's what you actually think is a good thing.
I can't express my complete disgust in that opinion.
I am surprised you didn't discuss how masks affect the most fundamental aspect of social interaction - loss of facial expressions. Our faces are so pivotal to social interaction, it is impossible to overstate.
With work from home you don't need a facial expression at all. Just close your Jira tickets quick enough, and surveillance software will ensure you are not doing anything funny in your working hours.
I guess it depends from a person to person. I actually find it relaxing, as being an Eastern European + an introvert I never really got used to American habit of smiling to everyone as a social norm. With mask I look less grumpy. :)
And also I think social interactions are constantly evolving process so, if needed, people would simply adapt to a new situation. Who knows, perhaps we'd start using our hands instead of facial expressions, just like the Belters did in The Expanse novels/series because they were limited by wearing space suits all the time.
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.
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
I don't think that's the case. It's about time to say goodbye to the illusion that we're ever going to extinguish this fire. It's seems to me the COVID is about to be become endemic, this is the new normal. It's not a far off scenario any more, so it does make sense to have this discussion, right now.
Been mulling over what I really wanted to say …
This is the par for the course on hacker news to have this kind intellectual conversations, exploring potential spaces.
However, what I was trying to convey is … it’s about being friends to each other right now, as in one big human family. And doing the right thing - which means coming together to have a conversation about how to extinguish this fire. I mean, we eliminated small pox. What happened to that human spirit of cooperation?
And to me, talking about what-ifs at this level doesn’t really address the underlying issue which is … people don’t want to figure out how to help each other - this is what we need right now otherwise it’s just another layer of drama that distracts us from what’s in front of us.
Edit : we already have a solution, which is basically - vax and mask up - we literally have people dying by the hundreds if not the thousands daily - but it’s always the government that’s the problem - and thinking about mask mandates 10 years down the road is like if “sir, our neighborhoos is on fire … can you please grab that bucket and help out” was met with “but What if it goes on for another week? Should we all be beholden to keep on filling and carrying the buckets? My house over there is fine why should I worry about that? I don’t really need to help out right now? I’m just worried that i will be forced to lug buckets forever”
> It's about time to say goodbye to the illusion that we're ever going to extinguish this fire.
That's a mischaracterisation of the above. Endemic at low levels is not the same as raging pandemic. Yes, the raging fire does actually have to be damped down to low levels before we can adjust and implement next steps after that.
But measures that are necessary during a pandemic are not the same as those necessary when a disease is endemic.
Masks are a new hygiene standard. Do you think the enlightened gentlemen doctors of the age actually set a bar of how many women should die before they began to wash their hands?
They smeared, they waffled, and now they serve as the warning to all of the the terrible, prideful (and filthy) fools who robbed families of their wives, daughters, and mothers over something people today balk at the idea of not doing- washing their hands.
Tacit defense of non-consensual disease transfer costs the arguer nothing to make and hurts others. It's far simpler to enjoy the same benefits of covering your mouth and nose that medical providers have for decades: knowing they are protecting others, whether or not they understand, appreciate, or ask for it.
Jesus Christ we aren't talking about backyard c-sections with gritty fingernails here. We are talking about breathing the air and smiling at others. Get a grip.
Sorry, I spent this morning figuring out the words to share at a friend's memorial. I've been emotional.
He was vaccinated, he wore a mask, he was careful. He did his part and hurt nobody.
I hope whoever gave it to him never finds out what it cost so they could smile at others and breathe the air. I'd trade their life for his in an instant.
Maybe he got it from a small child or someone fully vaccinated or someone who can't get the vaccine for medical reasons. Yes, fully vaccinated people can get the virus and transmit it.
Would you still trade his life for theirs in an instant ?
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.
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.
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]
>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.)
I don't get why almost everyone compares death and disease rates of something with basically unrestricted spread(flu) with something that has had heavy precautions taken around it, i.e lockdowns, isolation, social distancing masking (Covid).
Covid would have way higher stats if it was allowed to spread unrestricted.
>Covid would have way higher stats if it was allowed to spread unrestricted.
This is scientifically false; there's no correlation between lockdown severity and covid fatality rates. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...: " Lastly, government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality"
> The government policy of full lockdowns (vs. partial or curfews only) was strongly associated with recovery rates (RR=2.47; 95%CI: 1.08–5.64). Similarly, the number of days to any border closure was associated with the number of cases per million (RR=1.04; 95%CI: 1.01–1.08). This suggests that full lockdowns and early border closures may lessen the peak of transmission, and thus prevent health system overcapacity, which would facilitate increased recovery rates.
No idea where you are getting the idea that the flu predominantly kills the young? It is one of the major causes of death for the old. You generally seem to just be wrong with almost all of your points?
I seriously hope it is true, i.e. COVID-19 with vaccination settles into roughly flu territory. With all-cause mortality percentages - it is important to remember that doubling all cause mortality happened during the introduction of public health measures. Has it not happened it would be much worse.
Relying on QALY results in some very strange decisions, unless you allow for negative QALY. E.g., to maximize total QALY you'd want a very large population.
What about people who can't be vaccinated? My sister in law is chronically ill and, according to her doctors, not well enough to be vaccinated. It means she is still having to isolate as much as possible.
Are you saying we should give up on protecting people like her (sacrifice her?) for the convenience of others?
People with peanut allergies stay out of Five Guys, and people with compromised immune systems will have to take their own precautions as they always have before COVID. You can still elect to wear an N95 and whatever else as long as you want, but you can't expect the whole world around you to stop for you.
Please don't forget about children who don't have a vaccine, or individuals that can't vaccinate.
Last I heard maybe next year children under 12 (?, mine is under 5) will have a vaccine. But with talk of a third shot, and possible issues with Moderna, we'll see.
Healthy children are at approximately one-in-a-million risk of dying from covid-19 if they get infected. It's more dangerous for you to drive someplace with your kid than for your kid to remain unvaccinated.
Children in risk groups should of course get vaccinated.
But we're much better off making sure the limited supply of vaccines go to older people in other parts of the world than to healthy kids in the developed world that don't need them.
Note that I said healthy children. Pretty much all of the children and teenagers who have died in the US, and elsewhere, have been in a risk group. Diabetes, usually.
If your child is in a risk group, you should be worried, and you should want that child to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
If not, it's extremely irrational to worry about your kid dying of covid because that's in lightning-strike territory.
About 400 American children have died with the majority having existing comorbidities. 50% of children have "recovered" from Covid and would already possess some immunity. Certainly its questionable whether 99.9% most kids stand to benefit much from the vaccine anyway.
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.
You won't find any. Masks reduces the spread by the person who has covid, and it only reduces the spread if he wears it at all time, which is going to be the case in a study but is never going to be the case in reality.
Covid doesn't seem to be only aerosol BTW.
The only things that works at an individual level to reduce the risk to catch covid is to talk to less people. Which again is easy to do if it is chosen by the person but not going to happen if this is compulsory.
Mask works in theory but don't works when compulsory, social distancing works in theory but don't work when compulsory. Thus the probability that a legit study prove that mask mandate works exists is 0.
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).
These studies do not support any claims regarding how covid spreads.
I suspect the main reason covid spread doesn't correlate with mask wearing is due to the size of the particles/aerosols, so few are wearing filtering masks (what you would wear in a painting booth), and so few masks are sealed around the face. And then mask discipline.
What I have observed is that masks are used a social queue; people wear them outside in public to signal "don't talk to me", and remove them in private when with friends. This behaviour is opposite of what would be effective, given that the right sort of masks are used, which is almost never the case.
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
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.
> The only way would be to wear N95+ masks yourself.
And properly. Almost no one wears one properly, because it requires training, correct sizing and e.g. to be shaved. Mandating that everyone wears masks without training people is lunacy. When they inevitably don't work people lose faith is science because they were told there was scientific evidence that they will help, when in fact scientific studies were made only in specific, limited conditions.
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...
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.
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.
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.
What's so terrible about wearing a mask?