I'd strongly encourage you to look into your mask hierarchy. Cloth and surgical masks are not particularly evidence based devices. Even N95s have a lot of pseudoscience supporting their use (minimal size of viruses). They probably do something -- but go around in a well fitting N95 mask and an active lifestyle and you'll see that it's simply infeasible.
Your commentary about medical professionals is bizarre -- of course fewer medical professionals catch covid. They are exposed to it nearly constantly and generally have functional immune systems. If you work in a hospital, something you'll notice is you just stop getting sick very much.
Everything is a game of tradeoffs. Cloth masks in particular are obviously not worth the tradeoffs. Surgical masks are likely not. Maybe N95 are in particular situations.
Someone on HN just bought and tested a ton of masks, including surgical masks. Surgical mask material does filter nearly as well as N95 mask material, and the difference is fit. Based on data reported by this guy with actual equipment to test masks, most of your assumptions are highly questionable.
Surgical masks are more fluid resistant than N95 masks, which is why they are used in hospital settings (the goal is to note contaminate the patients, not really about self protection that the N95 is better at). They are designed to solve different problems.
Surgical masks: Fluid resistant and provides the wearer protection against large droplets, splashes, or sprays of bodily or other hazardous fluids. Protects the patient from the wearer’s respiratory emissions. Does NOT provide the wearer with a reliable level of protection from inhaling smaller airborne particles and is not considered respiratory protection
N95 masks: Reduces wearer’s exposure to particles including small particle aerosols and large droplets (only non-oil aerosols). Filters out at least 95% of airborne particles including large and small particles.
The masks have and have always had completely different purposes. The fact that we are using both during this pandemic to protect against COVID not withstanding. Now, people are using surgical masks in novel new ways (with braces and such to try and retrofit a seal on them), but they were never intended for that.
Relevant to the comments about fluid resistance: the difference between 3m's medical N95 respirators and construction N95 respirators is often nothing more than color, being stamped with a lot #, and additional fluid resistance. For example, the 1860 vs 8210. [0]
Medical personnel using the construction respirators out of necessity can wear a surgical mask over them, it's something I've seen locally. (I don't know whether that's a practice that predates COVID 19)
> if masks weren’t working at all, we’d see a lot of medical professionals catching covid. A lot lot more than we see now.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
"I am carrying my anti-tiger rock. I have not encountered any tigers today. Therfore, my anti-tiger rock is working."
You realize that medical professionals are almost universally vaccinated, have in large number had the virus already, and take other precautions, right?
Whilst you have a good point for the present, it is noteworthy that medical professionals working in covid wards (and so the ones with FFP2/equivalent or better) had, in the studies I have read, consistently lower rates of infection than even other hospital workers (with only surgical masks) during the first wave.
I recall seeing studies from the UK and US showing this, and possibly other countries.
A lot of people only want to think about it on their individual level, instead of realizing that every measure like masks, even lower quality masks, slows the spread on average and prevents the waves of infections from being as sharp or as massive, which really matters in terms of hospital capacity and general economic disruption caused by simultaneous sickenings. But it's probably preaching to the choir at this point about large segments of society being essentially selfish and myopic.
Yes, but HN isn’t made up of children. The vast majority of people here are adults, a population in which Covid-19 is a risk for a large proportion. People aren’t talking about children and saying “you’re afraid of the sniffles* (* is only sniffles for children)” is disingenuous.
The “selfish and myopic” people I know in states that don’t have mask mandates have happy kids who go to school and can look at each other’s faces and grow as humans.
Here in NYC we have woman yelling at kids to keep their masks on and they are in and out of school on a whim.
I think a lot of anti-mask discussion is really just people love and absolutely cannot resist pointing out that someone else is "wrong" in their judgement. When that someone else is an expert, especially so. HN users are probably even more prone to this behavior (pointless pedantry seems more common in nerds).
There’s no question they do something. The question is whether in practical terms they’re worth mandating society-wide. It reminds me of the old 55mph speed limit. Sure, properly enforced it would lower oil usage and save lives. But it wasn’t properly enforced and in practice became a random tax on those who got pulled over.
Not all interventions are effective when mandated society-wide.
The difference is clear between states that require masks everywhere and states that don’t. Masks have no effect if they are mandated or not. My state has had every single new wave occur while already mandating masks.
Terribly sorry about that. Perhaps if they have serious health concerns, they should take preventative measures such as being vaccinated, wearing masks, or isolating.
But as far as the people I work with every day, who also do not wear masks, I have not spread COVID to any of them. Nor my family, nor my volunteer groups.
If you were playing a video game you would also sprint all the time, rather than walk. Do you sprint all the time in real life? The difference is that in real life, sprinting has some non-negligible cost (eg. due to discomfort), whereas in a video game all you have to do is hold down a button. The same applies to masks/video game armor. Putting on a mask requires you to endure a non-negligible amount of discomfort for the entire time you wear it, whereas putting on an armor in a game causes you none.
> The same applies to masks/video game armor. Putting on a mask requires you to endure a non-negligible amount of discomfort for the entire time you wear it, whereas putting on an armor in a game causes you none.
This isn't really true, plenty of games make your character slower / heavier depending on what you have equipped.
I'd also say that, for me, a mask is really not that uncomfortable and the discomfort is negligible.
I would too. But then again then is zero discomfort wearing in-game armor,
and you can change it in a second if it had downsides like making you hungry faster.
Yeah, I, too, tend to drift towards Minimax/Maximin strategies when playing games. Basically, I know I'm there as soon as all the joy is sucked out of my play. That's why IRL it is not an option at all for me.
IDK, I am not convinced. Apologies if I offended you but this linked article has ~5 citations. Only one in English is from March of 2019 which says:
> “I’m not afraid of COVID-19 but what is scary, is the lack of common sense people have,” reads one of the most popular tweets about the coronavirus crisis. “I’m scared for people who actually need to go to the store & feed their fams but Susan and Karen stocked up for 30 years.”
This doesn't prove the point IMO. This word has been in the common vernacular for likely less than 2 years. It is not race based in my interpretation and also has evolved to mean someone who is entitled generally. You can choose to not be entitled but you can't choose to be not black or not gay.
I think this is reaching but apologies nonetheless.
> Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.
There are actual people with this name, and even if it was not racial, is it really okay to use pejoratives and denigrating terms, especially if that terms happen to be a quite common name in some parts of the world, like Denmark and Norway.
Edit: since you've been doing this repeatedly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29900612 was particularly bad), I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Flu kills at most 50,000 people a year. Covid is 10x that. All my life I don't know anyone who's died from the flu, i know multiple people who died from covid. It is like comparing measles to chickenpox. Measles has a very similar mortality rate as covid.
Covid is comparable to the flu young people. Up till now (~ 2 years), 56395 Americans less than 50yo have died from Covid and 768688 people over 50yo have died.
One of the worst flu seasons we had in the last 20 years in term of deaths. Covid has 10x the mortality rate for the age range 0 to 49. If you look at the H1N1 pandemic, which infected half of Americans and killed 20,000. It's on a full different scale. Covid hasn't infected half of Americans.
Covid is killing people who don't have covid. Elective surgeries are getting stopped which include cancer removal surgeries. ERs are full. There's cases of people dying of treatable heart attacks in parking lots because there are no beds. Has flu ever done that in the last 50 years?
> Up till now (~ 2 years), 56395 Americans less than 50yo have died from Covid
In the worst flu year in the last decade, the 95% confidence interval for total (all ages) flu deaths is 44k-64k and the flu also skews older for deaths, with around 75% in the over 50 category.
56k in 2 years under 50 is much worse than the flu in that age group.
Is exchanging anecdotal evidence a substitute for good scientific argument?
My father died of the flu. A friend of my mother's sister died 10 minutes after taking the Covid vaccine. I don't know anyone who died from Covid but I know that of course it's happening.
My anecdote doesn't add anything to the discussion but then again, neither does yours.
At the beginning of the pandemic it had a 10x death rate because it was new. Now that Covid is becoming endemic, people are building up immunity to covid and it's variants, and you should expect the death rate to fall substantially, which is what we are seeing now.
> Measles has a very similar mortality rate as covid.
Measles overwhelmingly kills children. SARS-CoV2 overwhelmingly kills the elderly and frail. This is why we have historically mandated measles vaccination for children.
You can't simply use "mortality rate" over an entire population to claim the illnesses are similar, when it's trivial to see that they have different impacts.
No mask < cloth mask < surgical mask < N95 etc < P99 etc
None of these are 100%. Does not mean they’re 0% effective.
When I cant get an entire Pizza but I can get 2 slices I don’t say ah fuck it, I’ll have none at all.
Edit: if masks weren’t working at all, we’d see a lot of medical professionals catching covid. A lot lot more than we see now.