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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

Others included sources, but also, how could masks not be effective? They cover your mouth and the disease is mainly expelled out your mouth. That’s why the government really lost the public when they said “masks don’t do anything” when what they really meant is “there is a mask shortage and America doesn’t have the civic fabric for people to leave masks for the more vulnerable — instead they will start hoarding.”

Similar is the pretense that the race protests wouldn’t explode the transmission of COVID — how could they not?

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> Similar is the pretense that the race protests wouldn’t explode the transmission of COVID — how could they not?

Well, so far its looking like they did not. There seem to be three reasons:

1. High rate of mask wearing,

2. They were outdoor events where people were moving about a great deal, and

3. Only 1-2% of the attendees were infected.

You need to get a certain amount of a given virus to actually get infected. For most respiratory viruses if you are just briefly near an infected person and they do not do something to emit a large number of viruses at one (such as cough or sneeze right near you) you won't get enough viruses from them to become infected.

Here's an article about this for the Minnesota protests [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/what-minnesotas-protests-are-rev...

This is absolutely false. Exposure to a higher number of viruses might increase probably of an infection, but a single virus can certainly lead to a full blown infection in an individual.

The infectious dose for most viruses is higher than that. See [1] and [2].

[1] https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_infective_dose

It's a probabilistic process. 1 virion of any virus can infect a host, but for some viruses that probability will be vanishingly small while in others it will just be regular small.

There seems to be some evidence that a higher infectious dose will not only increase the probability of an infection, but also its severity.

(This makes sense in a simple thought model where the virus starts replicating once it "hits" you, and then your immune system needs N days to ramp up and attack it back. The bigger the initial load, the more the immune system will have to fight back once it's operational. - Not saying that's how it is, just that this is a simple model to make plausible what appears to be empirically seen.)

In section 7 of the elsewhere-mentioned http://archive.is/QHU1H , Scott Alexander concludes (with explanations) that the initial policy of not recommending masks was not a deliberate attempt to prevent hoarding. Note that, in coming to this conclusion, he reversed his initial opinion on the matter.

And while there is little doubt that maskless protests of any sort cause spreading, there is little evidence so far of them causing the transmision to "explode".

But Fauci himself straight out admitted that was the intention, did he not?

Hm... apparently so, though in the only example I have found so far, he offers that reason as a justification for declining to recommend masks for people not at special risk. IMHO, this is was a valid response at the time, and not a hidden agenda.

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