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Comment by jacobkg | Hacker News Reader

For context, Plaschke is the senior sports writer for the Los Angeles Times. I have been reading his columns (mainly Dodgers coverage) off and on for at least 20 years. So my subjective experience was that this definitely felt like someone I “knew” as opposed to a random journalist. Also this is the only time I recall him writing about a topic other than sports

This part hit me especially hard as it describes one of my fears:

“I wore a mask everywhere. I followed all the rules, but a couple of weeks ago I didn’t follow my instincts. I briefly let my guard down. The coronavirus came out swinging.”

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It's interesting to know if people who really are careful and follow the handwashing/mask/distancing rules get sick. It seems like they're much, much less likely to.

It's nothing to be afraid of. It's like you don't walk out the door in a spacecraft of a space habitat without a space suit.

I don't think it's nearly that easy. I find myself constantly struggling with the balance between proper precaution and not completely shutting down my life.

Do I invite friends for a nice socially distanced lunch in the park? Maybe or do that quick trip to Home Depot to get supplies for my projects at home. That feels easy to justify, one quick trip and these projects could keep me busy for weeks. But is it easy to justify because I WANT to do it, or because it's actually a good idea. It's always easy to rationalize something you want, and often hard to know your doing it.

Sure, my trip to Home Depot is probably fine. I'm probably healthy, and wouldn't pick up anything on the outing, but on the other hand it's optional, and what if I picked up Covid on my last trip to the grocery store, and wind up passing it on to some 70 year old who HAS to go to Home Depot because their toilet broke.

It's a hard line to know what is the proper amount of caution. At least for me. Very much unlike walking out a space station airlock, where the proper precaution is very clear.

That sentence immediately reminded me of this: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/another-dull-quarantine-...

I wonder what share of cases have been spread by people "letting their guard down."

I believe he may feel it was this slip up, but I highly doubt it. Look at The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden or Norway where practically nobody is using masks. If masks made that much of a difference, we would surely be able to tell.

Masks are more effective at protecting other people from your germs, not the other way around. You are at risk if you hang around people who aren’t wearing masks and you put people around you at risk by not wearing.

> Look at The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden or Norway where practically nobody is using masks.

I'm not sure you have a good grasp on what you're talking about. Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe,and the absolute worse in nordic countries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133

The strategy followed by the Netherlands is to quarantine everyone who does a covid19 test, and get anyone feeling any symptoms to get immediately tested.

https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/tackli...

More importantly, the strategy followed in the countries you've mentioned was to intentionally let the disease spread in a way that didn't overwhelmed health services. While the rest of Europe is intentionally trying to completely contain the disease, the strategy followed by Sweden consists of letting it spread freely as long as they can claim their health services aren't overtaxed.

In my opinion that approach is idiotic because currently the best thing health services can do to a critical covid19 case is linger around while watching the patient die, thus what's the point of bothering about if a health service has enough beds to fill?

"Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe, and the absolute worse in nordic countries."

That is an incredibly misleading way of saying "Sweden is far better than Belgium, the UK and Spain in terms of death rate per 100k, and significantly better than Italy":

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

In fact, Sweden is ~mid pack for first-world countries. You really have to cherry pick the data to make it look bad. Yes, Finland is doing relatively well, but it is also beat out by world-renowned public health stalwarts like Afghanistan and Sudan, so...perhaps other factors are at play.

I don't get this obsession with comparing Sweden, a remote, sparsely-populated country, to more dense, well-connected, large population centers. If you really want to compare Sweden, please restrict your comparisons to its closely similar, equally remote and sparsely populated neighbors, namely, Norway and Finland. The 10X difference between them will be immediately obvious.

Finland and Norway have half the population of Sweden.

Sweden has about the same population as Belgium, Portugal and Greece...or Georgia (and Ohio, and Michigan, and...) in the US, none of which are places that people are shy about extrapolating from, when it suits their narrative.

You may not like the conclusions that can be drawn from Sweden, but you can't dismiss it based on population. Try again.

As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case. Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March. Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good. As was the original story from experts.

> Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good

One could argue that, but one would look like a moron without any proof, and with a lot of evidence showing the exact opposite.

Given the huge amount of evidence of transmission by cough droplets and the lack of evidence of even a single transmission out of millions by touching masks/surfaces, keeping droplets out of your mouth and nose is the only thing that helps and it definitely does more good than harm.

If the person wearing the mask is not using it properly then that's not good for them. The wearer is still protecting other people from contracting the virus, if they (maybe not knowingly) have it.

> As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case.

You're free to cherry-pick whatever data fits your prejudice if that makes you feel better.

However, I hope you understand that garbage in means garbage out, and if you feel desperate enough to grab onto garbage to try to rationalize your prejudice then you should seriously rethink what you're doing, because thinking ain't it.

> Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March.

I'm curious to see where you came up with that nonsense.

If you take a step back into reality and look at the facts, you'd eventually find out how Spain and Italy reigned in their daily death rates from 1k to single digits by enacting public health policies that included a mix of quarantines and mandatory masks.

That’s an aggressive put-down for someone who is not omniscient himself...

Doctors do a lot for a critical Covid patients! “Proning”, anticoagulants, anti inflammatories, anti virals (E.g. remdesivir), CPAP, and, yeah, if all else fails, ventilation.

I can't imagine what thought process leads from an unsubstantiated claim that practically nobody uses masks in some countries to an assertion that they must not make any difference.

FYI masks are now mandatory in all public transport and even some busy outside areas in NL.

Norway also introduced masks in public transport at least in and around Oslo.

First: USE YOUR MASK. Don't argue about this shit. Researchers will do their job and will TELL YOU if it makes sense or not when the data is out.

Its absolutly a no brainer and no issue at all to wear a mask. Its a no brainer on an discussion base as well.

And don't bring Sweden in here. They are quite informed and took a lot of precaution and still have bad numbers but nonethless there is probably 10x or 100x less Karens in Sweden then in USA.

This has really worked in Peru

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, please omit flamebait tropes like "Karens". We don't need that here.

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