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Comment by pa7x1 | Hacker News Reader

Masks do very little in open spaces. We still don't have the data but I think a large part of infections is happening at home were prophylactic measures are highly impractical and impossible to enforce.

We probably would have been able to control better the pandemic if students (of all ages) didn't go back to school, the assumption being that students are acting as silent spreaders (due to the low morbidity in young people), reaches home and multiplies easily there.

But our societies are not prepared to handle this scenario so we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Preparation between the first wave and the second wave has been also pretty poor.

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> Masks do very little in open spaces.

I wonder then why many countries enforce them in open spaces. Note, this meant as a honest question.

> We still don't have the data but I think a large part of infections is happening at home were prophylactic measures are highly impractical and impossible to enforce.

Some research on current evidence was published in Science last month[1]. With the exception of some specific "job related" events (like meat packing plants) or public gatherings, most of the transmission is in fact in the household.

> the assumption being that students are acting as silent spreaders (due to the low morbidity in young people), reaches home and multiplies easily there.

I've seen this a few times, but as far as I can see the current data are absolutely inconsistent. And the largest contact tracing study from India (recently published) was done with closed schools, so no information from there either.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/29/scie...

> I wonder then why many countries enforce them in open spaces. Note, this meant as a honest question.

Well, first off, I’m not sure that many countries have. But for those who do, I suspect a big part of the motivation is initial high rates of people claiming they forgot their mask when they get to the shop and insisting they be let in anyway.

On top of my head, France is one, Spain too, and Italy as well.

> I suspect a big part of the motivation is initial high rates of people claiming they forgot their mask when they get to the shop and insisting they be let in anyway.

As far as I can tell, no shop here (Italy) will let you inside if you don't have a mask. At least in my town shopkeepers enforce this.

> I wonder then why many countries enforce them in open spaces. Note, this meant as a honest question.

I think it's just simple to enforce and has very limited downside. We want people wearing them in public closed spaces because that's were they help the most and we don't necessarily care if they were them outside but the inconvenience of doing so is fairly minor. So the simplest way to enforce this is if everyone has to wear them to go outside of their home.

> Some research on current evidence was published in Science last month[1]. With the exception of some specific "job related" events (like meat packing plants) or public gatherings, most of the transmission is in fact in the household.

Thanks for the article.

> I've seen this a few times, but as far as I can see the current data are absolutely inconsistent. And the largest contact tracing study from India (recently published) was done with closed schools, so no information from there either.

I intentionally phrased as being an assumption as I don't have the hard data to back it up yet. It's based on the spike of cases observed here in Europe after the return to schools, in Belgium (for example) the french-speaking side went to school one week before the dutch-speaking side of the country.The dutch-speaking side is lagging in cases for roughly that amount.

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