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Comment by hedgehog | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty of evidence mask campaigns slow transmission. It's not fun but I see it as a minuscule sacrifice for me to wear a mask to the grocery store if it saves even one person a trip to the hospital. The sad reality is the grocery store _is_ a contaminated danger zone, and will be until we get this thing under control.

The sliver of good news is that lowering the growth rate just slightly from above 1.0 to below will cause the epidemic to shrink dramatically. It's not like we need to reduce transmission by 100%.

Not that you asked for it but my advice to you is to find more sources of joy in your daily life that aren't so affected. If you're bored shoot me an e-mail, I have plenty of extra projects :)

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> There's plenty of evidence mask campaigns slow transmission

By how much do they slow transmission?

> It's not fun but I see it as a minuscule sacrifice for me to wear a mask to the grocery store if it saves even one person a trip to the hospital

People go to hospital with flu every year. You or I might have unknowingly spread it around and caused someone to go to hospital before. Will you wear a mask every flu season, forever? It's worth it if it saves even one person a trip to the hospital, right?

I would have no problem with mask to be adopted as a thing that people do.

Try changing this argument from 'wearing masks' to 'washing hands' or wearing seatbelt.

>Will you wear a mask every flu season, forever? It's worth it if it saves even one person a trip to the hospital, right?

Would it be so bad to wear a mask when flu season is around? Plenty of folks do in Asian countries to no inconvenience to their daily lives.

I do hope that going forward we will be more educated on the benefits of wearing a mask here in the west and we take the lesson to heart. I doubt it though.

Mask for crowded places and public transit to reduce flu? Sure. But that's not a remotely comparable situation for a few reasons: 1) seasonal flu has available vaccines, 2) seasonal flu kills orders of magnitude fewer people, 3) seasonal flu is much less contagious, 4) seasonal flu does not appear to have nearly the level of long-lasting incapacitation.

We can estimate if it's worth. Let's say the yearly economic burden of flu in the United States is $11.2 billion [1]. Now we need to compare it to the total cost of wearing masks - both manufacturing and distribution, but also the burden on mental health you mentioned in your other post. Actuaries can help us find such monetary value. Then we have to find out how much we will save if people start wearing masks (i.e. how effective the masks are). Finally we compare costs and savings and form our conclusions.

For example, assuming 330 million Americans would spend about $20 on masks every flu season, we would need the flu cases to drop by 59% to break even. It's based on a massive amount of assumptions and shortcuts. We probably won't need 100% of the population to wear masks. And I didn't include the cost of mental health, since I have no idea how to estimate it. But we can start from there.

1 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29801998/

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