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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

The point of wearing masks is mostly to prevent you from infecting others if you're already infected. They're somewhat effective at preventing infection but that's not what they're best at - if you're wearing a mask in a room with an unmasked, contagious case, you're still in danger.

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Maybe they should advertise it like that. I and most i know are wearing thinking it would reduce our risk to exposure.

I thought masks will reduce the viral load and lessens the severity of infection

I though the same. Maybe it has reduced the severity. It seems 99% of infections in Bangalore are asymptomatic. Actual number of infections might be very large.

It was advertised like that. The mask deniers were louder.

India really needed to keep up consistent messaging about wearing masks, promote easy to understand infographics (for folks who cannot read)

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

The government, the lax attitude of the public and inconsistent messaging has lead to this situation. It is heart breaking to see so many lives lost needlessly where something as simple as wearing a mask effectively could have averted this disaster.

That's been the messaging around masks from the scientific community from the beginning, and also partly why they were hesitant to recommend universal masking early in the pandemic.

>If you’re already infected.

And if you’ve had it or been vaccinated?

Requisition (symptoatic or asymptomatic), or simply acquiring viral particals and re-distributing them, are both possible.

It's also far easier to establish (and verify) a "masks requried" policy (visual inspecition is sufficient) than a "masks or fully-completed vaccination schedule required" one.

The ultimate goal isn't protecting individual health but public health, and here, social measures including distancing, quarantine, masks, sanitation (though perhaps less so than first thought), etc., all reduce the probability of transmission through the population at large.

We're used to thinking of individual health. Public health is related, but is not the same thing. Logics and measures that are appropriate or sensible in the case of individual health may not be for public health. (And vice versa.)

Public health is an emergent phenomenon of individual health.

In today's news: "An unvaccinated worker set off an outbreak at a U.S. nursing home where most residents were immunized."

An unvaccinated health care worker set off a Covid-19 outbreak at a nursing home in Kentucky where the vast majority of residents had been vaccinated, leading to dozens of infections, including 22 cases among residents and employees who were already fully vaccinated, a new study reported Wednesday.

Most of those who were infected with the coronavirus despite being vaccinated did not develop symptoms or require hospitalization, but one vaccinated individual, who was a resident of the nursing home, died, according to the study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/health/vaccine-nursing-ho...

And what has that got to do with people like me whom have had the rona and not died? It doesn’t mention that the worker had and recovered from the rona, just that they were unvaccinated. Even the WHO have started to admit to immunity through exposure.

unfortunately it is not about the individual who can get corona and can recover from it. It is about stopping the spread into the community to prevent the vulnerable individuals from catching on to the virus and breaking the transmission chain.

I am certain most of the world population can get covid and recover, but that is no justification to allow it to spread uncontained and cause so many preventable deaths.

Yes, this.

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