Hacker News Reader

Comment by aarondia | Hacker News Reader

This year was a great experiment in person hygiene. It was the healthiest I have ever been for a full year, no colds, stomach bugs, anything.

I'm not sure which practices I'll continue, but its definitely shown me that I have wayyyy more control over my health than I previously thought.

Curious what others think are the most effective continued practices. Seems like social distancing isn't super reasonable, but maybe continuing to wear a mask in crowded places?

View on HN

One thing that would be great would be if people would throw on a mask if they have to go out while they're feeling sick. This is considered common courtesy in some places, but just isn't done much in the West. You could do so yourself even when not sick, and that presumably would help protect you from people who are sick (and are probably not masked), but I expect that will be considered socially "weird" after things go back to normal.

Continuing to wash your hands often and avoid touching your face (especially after touching things in public like door handles, elevator buttons, etc.) probably would help as well.

Agree that social distancing isn't really practical outside of the current situation.

But really, there are just a lot of things that you won't be able to avoid, at least not unless you want to stay at home more often than you used to rather than venturing out. Conference rooms at an office, crowded public areas, public transit, even lining up at a popular takeout restaurant... all of these things make it easier to pick up something from someone else, as virus particles in water droplets can linger in the air for quite some time.

For your list in the last paragraph - children at school or childcare. Our childcare lists any reported illnesses on the door of each age group's room. Sometimes there can be 2-3 items on a door: gastro, colds, HFMD, etc. Of course, you find out after your child has been exposed and brought it home.

Like others, we haven't had any real illnesses in over a year, as well as living in a place which hasn't really had COVID cases in many months.

You can do a LOT. I haven't been sick once in 6+ years because I do the following:

1) Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life.

2) Hand wash before touching face, or food.

3) Avoid sick people. If I hear someone coughing or sneezing, I move away from them. Call me a germ freak, I don't care, I've had 0 sick days in 6+ years since I started taking these simple precautions.

You don't even need to social distance... just avoid people if they're sick. SOME of this is impossible (on an air plane for example). Turns out, I very rarely travel so have likely just gotten lucky avoiding the dip shits that fly while sick.

4) Don't have children.

... that are in kindergarten / school.

But yes, the lockdown a year ago was interesting in that I wasn't sick once. But when everyone is at home and you can't see anyone, there's no one to get sick from either.

Adopting adult kids is kind of awkward, though.

Don't know why you're downvoted; this is true. You can personally avoid opportunities for exposure all you want, but your 2-8ish year old kids will get colds regularly from daycare/school, and then will give them to you. I also didn't get sick from March-September 2020. Then schools re-opened here, and I was sick within 3 weeks, and then again a couple months later. And that's even with all the extra sanatization and distancing they were trying to do at school.

don't forget that kids get sick for like 12 hours and you're knocked out for several days.

There’s no way to avoid them even if you don’t have your own. There’s always a parent-colleague you have to deal with, unless you WFH.

And here comes the childfree brigade again.

I've done the same except for not eating out, same result. I regularly eat at places that perhaps are not the pinnacle of hygiene. Doesn't make a difference.

My theory is that your mouth is already a cesspool where bacteria colonies fight it all out. It makes sense, because "safe" meal preparation is unnatural. Your nose/eyes are far more vulnerable.

A biological warfare zone more or less in balance but a "cesspool" is kind of gross and unnecessary. Bacteria aren't all bad, and if your digestive tract was suddenly without them you'd die from malnutrition if you didn't get nutrients through an IV

Well eating at home can also have failures. Few months ago I accidentally ate some hot sauce that should have been refrigerated but was stored on a room temp. shelf.

Looked fine when i ate it but was violently sick for 3 days and thought i had covid :(

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever gotten a cold/the flu, at least not since I was a young kid, and I don't take much care to do anything on your list. Sure, I'll wash my hands after using a restroom or before prepping food. But I'll definitely walk into a restaurant (pre-covid) and just start eating a burger without washing my hands first.

I feel the biggest factor is just what body and immune system you have... Some people I know just get sick constantly, multiple times a year, and they don't seem to do much of anything differently than I do. I don't think they're secretly licking doorknobs when no one is looking.

Even though the plural of anecdotes is not data, I must say that my personal experience matches yours as well. I pay no attention to disinfection or antiseptic cleanliness, and I can't remember the last time I was actually ill. In the good old days, whenever someone would "warn" me that they were a bit sick before hugging/sharing a bottle/shaking hands/etc, I would even joke “Don't worry, I don't believe in the germ theory of disease”, because in my personal experience it wasn't worth the effort to avoid it. Needless to say, that joke is now retired—not only because there are very good reasons to be cautious regarding COVID-19, but also because with so much bizarre denialism that has trended lately someone might even believe I was saying it seriously.

Damn I wish I had your immune system. Pre-covid I would get sick every September and probably 2 other times in the year (I would have the flu jab every November too!). I'm a germaphobe so wash my hands before eating, etc. I also try and stay fit, don't smoke and hardly drink alcohol.

Unless there's a trick I'm missing here?

Just a thought — the trick might be trying to be less of a germaphobe to build up your immune system (not medical advice).

Also not medical advice, but since I stopped being a germaphobe in 2016, I haven't gotten sick. Maybe it has to do with being less stressed in general, too.

YMMV :)

So after my daughter was born 6 years ago I had to reduce my germaphobe habits, simply because it's not possible/practicable. Perhaps after a few more years of being around young children I'll build up my immune system...

(not medical advice, but this is my style).

How was your upbringing? Did you have to use things like public transport when you were young? I imagine some of the early exposures and immune system build up might have good impact later on in life.

I am not germaphobe. When people saw someone with flu, they would stay away, i was indifferent. I'd just tell them i am ok with the risk, and most likely i would not even get sick, or if i did, it'd be a very very mild one. I never did.

The moment i read about covid 19 and lack of evidence for touch based spread (which was very very early on in pandemic, really), i stopped caring about many things (but ended up still doing some for a while because my wife asked me to). We still met with some people etc.

I had to use a train to get to school, so lots of public transport use I guess. I only really became germaphobe in my 20s so it's not like a lead a sheltered childhood.

> Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life.

I highly doubt this is the case. And in any event, how would you know?

I'm also lucky to be quite healthy, almost never sick, The last time I had a flu was probably somewhere around 2010, because I was still in my second to last job, which was the only time ever I had to take a couple of sick days

But my lifestyle is quite different. When restaurants are not closed, I eat out at least twice a week. I don't often wash my hands. And touch my face all the time. I don't bother avoiding sick people because I don't think I'll get sick.

I'm the opposite of germ freak. I don't like washing my appartment and people visiting me can easily see that.

The social distancing rules had a big impact on me and the amount of social I get.

I guess I'm just lucky with my health. Or maybe my hymune system is well trained. Who knows?

Probably 2 and 3 are bigger factors if not getting sick than 1. Although never eating out also reduces your exposure to others that may be sick. Of course avoiding people who cough and sneeze send a bit paranoid. I don't do any of those things, and precovid the only times I got sick were after a plane trip out standing in a long line for hours.

> Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life.

How do you know this was the biggest factor?

I don't "know" for sure that it was, just like I dont "know" that ANY of these factors had anything to with me not getting sick. Maybe, it was all just luck.

That said, I've been pretty good about hand washing and avoiding people my whole life. Having grown up in a medical family, personal hygiene was not something completely foreign to me. As a result, haven't had a history of being sick regularly, but it still could/would happen from time to time.

It was after I stopped eating out that I completely stopped getting sick. I am not exaggerating when I say that in the last 6 years, I have been sick 0 times. That correlates perfectly with me stopping eating out. Correlation != causation, I know.

I don't think your anecdata proves anything but your own experience.

1. I eat out a lot, including junk food every now and then. 2. Of course I hand wash, but i would not say "before touching face" per-se, but as often as you'd normally expect (restroom breaks, before preparing food and/or eating, after coming from outside). 3. I don't really run away from sick people. I simply am indifferent.

I still never get sick, i used to, but probably haven't for more than 7 years.

I've worked a variety of jobs. I tend to a lot of mild upper respiratory infections I recover from easily enough.

The only things I could ever really link were routine public transit use. Or when I worked in a bar. When those were true I got sick a lot more than when they weren't.

I'd imagine it has more to do with ventilation, maybe?

Yes well, I would hope if you've learned nothing during this pandemic it's that there is no one-size-fits-all immune system. Some 20 year olds are dying from COVID, others are barely noticing they have symptoms.

All suggestions are de facto "anecdata". What works for me, may not work for you. I used to get "food poisoning" once a year or so, but haven't ever since I stopped eating out. That you are more resilient to whatever food born illnesses I was encountering, does not invalidate my own experience.

That's exactly what i said.

I am actually in the "exposing yourself to decent variations of microbes is actually good for your long term health" camp. Not everyone can do that, of course, especially the immunocompromised. I get that.

You are telling your experience as if it's one size fits all. It's not. There is a reasonable case to actually exposing kids and one's self to microbes early on. Similar story for food allergies - exposing kids early on actually helps them not have those allergies, for example.

Anyway, like i said, not one size fits all, which is what I was against at in your argument. You made it sound like it was.

> You are telling your experience as if it's one size fits all.

No, I'm not. I'm telling my experience exactly as it has been... my experience. One should not have to preface all of their comments with "this is my experience". That's de facto implied if you remove qualifiers like "this study indicates [1]" or "its been proven [1]", etc.

I said you can do a lot. You an do a lot. Whether it works for you or not, is entirely dependent on your own immune system.

You read it as something else here and that's on you. I have been clear in this thread to point out that there are differences in how we all deal with illness. This is what worked, FOR ME.

I think junk food place in general is actually more hygienic.

Might be. It also spans to occasional food trucks every now and then, which i would probably not call super clean (though can't claim to know either). "IF a food is tasty, you probably don't want to know under what conditions it's prepared" is something i believe in (but don't necessarily seek for - ie if somewhere is disturbingly unclean, i would probably skip, but otherwise don't care).

> IF a food is tasty, you probably don't want to know under what conditions it's prepared

I was in Bangalore (India) some time ago and everybody and their dog tells you not to eat the street food there, especially not the dairy products!

First thing our host (friend and former flatmate) brought us to was a street merchant with some dairy sweets :-)

Definitely surviorship biased ... but we ate a lot of street foot while we were there and have not gotten sick. I guess it's fine if you don't go to the super rancid places.

The biggest factor for me was having kids. After I moved out of my parents' (my mom was an administrator of a preschool, so I think she brought home lots of fun germs), I didn't even get a cold for 3-4 years. I wouldn't say I did anything other than basic hygiene (hand washing after bathroom breaks, etc) to prevent getting sick during that time.

Then I started having kids. I've spent most of the cooler seasons with at least mild cold symptoms ever since. It's been like clockwork that every year for the last 8 years, everyone in the house gets a "stomach bug" around February; including 2020.

No surprise to me, this past year no one in the house (of five) has had anything besides allergy symptoms. This February was the first in 8 years that I didn't find myself spending an evening on the toilet with constant diarrhea. I don't want to go back to normal.

Unfortunately if you take crowded subways or buses, or have meetings in small rooms with coworkers who have young children in school, none of that matters. You still WILL get sick.

It doesn't matter how much you wash your hands, or cook food at home. Plenty of germs are airborne and linger. Unless you stay at home all day long, you're going to get sick.

Now some people have much more effective immune systems than others, and a lot of that is just genetics. Sounds like you're exceptionally lucky here.

Not if you wear a mask and wash your hands immediately afterwards. I haven’t been in an in person meeting since COVID started, but I’m wearing a mask to the next one I attend.

In Covid's case, wearing a mask only reduces the chance of you contracting the virus by 2%. The real reduction comes from the other person wearing a mask ~20% reduction).

Thus, you can't simply choose to keep wearing masks and get significant reductions in getting sick. Everyone would have to keep wearing masks, which is very unlikely.

Similarly, before the pandemic it was totally normal to go to parties with a cold or respiratory illness. I sincerely hope people keep the behavioral shift of not going to any events when sick, but humans are selfish and I bet they will largely return to their selfish ways

Not true.

Wearing a mask is more to prevent spreading a virus you have, than to prevent you from getting a virus. In other words, the main benefit of masks is to prevent people with COVID or the flu from sneezing and infecting others.

If you're healthy, wearing a mask is not going to provide a ton of protection from infectious people near you not wearing masks. A little bit of protection, but not a lot.

So unless you can convince everyone else in your meeting to wear a mask as well, it's not going to make a major difference, sadly.

you're like a hedge fund manager who's made money 6+ years in a row; your day will come.

You can't "avoid sick people" by moving away from those obviously sick. If that were the case this covid thing would have been easy. Best bet is your habbit avoided you catching hay fever from someone with seasonal allergies.

In non-covid times I'm not nearly this precautious and am super lucky to basically never get sick. I'd be careful of drawing any meaningful conclusions based on just anecdotal experiences.

Studies seem to suggest that because of the air filtration and air flow that flying is one of the safest ways to travel with other people.

I too rarely got sick for years, even with international travel. Until I had kids, which I notice you don't mention anywhere in your comment.

Sure.. but this also means that you don't have to take public transportation, that you probably don't have small children, and you likely don't work in a school, pharmacy, daycare or hospital.

Bragging about sick days is hardly indicative. Many if not most places in the states don't give sick days, and folks are forced to go in when sick because they can't afford not to.

I should now mention that I worked 8+ years at a pharmacy, and a school before that. I rarely got sick and I didn't do most of your precautions. Just basic hygiene, and got my flu shot every year. And I directly led folks to cough and cold medicines.

Some of this time, I stopped to get coffee most days (there was a mcdonald's next door).

I just get sick even less now, but that's mostly because my lifestyle naturally isolates me (not in a bad way).

I'll also say that sick folks can - and do - get you sick before they show symptoms, and a lot of folks that cough or sneeze do not have any disease that you can catch: Smoking (pot or nicotine) causes coughing: Allergies and irritants cause both coughing and sneezing. You can only do so much.

You've just been lucky and have a lifestyle that allowed you to keep away from people to an extent, though the hand washing does help out and honestly, if anyone picks up one of your habits, it really should be somewhat frequent hand washing.

You can't avoid sick people if it's your boss at work. My old boss used to make fun of people if they stayed off with "the sniffles".

Usually my colleagues at the office didn’t wash their hands before eating and showed not so great overall hygiene. They also missed many days due to “stomach bug”. And then there’re people with children, they’re always sick. Yes, it’s been a great year in terms of not having to deal with many people. But I have to say I’m a bit worried it’ll go back to usual soon.

I am hoping people get serious about staying home if they’re sick. “I’m not contagious.” If you’re not contagious, then how did the whole office get wiped out?

Too bad companies do have policies about this as it implies discouragement of taking sick days. Perhaps the CDC has some guidelines that help such as "stay home if you have had a fever in the last 48hours".

Just to add onto the anecdote pile. I used to work for a Silicon Valley tech company which, due to it's well-known obsession with secrecy, had office buildings with a lot of closed doors you needed to grab and open to get anywhere. Probably 4-6 different doors to handle just to get to my own office (itself with a door that people grab). I've never taken more sick days in my life. I always seemed to have some sort of URT infection or stomach bug, despite trying my best to keep good hygiene.

Just washing my hands regularly and not touching my face had me avoid colds for many years now. I've never worn a mask before COVID.

IF nothing else comes of this I've been much better about wiping surfaces and using hand sanitizer. I don't see myself going around indoors everywhere with a mask, but I won't feel weird doing it during flu season either. Hopefully it's a bit more normalized.

I think I got sick a lot from poorly ventilated meeting rooms. I can recall multiple times coming into a room with stale air smell and get sick not long after.

Stopping the spread of disease is on everyone. It's important to understand that the precautions we took helped to keep others healthy, as well. It's great to continue with your personal hygiene regiment, and it's even better when the people you interact with (and the people they interact with, etc.) do it too. So, do you what you've been doing & convince others to do the same.

I doubt it has much to do with personal hygiene. I always washed my hands. That hasn't changed. What's changed is personal distancing, in particular not sharing an office, train, hotel etc with sick people.

I really hope the long term effect of this will be huge social stigma against being in public with a contagious illness.

It might be that you working from home. I think you get infected at work and the kids at school.

Have you been sleeping more because of WFH? That could be the major factor here.

I got sick 4 times in 2019 and am normally sickly for about 90 days a year. Sick 0 times since Feb 2020 and almost no "feeling shitty" days. The major change was hand washing, face masks, no bars, no gym, no movie theaters, and no travel.

For the first time in my life I feel unstoppable.

You have no clue what health is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com