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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

The CDC's advice has been focused on one thing since the start of the pandemic: keeping the amount of PPE and infrastructure resources required down to the attainable for hospitals. It has never been about protection of the public at large.

It's why they waited so long to acknowledge aerosol spread and still stick to droplet based modeling of indoor spaces despite acknowledging aerosol spread being dominant. It's why they say 6ft still re: droplets even though aersols don't care about 6ft. It's why they (and states) still let people use ineffective unfit "masks" instead of requiring (and supplying) everyone with N95 or better.

I just don't understand what exaggerating outside spread does to help them with this. If anything it suggests that outdoors we'd need to use more N95 masks. It seems to go against all their past behavior.

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Austria[0] and Germany[1, edit: this seems to only be true for Bavaria and Berlin, see comments below] have mandated the use of FFP2 masks since the end of January. Their neighboring countries didn't[2].

If you look at the data, there does not appear to be a decrease in infection numbers relative to their neighbors after the switch to FFP2[3].

[0] https://orf.at/stories/3197782/

[1] https://www.focus.de/finanzen/recht/verschaerfte-massnahmen-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Germany hasn't required FFP2 masks, the state of Bavaria did (which includes only 15% of the german population)

Germany requires FFP2 masks OR op masks. Public transportation requires FFP2, vouchers for FFP2 masks have been issued (huge cash grab for pharmacies, but thats a different story). They are ubiquitous. I just went shopping and all customers wore a ffp2 mask. The cashier was behind totally useless (see: aerosols) plastic shielding and didn't wear any mask thou.

Apropos of very little, I was in Tennessee recently and at nearly every establishment, the personnel wore their facemasks around their chin, presumably to nominally satisfy some corporate mandate. I say this more as an amusing observation than an implicit judgment one way or another.

Why was the plastic shielding useless?

Because covid spreads via aerosols, not via droplets. If you could smell a perfume, covid is transmissible.

The shielding was just a pice a plastic hanging from the ceiling, not some kind of box. So the cashier was breathing the same air as everybody else.

Not right, in Berlin FFP2 is required in supermarkets, on the train and so on. This may be because the individual state not the federal government set up the rule, but there you go.

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