Hacker News Reader

Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

733 people died yesterday in the U.S. from COVID. On an annualized basis, that would be 267,545 deaths per year. On the other hand, 36,120 people die in car accidents per year.

If you saw someone wearing a seatbelt when they were stopped at a red light, would you make fun of them due to the relative safety of that situation?

If you had a friend that refused to drive after drinking any alcohol at all, would you make fun of him?

Perhaps some people do more to protect themselves and others against COVID than is necessary, but perhaps we should appreciate their conscientiousness by contrast with the very large number of people who took unnecessary risks, downplayed the problem, got infected, infected others, and ultimately led to 33 million people getting sick and 600,000 dying.

View on HN

AFAIK there still isn't a single documented case of outdoor transmission of the virus, anywhere in the world.

There's been a few cases reported, e.g. here in Germany there was a cluster of cases of a spread among members of extended family that only met outside reported. And for the vast majority of cases, we simply have no data.

Still, everything points to outdoors being massively safer, with the highest remaining risk if you stand still with someone infected for a long time. (And in many places masks have never been required outdoors, or only when in large groups of people)

If outdoors is that safe we shouldn't be having lockdowns and stay at home orders. We should be happy for people to be outdoors doing activities.

Also sports shouldn't have stopped at all having audience

> Officials in Haridwar said that on Monday and Tuesday alone they detected nearly 2,000 infections among festival goers.

https://www.dw.com/en/india-hindu-festival-turns-to-superspr...

A news report with the words "Experts say.." is noise. A case documented in a journal in a trial (e.g. DANMASK-19, or any of the dozens of other trials) is not an unreasonable standard of evidence in order to better determine what the true risk of outdoor transmission is.

How exactly would you confirm - beyond any doubt - that contagion happened outside? Most people live most of their lives inside a building of one sort or another, so it'd be almost impossible to 'document' a case of outside transmission.

The closest thing we have is homeless populations - they spend most of their time exclusively outside - and they still get sick: https://www.sfpublicpress.org/covid-19-cases-spike-among-hom...

So making some big claim about how outdoors transmission is impossible is kind of preposterous.

Even people from remote Amazon tribes in the jungle have got covid.

Also in warmer countries outdoor/indoor is not all that different ventilation wise. It is not like I am magically getting covid if I am standing just inside the door and am suddenly immune standing on the porch.

I can’t find the source, but early days of contact tracing I think there were some outdoor transmissions identified, but it was in the low single digits compared to tens of thousands identified indoors.

If you’re outside and whispering in someone’s ear or accidentally cough in their face, it sounds like transmission is possible from what I’ve heard.

But yeah the risks are super low.

> If you had a friend that refused to drive after drinking any alcohol at all, would you make fun of him?

If he were drinking non-alcoholic beer, yes. This is probably a better comparison to the mask situation going on.

Non-alcoholic beer is still a psychoactive drug due to all the psychoactive flavonoids and especially the heterocyclic aromatic amines present in all boiled mash beverages.

WTF, gtp-3?

Look it up, because it checks out.

”Flavonoids” and ”heterocyclic aromatic amines” are groups of chemicals, which both contain some chemicals that act as MAO-A and MAO-B inhibitors in the human CNS, causing attentional, cognitive, emotional and behavioral changes.

https://www.bevindustry.com/articles/92090-flavonoids-provid...

So non-alcoholic beer could modify behavior like a blackberry smoothie?

Sure, especially if you make a habit out of it and pair it with a stimulant, like nicotine or caffeine, which both are routinely consumed with large amounts of MAOIs (which are found in both tobacco smoke and brewed coffee).

For an especially interesting evening, search ”monoamine oxidase” in the publicized tobacco industry documents: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/results/#q=%2...

> If you saw someone wearing a seatbelt when they were stopped at a red light, would you make fun of them due to the relative safety of that situation?

There’s a causal relationship between seatbealts and utility in a crash. The fatality rate is lower because of the use of seatbelts.

Wearing a mask while vaccinated is not causal with reduced transmission or death.

I wouldn’t make fun of someone for anything like this, but if I saw the driver of the car next to me with a pillow in their lap with the intent to help during an accident, I would think that they are being silly. I would definitely think they were super silly if they were espousing the benefit of keeping pillows in laps while driving because it makes them feel comfortable, or can’t hurt, or is an easy thing to do.

I'm not sure what your argument is here. Are you claiming that masks are ineffective in general or that vaccines are so effective that further protection is pointless?

I’m claiming, and not just me, that masks are ineffective at adding additional protection for a vaccinated person who wishes to not spread covid.

Masks are quite effective at preventing the spread of COVID. I believe this is shared by public health authorities.

Masks are tool that are good for some things so it depends the particular need.

I’m not arguing either of your claims, but masks+vaccine are unnecessary. This is different from masks being effective or from vaccines requiring no further needed protections.

What evidence is there that masks provide no additional protection for vaccinated people?

Are there special types of virus particles that come from vaccinated people that pass freely through filters? Or is it that when on the face of a vaccinated person, a mask is unable to filter out viruses?

> What evidence is there that masks provide no additional protection for vaccinated people?

The question is what evidence is there that they provide additional protection.

You don’t disprove things, you prove them.

Since there’s lack of evidence of efficacy, so that affects the decision.

This is kind of why I think people are logically waking through available evidence. There’s some material on CDC’s page [0] but I’m not familiar with the field so don’t know all the specific papers and studies and what not.

As a layperson, just reading the CDC site I think it’s that a vaccinated person, almost always, does not produce vaccine particles to spread. Since masks reduce spread of particles from infected people, the principle of the mask would not apply. Since vaccinated means no particles to prevent spreading.

Of course the vaccine isn’t 100% effective, but I assume protective enough that wearing masks produces no additional population protection, or that the benefit does not outweigh the cost.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...

We know:

a) Masks reduce transmission by physically blocking viruses

b) Vaccinated people can contract COVID by breathing in viruses

c) Vaccinated people can infect others by breathing out viruses

There's no reason to believe that the mechanism in (a) doesn't work for vaccinated people any more than it wouldn't work for people in Vermont or people named Jake, even if there hasn't been a specific study on those subgroups.

Yes, vaccinated people are significantly less likely to be infected and to infect others. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that a mask wouldn't reduce that risk further.

Whether or not it's worth the hassle of wearing a mask is a reasonable question, but that's a risk/reward tradeoff question, not a question of whether or not a mask reduces risk, which is what your claim is.

I was one of the first to wear a mask. I made them from tissue paper and staples and rubber bands. I would get weird looks for being the only one in the store that had a mask. 6 months later, when I got masks with valves, I staryed double masking. I never wore a mask in the open though. Just kept my distance from people and that's it. Especially in the state parks, that would make zero sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com