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Comment by hauget | Hacker News Reader

Masks should be optional UNLESS you're NOT vaccinated.

Why?

Why not?

Just seems like a somewhat arbitrary point to draw the line - I assumed there was some logical justification for it that I was missing.

Are you sure you aren't being facetious and pretending like you have not heard any mention of the numerous studies that show vaccinated people do not spread the virus in any significant percentage and how herd immunity works?

No, I haven't seen any of those studies and I have very little personal motivation to do so as I live in NZ and the only place I care to travel to is Australia - so no need to pretend or be facetious at all.

In fact, my first actual exposure to wearing a mask was less than 3 weeks ago when I traveled to Sydney. TBH, I don't know what the big fuss is about.

Because unvaccinated people can contract and spread COVID?

Exactly.

So can vaccinated people.

Sure, but the probability of that happening is much, much lower, to the point of it being not worth protecting against, for the most part.

Not really. Singapore is finding quite a few infections among the vaccinated. Sure, they don't get severe disease, but they do spread disease.

https://mothership.sg/2021/06/mindsville-napiri-covid-19/

HIV has a transmission rate below 2% - I'd still suggest wearing a condom though.

risk/reward ratio here is way different, no?

lol

you're totally right, let's just never trust any vaccine or medical developments due to anomalous chance of failure. in accordance to this, i pledge to never leave my home until i leave this barren earth.

The vaccine does not completely prevent you from getting infected or from being able to infect others. It drastically reduces the chance, especially of the more dangerous symptoms affecting the lungs, but it doesn't grant complete immunity.

Besides, measures like masks also affect many other diseases; this recent winter they were effective enough to reduce influenza-related deaths by over 95% compared to the year before.

>this recent winter they were effective enough to reduce influenza-related deaths by over 95% compared to the year before.

A little hard to chalk that up to masking alone given all the other drastic societal changes. What about WFH and distancing?

I never excluded other measures beside masks. I mainly mentioned masks ("measures like masks") because they were the main topic here.

“Drastically reducing the chances” is all you need, because everyone else has also gotten vaccinated and there isn’t a supply of bats dropping fresh virus on you to constantly challenge it.

The COVID vaccines really are so good there’s not much reason to take extra precautions as long as you’ve gotten one. Variants don’t even matter since it’s not the flu.

I never said there wasn't value in being vaccinated. Obviously it reduces death and severe illness.

The popular vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca) are known to significantly reduce asymptomatic infections as well [1].

[1] Table 1b. Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination Against Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection in https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

Because that is the guidance from the CDC.

I wish all the covid vaccine protocols were applied to other diseases we have vaccines for. Measles is a million times more infectious.

Everyone where I live gets the MMR vaccine in grade school.

I also don’t live in Brooklyn, but some people do

For me, it's Canada:

"Routine childhood immunization: 2 doses of any measles-containing (MMR or MMRV) vaccine. The first dose of measles-containing vaccine should be administered at 12 to 15 months of age and the second dose at 18 months of age or any time thereafter, but no later than around school entry."

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications...

Many school boards require it, along with DPTP, hep-b, and others. Maybe it's a socialized medicine thing?

No, it’s free in the US too. There are clusters of families in communities that reject vaccines however, so there are a bunch of schools with insufficient proportions of vaccinated kids. A ripe breeding ground to create a vaccine resistant strain of measles or mumps or whatever.

Vaccine resistant measles does not appear to be possible using standard gain-of-function methods on the vaccine strain, mumps I have no clue. People's vaccines wearing off (or not working in the first place) and them not noticing due to herd immunity would be a much bigger problem, I think.

There is basically no community spread of measles currently due to good herd immunity (via widespread vaccination). When there are outbreaks it is usually very serious and stuff gets closed and people isolated.

It's a bit overblown if there's no active pandemic thanks to herd immunity, but I wouldn't be against it (if it was a work policy, and not a law)

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