https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
So what are the exit criteria?
Before we catastrophise, how about we start with the pragmatic - ask people to wear masks while infection rates are high. Which is unlikely to be forever
There's a big difference between 'Covid is going to be with us forever' and 'Covid infection rates will threaten to overwhelm health services forever'.
I don't know about "forever", but people in Japan have no problem wearing masks in public while asymptomatic with low case rates because we know it's a public health issue, and it's working. That's why we keep wearing them.
I wasn't used to masking up pre-pandemic. I got used to it within the first month. Now I can't leave the house without a mask on. It feels wrong. (This doesn't mean I'm deathly afraid to remove/lower it, e.g. while eating at restaurants or when I'm outside with nobody around and I feel like a bit of a break).
How every abelist of you.
My experience with masks, and glasses is very poor, specifically the more common cloth masks that go over the ears. Something like a Gaiter mask is slightly better but many say these are less effective
Disposable surgical masks with the "metal-bendy-bit" for the bridge of your nose has worked great for me.
I also use cloth masks all the time due to the ease of keeping one on me, and washing it with the whites and bleach at the end of the date. Cloth masks definitely fog up my glasses more, but I find that adjusting them and not breathing through my mask help me.
> eventually
I don't know exactly about the US but in NL that is precisely the sticking point. It doesn't matter that everyone will get it, it matters when everybody gets it because we don't have the ICU capacity to treat everyone at the same time (+ regular ICU patients and overhead for scheduled surgeries)
Which is why I am so frustrated with people refusing to be vaccinated and with our politicians that ignored all warning over a calm summer, again after they did the same ting in 2020. Because reasonable, innocent people are suffering now. Sometimes I wished voluntarily unvaccinated people would be consequent enough to refuse treatment.
This reminds me of someone telling me "If even vaccinated people can get Covid what's the point of me getting vaccinated?"
The answer is simple but perhaps subtle and may be hard for some people to understand and accept: To lower the risk.
You can't fully eliminate the risk but you can and should lower the risk as much as is easily possible.
There are 777k Covid deaths in the US now and I wonder why media doesn't tell us that number every day. I guess many people don't want to hear it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+have+died+fr...
Vaccination. Which is one of the reasons it’s especially infuriating when anti-maskers are also anti-vaccine. By far and away the easiest way to do away with masks is for everyone to just get the vaccine.
For myself, I have two small children that are currently not eligible to be vaccinated. So I will be continuing to wear a mask indoors until they can be.
> You can't seriously expect asymptomatic people to wear masks in public forever.
Another shame this has become such a culture war topic because there’s nothing wrong with the idea of wearing masks when appropriate, indefinitely. As the OP said, in Japan people wear them during flu season and when they feel themselves coming down with a cold. There’s nothing wrong with that, nor is it a particular burden on the vast majority of the population.
I live in NYC and might continue to wear a mask when I’m on the subway during flu season, it feels like common sense. But I know if I try to do that in other cities in the country I’ll be looked upon as if I’m a leper.
The public health argument is very clear: vaccines reduce transmission. No, they don’t stop it. But they also reduce the strain on ICUs and other healthcare facilities needed to treat people with extreme cases.
In what world do you live in such that you can ignore that?
Obviously, if you take the same COVID-naive person and subject this person to a virus both in vaccinated and unvaccinated state (repeatedly), you can derive a conclusion. This is a simple and easy to understand impossible experiment.
How your conclusion was derived? (I'm not arguing with it, I just don't understand the method.)
Lest we forget that the flu killed millions of people a century ago, the vaccine likely reduced the chance you caught it, but still managed to catch the disease, and the reduction in severe symptoms when you get it.
I remember reading every year about someone who refused to vaccinate their kids, and one of the kids died from the flu.
Vaccines don't 100% prevent catching any virus. Especially fast mutating viruses.
>infuriating when anti-maskers are also anti-vaccine
I am anti-mandates, so would you count me as an anti-masker and anti-vaxer?
>>and when they feel themselves coming down with a cold
This is the key point that betrays your statement, They wear them to prevent spreading sickness to others, your statement imply you will wear them prevent getting sick. Non-n95 masks are not effective at preventing you from becoming sick, and infact in some ways should concentrate a flu virus and make you sick where you would not have otherwise gotten ill.
Masks are good for already sick people to use to prevent further spread that is the correct use for normal non-n95 masks
Why do these conversations always devolve into people trying to make “gotcha” points?
I was pointing out reasons why wearing a mask could be sensible. Those reasons aren’t necessarily anything to do with COVID. But there’s now such a cultural issue around it that the reasons won’t even matter. You’re a “masker” or an “anti-masker”.
Our intuitive understanding, inclination is "do as others do". "Oh, nobody's wearing a mask, must mean there is no virus around here". No. Not. If people are not wearing masks it is more likely that there's a lot of virus going on.
People who don't wear a mask in your presence are likely to be careless about protecting them against the virus in other ways, and therefore are more likely to have it already.
The exit criteria is that the general population get enough protection that covid outcomes behave similar to other seasonal flu viruses. The hope is that this will be achieved through a combination of vaccinations and time, but we won't know until the data is in. What is known in many countries is that transmission of covid by vaccinated people has surpassed greatly those of unvaccinated (by simple quantity of people who are vaccinated), which is why masks in high risk areas is still recommended for tipple vaccinated people. I would recommend a mask in NYC subway to combat Covid regardless of how much vaccine you have taken.
why not? I enjoy foiling facial recognition efforts, and those efforts are everywhere. I probably won't ever stop wearing a mask in public.
Why do you feel so strongly about this? Masks of a few kinds are standard PPE in many fields, it's not like they're particularly restrictive or anything.
Consider you are doing UX design. You wrote some software that helps your customer, but they won't use it. Why won't they use it? How can you improve it? What alternatives can you implement to keep the benefits that you are trying to give to your customers while also making the product "acceptable"?
Short questions like "why won't you use masks?" Can come off as antagonistic (e.g. shame on you! Just use the Fing mask), but they may also be inquisitive (e.g. what concerns do YOU have with masks). This being HN, I prefer to assume the intent is the latter.
From a practical point of view I think that the plastic ones are probably going to be horrible from an environmental perspective - especially to the marine environment which is where a lot of plastic litter ultimately ends up. I'll admit there's also an element of iconoclasm involved in why I'll be keen to see the back of them when their times comes. From a purely symbolic point of view (ie regardless of their effectiveness) they're quite a dystopian thing in my opinion, it's a signal of "be afraid of disease" or worse still "my fellow human beings are disgusting plague vectors". I can't help that feel that making hiding our faces a permanent social norm would lead to society becoming even more atomised than it already is which is also fairly dystopian.
On a purely personal note, I also don't like that they give every moral authoritarian and insufferable busybody yet another thing to harass strangers about, especially when legal penalties for non-compliance exist.
If people want to wear one for the rest of their lives (I doubt they will), have at it. If it is to avoid facial recognition, I guess I get that but have to understand that in that situation you are in a tiny minority of people willing to cover your face in defense of your digital privacy. (Look around you, 90% of the people are uploading themselves to TikToc without a care in the world)
At this point, the masking mandates in the US makes absolutely no sense either. If you fly on a plane, you are allowed to take your mask off to eat or drink but then have to put it back on when your not doing either, as if COVID disappears when you're eating. You can cross state boarders without being tested, etc.
We need to start learning how to live with COVID, because zero COVID is no longer an option. That ship has sailed.
No, but you can't really eat with a mask on so keeping it on for the entire rest of the time minimizes the risk of spreading and transmitting it. Even if it's not 100% perfect, it still has a significant positive benefit.
taking off your mask to eat does not negate the rest of the time you wore the mask.
how the hell do people not understand why masks work? I do not understand this.
an analogy:
let's say I am at work, and I fart, but oops, it's poo instead, and now it's all over this side of the conference room floor, even in places you can't see with the naked eye. should I have worn clothes? clothes are so intrusive and restrict my ability to move and express myself, and it's immoral that you create a rule that keeps me caged when I only crap in the conference room three times a year.
the poo in that analogy represents the aerosol saliva and mucus of someone that is contagious with anything, which is stuff that is regularly produced when people talk or breathe. the clothes are a facemask.
how do people not understand why facemasks are effective? I don't want to step in anyone's crap that they left behind wherever they coughed or sneezed or touched the break room chair. wash your damned hands and wear a facemask if you're sick, dammit.
I understand statistics, you have no statistics to back up your claim. Just so we are clear, I think masks do work if they are used properly - they are not used properly on airplanes in the US, so they are pointless.
It's not a study from the US but it includes enough flights where there were confirmed index cases and there were 4 levels of masking rigidity. The case we're describing, where people only unmask to eat, there were no transmissions.
> On flights N–R with the rigid masking policies (meals served) of Emirates Airlines, no secondary cases were identified on Day 14 screening despite 58 passengers who were PCR+ on a total of 5 flights of 8 hours each with ~1500–2000 passengers.
can you provide some links to the evidence of this?
the things people do really confuse me, sometimes. I .. I am just not capable of understanding why people do most of what they do.
I didn't say I wanted to defeat gait recognition, did I? No, I did not.
my turn to imagine something you'll say: "oh well you can also be recognized by your voice"
I didn't say I wanted to defeat voice recognition, either.
etc
I don't think even the most vocal opponents of masks saying we should ban them, if you want to wear a mask forever that's your business. I'd be monumentally miffed if mandates were in force forever though, especially in the half-arsed way we have them in the UK which is so arbitrary it makes a mockery of the whole concept.
We still need to slow down the spread though, as several operations otherwise can't handle the load.
In NL, our undertakers have employed external cooling cells again, just like last winter, to be able to 'service' the dead.
If wearing "forever" means individuals wear masks when they're feeling ill, or when they're in a place with current high transmission of respiratory illness, then I'm all for wearing masks "forever".
Why not? Many societies expect that you wear clothes in public, and most people willingly comply every day. In many places it's actually mandated by law! Where are the anti-clothers protesting in state capitals? Oh yeah, they're nudists and most people don't take them seriously.
Why is being required to wear a mask in public any different than being required to wear pants?
> Why is being required to wear a mask in public any different than being required to wear pants?
I was one of the people defending the mitigations early on, speaking out against the "conspiracy theorists" - those who said the new controls by those in power would never be given up and that this would be the new normal.
I slowly came to see that they were right. Sentiments like this prove it.
I also don’t understand why sentiments like this prove anything. Is the OP a person in power? Nothing suggests that. They’re just a person that’s being (overly) cautious. FWIW I don’t agree with them but I also don’t think they’re a lizard person.
If you can normalize something like mask wearing, there's a strong psychological effect. There's a sort of built-in obedience that's a clear signal to those around you. Arm bands also come mind.
Is it then such a leap to grant the power of forced vaccination? I mean, it's all for the public good right?
Flu is a deadly killer. We should probably go ahead and mandate that vaccine too, while we're at it.
Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death in the U.S. - why are we allowing private car ownership? We could save tens of thousands of lives per year if we centralized control of transportation.
Guns? They're right out.
While we're at it, there's no good reason to allow fast food restaurants to continue to exist. Obesity is an epidemic and costs the U.S. billions, if not trillions and is a leading cause of heart disease. Let's get rid of all fast food restaurants.
Since we're doing that, we should also probably mandate that every restaurant remove the deep fried. They can make something more healthy.
And on. And on.
This never ends.
You say that the perspective baffles you. I'm trying to illustrate the perspective that those of us who believe in maximizing personal liberty hold.
Incrementalism is a real thing. An affront to liberty must be stopped at the beginning, if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people reading through what I just wrote actually believe doing all of those things would be a good idea, and they may be right.
I think a better idea is to allow people to live their lives the way they chose.
And so is the slippery slope fallacy.
If you can normalize something like seatbelt wearing, there's a strong psychological effect. There's a sort of built-in obedience that's a clear signal to those around you. Life jackets also come to mind.
Measles, mumps and rubella are deadly killers. We should probably go ahead and mandate that vaccine too, while we're at it. Oh wait, we already do with school kids. Have done for decades.
And on. And on.
Human beings love to see patterns. In reality A does not necessarily lead to B, and to C. You can evaluate individual decisions according to how beneficial they are and say yes or no.
Take a look at all of the federal powers that have been seized based on Wickard [2] interpretation of the ICC.
These are just a couple obvious cases of incrementalism.
The entropic state of humanity is to allow power to accumulate and centralize.
It takes active energy to resist this.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
> I think a better idea is to allow people to live their lives the way they chose.
I'm not allowed to recklessly speed down any road I please. I'm not allowed to fire guns wherever I please. I'm not allowed to build my house in any way I please. I'm not allowed live in any house I please. I'm not allowed to build bombs in my garage. I'm not allowed to dump waste in the local water system. If I walk around downtown without any clothes I'll almost certainly be arrested. There are countless things we're all forbidden from doing by society. We are not free to live as we please with no regard for anyone else. That is the price of participating in a society.
Liberty is an artificial construct that we, as a society, have agreed upon and set the boundaries for. There is no natural state of liberty that exists, it must be explicitly defined and agreed upon. It's OK to disagree on the boundaries of liberty. We can arbitrarily choose where to draw the line as we please. So we can choose to mandate masks and yet allow fast food to exist.
You can't "recklessly speed" down a road, but are you not generally allowed to drive along any public road for any reason - or no reason - so long as you're not "reckless"? Should you be made to justify your need to be on the road, or your choice to drive rather than ride a bus? After all, these things impact public safety and the climate.
You're not allowed to fire guns wherever you please, but you're also not allowed to even HAVE a lawfully obtained gun in many settings simply because those in power have deemed it so. Try getting a concealed carry permit in NYC. Should it be that way everywhere?
You can't live in "any house you please" perhaps, but you're certainly allowed to live in any house that you can afford. Are you trying to justify bringing back things like redlining or neighborhood exclusionary rules?
I won't go over every single "I'm not allowed" item. But I'll finish by saying that "recklessly speed" and "drive where I please when I please" are different things. Almost every rule in existence finds SOME degree of justification in necessity, which is why "necessity" has always been the go-to justification for any authoritarian regime or ruler throughout history. And it never stops until people push back.
So what? Is that a bad thing or something? Opinions on what is an acceptable amount of laws and regulations is all over the map. Some think we should have no laws. Some think everything should be regulated. Many are somewhere in between. Mask mandates are not a slippery slope towards authoritarianism, it's a step on the spectrum toward some equilibrium on the spectrum of anarchy and total authoritarianism that society, on average, finds acceptable.
Some reductions in liberty are beneficial: speed limits, private property rights, bans on exclusionary lending practices. The question is always, "is it worth it?" Many people believe that mandating the wearing of a mask in public is part of an acceptable definition of "liberty." There is no natural state of liberty (other than complete anarchy) that is violated by a mask mandate, there is only the degree of liberty we choose to grant ourselves. Even the right to life is a man-made right, granted only by mutual assent.
So society, in England at least has already decided that if it's their choice, they'd rather not wear them.
Could you elaborate on the statement at the end - "but in the long run that won't save anyone.". Anyone, as in nobody? How come?
Though I'd like to add that you could get a vaccine instead.
Are you that weak of a human to not wear a mask when you're sick, or during a pandemic? Or is this just a "Lets Go Brandon" (aka: fuck joe biden) dogwhistle?
Cause your "question" isnt certainly about anything scientific.
From your comment I can infer that when you observe a person not wearing a mask, you make an immediate assumption about their political ideology.
I believe that this was the main purpose of mask mandates, not public health.
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/about-the-gui...
And remember that while the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection, they're pretty good at preventing severe symptoms.
And I agree that having healthy people wear masks just to be safe is unacceptable.
Without the vaccines you might have a point, except that Corona and the large flu seasons are not that different for most countries if you measure hospitalizations and deaths.
With the vaccine it's two wholly different things as the vaccine is your way to protect yourself.
A SUV driven by a drunk driver can kill a dozen people, that have no way of avoiding that.
Since when breathing open air become a privilege?