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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

With masks, COVID measures commercial travel is becoming unbearable, even in the first class.

Really? I mean I don't like wearing a mask on a long plane flight but lots of people have to do this at their jobs all day so saying it makes commercial travel "unbearable" seems like quite a stretch.

To me it’s less about the mask itself. What makes it unbearable is the additional point of friction it creates. There are varying opinions and comfort levels with wearing them and it’s leading to violent confrontations. People are losing their humanity over it and it makes everyone else onboard anxious, in my opinion of course.

When public transit systems begin having issues with disruptive passengers the same thing happens. The more well off will trade their money for the convenience of not dealing with it.

Wearing a mask is definitely not the uncomfortable part of flying. It's the huge number of unhygienic people crammed into a tiny space, rubbing up against everything and not wearing proper equipment that makes everything extremely uncomfortable. But the ending sentiment is the same.

Everyone certainly needs to make their own call. Obviously, there are a great many people attending large indoor events with a lot less in the way of air circulation and filtration systems than a jet airliner has.

Air travel is just kind of gross, at least in recent years, even before COVID. I usually end up mildly sick with a nondescript "cold" after intercontinental flights, although I fly in economy, where the "lots of gross people packed into a tiny space" factor goes way up...

Don’t forget about the pre-flight and post-flight “security” and customs/immigration theatre lines where you get mixed in with people coming from and going to anywhere and everywhere.

No chance of catching anything exotic there!

People are different. My personal limit with the mask is about 30 min. After that I starting to suffocate. Maybe it is mental but feels real. And I do not have any particular condition which would make me feel that way, on a contrary I am very fit and do cardio every day.

What kind of mask are you wearing?

I find surgical masks incredibly frustrating after a short while as condensation and sweat start to build up (keep in mind this is usually in rooms much warmer than your average operating room)

N95 masks despite being bulkier end up being much much more comfortable. To the point that even a surgical mask stretched over an N95 with an exhaust feels better to me than just a surgical mask..

They're also easier to find now. Genuine 3M masks are going for pre-COVID prices at hardware stores and always in stock (don't go in planning to clear out shelves though: I'm pretty sure there are buy limits, and more importantly some people do require them for their work)

In parts of Europe, like Bavaria and Austria they are mandatory indoors. They cost about 0.5 Euro each and there are usually buy limits.

Regular crappy mask. Nothing fancy. No idea what kind it really is.

I'd try an N95 then, some of those crappy masks even absorb the moisture you exhale like a sponge

I think you'll find that mask compliance amongst people who're supposed to wear them at their jobs all day is almost universally pretty poor. Prior to Covid they were disfavoured as a way of protecting workers partly for that reason.

Commercial air travel was already unbearable before the pandemic.

It was unbearable even before all that. Especially if you’re over 5’10.

Wearing a mask seems like the least unpleasant part of commercial air travel to me.

I know several people who chose to make multi-day drives last summer rather than sit on planes wearing masks for multiple hours. And yes, the mask was the primary driver of that decision. Reduced viral exposure was a side benefit, because they had been vaccinated and felt that that risk had passed.

It boggles my mind that someone would make a multi-day drive that they wouldn't otherwise do just so they didn't need to wear a mask for a few hours.

I just took 2 flights yesterday. Not first class; but there was no major difference from before the pandemic apart from the mask, and much fewer passengers.

I don’t understand why avoiding effective COVID countermeasures is desirable.

If I had the need to fly somewhere, I’d want to fly private to avoid COVID exposure.

Because they're not effective. It's safety theatre, just like the TSA is security theatre.

"Everyone has to wear a face mask on a plane at all times to stop the spread, except for an hour here and there where everyone removes their masks at the same time to eat."

On international flights where everyone has to be tested beforehand, it's even more ridiculous and performative.

Except that rapid tests have high false negative rates…

[[Citation Needed]]

That's totally a realistic option for the vast majority of the population. </s> In any case, I haven't see any real evidence that commercial flying is a particularly high-risk infection vector.

There are significantly more air changes per hour on an airliner than in an office building or on a train. I personally put airliner travel as being reasonably low risk for COVID transmission during the flight. (It's obviously higher than staying at home alone.)

There isn't evidence that it is low risk either...

I would take a bet that the probability of illness after 10 hours on an aircraft is worse than 10 hours at home, in the car, in a cinema, in a shopping mall, or in a park. Part of the added risk I would guess is because the people around you are not people from your hometown who all have the same diseases as you, but travellers from all over the world who can give you new unseen diseases.

It's sad that we've had aircraft for 100+ years now, and yet there doesn't seem to be data on this.

I was talking about COVID specifically but yes. I'd say it's fairly clearly higher risk than being at home or in an outdoor location. Might be lower risk than an indoor restaurant or a crowded indoor sporting event.

Data would be hard. If you go to a big convention in Las Vegas and get sick--of which there are plenty of anecdotes--did it happen at the airport, on the plane, somewhere at the event, in a restaurant, in a casino, etc.?

Some flight tickets are very cheap...

You could pay some students to stay home and revise, while other students fly somewhere and immediately back, then check over the next week what percentage get any kind of illness.

There's a preschool near me that I walk by every day. Their playground is constantly full of 3-4 year old kids, all of whom are properly wearing masks. In other words, you have worse coping skills than a toddler.

A preschool is making 3-4 year olds, who are extremely low risk, wear masks outside? Why are we treating this as normal?

3-4 year olds tend to live with other people. It doesn't really matter if one person is low risk when we're talking about an airborne disease.

Because PICUs full of kids sick with COVID isn't "normal", you ignorant fuck?

Ding ding... schools here are filled with kids wearing masks. One can argue it is not useful, but that is not the point at all. The point is, they wear them without complaint, every day. Hell, my kid has her mask on before we walk out the door. I tell her she doesn't need it, but it's just easier for her to put it on and forget about it than remember to put it on when we get where we're going. She's a picky kid with sensory issues, so...

I see the height schoolers wearing them when they are across the street at the mall. If high schoolers, the most likely to rebel, can do it, anyone can.

>all of whom are properly wearing masks

There is absolutely no way that 3-4 year olds are consistently wearing masks properly unless there is like 1 teacher per kid fixing their masks anytime it moves.

Ok, I'm just a liar then. Go fuck yourself.

Because those kids, who are not at risk from the disease, have been scared into compliance by their hysterical parents.

In Europe, this would be child abuse, because masking small children is considered completely useless there.

Please don't say "in Europe". Diseases are often driven by schools and kids of all ages, in my country the expert commission has been asking masks for all kids at school, all ages, for a while now (they generally have plenty of evidence, but I don't read too much into public policy), but politics have not implemented these requested changes, probably for fear of backlash.

There are many countries in Europe and they differ greatly

As Epse says, there is no “in Europe” for this. The rules for masks on children varies greatly between countries. But letting the kids wear a mask is certainly not seen as child abuse over where I live. Maybe as unnecessary or as “overly cautious/protective” but I haven’t heard of people calling CPS because children had to wear a face mask.

Hello from Europe!

You speak for all three quarters of a billion of us? No, you don't.

You made this up, pure and simple.

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