Fact check: Employees asked to wear masks during Zoom meeting is satirical | Hacker News Reader

Fact check: Employees asked to wear masks during Zoom meeting is satirical

reuters.com

12 pointssteelstraw10 comments

Curious that anyone believed this. Equally hilarious, I have to wear a mask at my desk, but if we go to the chow hall no one has to wear a mask while eating indoors.

They’re trying to maximize the amount of mask coverage. Obviously masks aren’t possible while eating, but you’re still better off going maskless for one hour out of eight, in a more open eating area, than you are going maskless next to others all day.

You say that like it's definitive. Do you have a source?

My colleagues all sit near me at work and eat with me at lunch. I don't see how that logic shakes out.

Yeah, Im Pro vax and obviously want this pandemic over soon, but I don’t see how having the same colleagues wear masks in another cubicle but don’t wear masks in the common canteen. Should be the other way, really.

The goal is to minimize the amount of contaminated particles (droplets, dust, etc) that you exhale and inhale. If you're carrying the mask reduces how many particles your colleagues come in contact with, if your colleagues are carrying it reduces the amount of contaminated particles the you inhale. When both of you are wearing masks then the likelihood of transmission decreases further.

The likelihood of inhaling is then dependent on how frequently you breath in, and vice versa. So what matters is not just who you have contact with, but rather how long the contact lasts. If you're in the office let's assume you have a 10 hour work day, with 1 hour for breaks where you're unmasked in an area with other unmasked people.

Let's do some very basic maths, using some very dumb assumptions

  * Wearing a mask reduces your likelihood of inhaling a contaminated particle by 50%

  * Wearing a mask reduces your likelihood of emission a particle by 50%

  * If you are in the vicinity of an unmasked carrier you have a 1% chance of inhaling it every hour

  * If a contaminated particle is inhaled you have a 50% chance of catching the virus

This obviously ignores things like proximity, immune strength, real world transmissability, etc. The number are chosen entirely for the ease of maths.

Using these assumptions, if you spend 10 unmasked hours with a contagious coworker then your likelihood of inhaling a particle in 10 hours is something like

  1 - (0.99 ^^ 10) = ~0.096

Or 9.6%, if you do inhale a particle you catch the disease 50% of the time, so you have a 5% of contracting the virus in ten unmasked hours.

If you are both masked all the time, then the likelihood of exhalation drops 50% and your inhalation drops 50%, so your likelihood of inhalation drops from 1% to 0.25%, the above math becomes

  1 - (0.9975 ^^ 10) = ~0.025

Or 2.5%, the above maths again gives you 1.5% likelihood contraction.

If we go for 9 hours mask on, and 1 hour mask off you get

  1 - (0.9975 ^^ 9 * 0.99) = ~0.032

Or 3.2%.

Now it's important to note that I'm pulling these percentages out of the air. I would guess that masks are more effective, likelihood of inhaling a contaminated particle in the vicinity of a carrier is higher, but your likelihood of catching it when you do inhale is lower (this is also the number impacted by vaccination).

The important thing is that the only thing we can control directly is mask wearing, so all other figures can change and the end result is always that masking lowers risk. If you must remove your mask (e.g. for eating) the less time you are unmasked the better.

This applies all the time, for any airborne disease, not just covid.

It's not too complicated. Your likelihood of catching covid - or anything else for that matter - increases not with the number of times you interact with them, but with the amount of time. Any time you're wearing a mask is time wear you have a substantially reduced likelihood of exhaling infected particles, or inhaling particles exhaled by carriers.

This is why open plan offices have higher disease transmission rates, even if they have the same cafeteria configuration as a non-open plan office.

It's just a game of probabilities. And it hard to estimate probabilities, deltas and relevancy so recommendations are conservative.

I would like a source for this too, having not worn a mask once in the entire 2 years of what I'll call a "hoax". The way the media talked about it, I should've been dead a year ago. I've been on public transportation, malls, grocery stores.

I'm probably a lot healthier than you since I'm not breathing in moist bacteria culture growing over your mouth and whatever material the mask is made out of all day.

This “hoax” has killed nearly a million people in the US alone. Countries that enforced stricter measures have significantly lower per capita rates.

We have untold millions of samples showing the original virus and mutations.

If you haven’t been sick or dead: congratulations many people are asymptomatic and you appear one of them. Happily that means that you are simply a carrier host that can transmit to others.

Millions were killed by a lot of things this year. Front page of HN right now is an article about how youth suicide attempts increased majorly because of this "hoax". In my neck of the woods, heroin overdoses have done more damage than any covid related flus, by a long-shot.

If it's so easy for people like me to be fine and that it's not unheard of that we're not going to die. Maybe you should swallow your pride and realize my instincts were correct to not wear one, and yours were wrong to blindly trust authority and SCIENCCEEEE. Now where are we? 2 years into 2 weeks to flatten the curve.

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