It's stunning to me that literally billions of pounds are being spent on now futile testing without getting this basic stuff right.
Your risk calculus is out of whack.
Airplane air turnover is _extremely_ high, apparently even higher than many specialized hospital environments. If there's any danger, I would imagine that it would come from the immediate airflow within the cabin, and not from gradual saturation of the cabin's air.
I don't actually have a good model of airplane risks. But I recognize that many of my intuitive assumptions about what's going on would need to be checked against real data.
An airplane where you are packed in with other people in a small tube close enough that you are essentially (and often actually) in physical contact on one (or both if you are neither in a window or aisle seat) side is a hot spot, but Costco where you are moving, everyone else is moving, there are wide spaces where you don't have to be particularly close, and high ceilings and wide bay doors so it's essentially outside, is relatively benign.
> Your risk calculus is out of whack.
No, yours is, unless you are on some weird airplanes where everyone is wearing a breathing mask so that the constant filtration happens before your exhalation gets all over your neighbors.
- NIOSH certified N-95s with a head band. These are just about impossible to keep from fogging my glasses. The long elastic seems to "fatigue" after an hour or so and I can't keep a seal.
- Good KN-95s sourced from an allegedly trustworthy source. These seal much better around the nose, but they tend to leak under the chin.
- KF-94s (chosen after trying on multiple brands). These use ear loops, but they seal very tightly around the nose, and they seal tighter than the KN-95s at the bottom. They do occasionally leak a small amount of air at the bottom.
I suspect that as long as you're using certified, authentic "94+" masks with good filtration ratings, the biggest remaining factor is how well a specific mask seals for a specific person.
I notice that with KN95 ear loop masks consistently.
Also, you're kids, so you were at extremely tiny risk in the first place.
Better than not vaxxed, but with Omicron not nearly as well protected as against prior strains, and with both Omicron and Delta not protected against infection and retransmission enough not to be a public health risk if unmasked, even if your personal risk is low because of your combination to age, vaccination status, and general health.
...against symptomatic infection. The vaccines still provide excellent protection against severe outcomes. There is no debate on this point.
> with both Omicron and Delta not protected against infection and retransmission enough not to be a public health risk if unmasked
The vaccines still reduce risk of infection by 30% (if not more), even against Omicron. You need only look at the statistics from a state that breaks down by vaccination status to see that this is true. As of right now, the unvaccinated in NYC have a case rate of 3292 per 100k, and the vaccinated have a case rate of 457 per 100k -- a seven-fold reduction in risk of infection.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily
Masks are nowhere near this level of effect size. Worrying about masks after vaccination is the ultimate bikeshed. You've already done the thing that slashes your risk, and you're fixated on the thing that has almost zero evidence of effectiveness, because it's the thing you can see.
It's not a bikeshed; it's an easy, cheap action with added benefit, not a way to waste time dithering that impedes useful work.
Yes, it's much lower value than vaccination, but that only matters if you treat them as alternatives, which they aren't.
Prove it. Cite one study that shows added benefit after vaccination. Not a lab study. Not a study on rats or ferrets or mice or mannequins. A controlled study of humans, who are vaccinated, who are wearing masks in the real world.
You've had two years now. It's time to stop making things up, and back up your claims with data.
One correction: Airplanes are safer than Costco.
When I first read the claims about air exchange rates on airplanes, I thought it was corporate propaganda. I looked at the research. Flying is authentically pretty safe. The air gets cycled and scrubbed insanely quickly. There's still a risk, but it's safer than Costco.
If you do need to travel, you want to be paranoid exactly at airports and similar. The flight itself is not so bad.
There was a flight a while back, where everyone wore masks (cloth or surgical) and had some crazy number of people with COVID on-board, but no in-air spread.
Evidence for limited spread on airplanes is pretty solid, but everything from here on out is speculatory:
* A lot of people get sick traveling. You're interacting with all sorts of people from far away who have novel viruses, many of which aren't circulating in your area. That doesn't mean you catch it literally on the airplane.
* Masks probably make a bigger difference on airplanes than elsewhere. Even cloth masks catch big particles. By the time droplets evaporate into small droplets, odds are they've passed through a HEPA filter many times.
But its pretty clear medicine has a very poor understanding about how viruses spread given how long they denied coronaviruses were airborne. So who knows.
Anecdotal but my friend had taken off his mask for 5 minutes for eating during a flight (this was during India's massive wave) and he got infected. Almost everyone would have been wearing a mask (unless eating themselves). Off course it's possible that masks are incredibly effective (and I'm not doubting that) but I'm not convinced aircraft filtration systems are that top tier.
Omicron aside, peak infection rates were around 30 cases daily per 100k. The odds of the guy next to you having COVID were always very low. The odds of someone in the same building, airport, plane, bus, classroom, workplace, etc. having COVID were often quite high.
Airplane filtration systems mean you /only/ have to worry about the guy next to you, and not about everyone else on the airplane. That's pretty low risk.
The other curiosity about COVID are superspreaders. Most people don't spread COVID very much. A few people spread COVID /a lot/. The question isn't just whether you're sitting next to someone with COVID, but whether you're sitting next to a superspreader. If the person next to you has COVID, but isn't shedding a lot of virus, you're probably okay too.
That said, the guy next to you likely isn't shedding microscopic particles, but pretty large droplets. Your mask stops large droplets pretty well. The airplane filtration system just needs to get them before the become microscopic particles.
Rather, some of the air going into the big fans of the engines is diverted into some air conditioning machinery that gets it to a comfortable temperature and humidity, and then pumped into the passenger compartment. In order to maintain the correct pressure, there are basically "leakage" valves that let air flow out of the plane. An airplane maintains pressure by balancing how much air is allowed out of that valve vs how much air is coming in through the AC machinery. The result is the vast majority of air inside of a plane at any time is air that was previously outside the airplane.
To be pedantic, modern bleedless engines don't do this but just directly get fresh air :)
What kind of respirator have you switched to? Smells are vapors and not particles, so they're removed by eg activated carbon and not particulate filtration. I would bet your better respirator has "nuisance organic vapor" protection or something like that.
For example, with my 3M silicone facepiece [0] you can use a 2291 filter (no OV), 2297 filter (nuisance OV, what I use for Covid), or a 60921/6001 for full OV which blocks any smell I've come across (in addition to protecting against hazardous levels of some specified organic vapors).
[0] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/40744O/3m-respirator-car...
I've been using different P100 masks since the beginning of the pandemic and while it occasionally garners strange looks, I love not smelling anything when forced to use a port-a-potty.
I think wearing a mask has made me more sensitive to smells. So one of the things I like about masks is not having to smell other's bad breath occasionally or those closed air conditioned spaces that have "humid" smells.