Ready for an N95? Here's how to find a high-quality one that fits you well
npr.org
npr.org
This makes me think we're still floundering at the basic protections. Our kids' school in the Bay Area recommends N95s for kids which, if this statement is true, don't exist.
Almost no one is wearing N95 masks. And many of those who wear masks only wear them some of the time or incorrectly. On a flight I took recently, they asked a man to remove his N99 mask in favor of the standard issue, light blue surgical mask you see everywhere.
Masks to me are symbolic. People wear them to show that they care and that want to obey the pleas to “do your part”. But with the implementation I’ve seen they probably haven’t helped much.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e2.htm
> Among 139 clients exposed to two symptomatic hair stylists with confirmed COVID-19 while both the stylists and the clients wore face masks, no symptomatic secondary cases were reported; among 67 clients tested for SARS-CoV-2, all test results were negative. Adherence to the community’s and company’s face-covering policy likely mitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Stanford Medicine's assessment[2] states that, "Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant."
[0] https://www.poverty-action.org/study/impact-mask-distributio...
[1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210907/masks-limit-covid-s...
[2] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
One big issue was that the mask pickup didn't equally reduce cases across ages. This leads to the training for wearing masks may have caused older groups to stop socializing, rather than the masks doing anything.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7298691/
I have raised this issue with everyone I could think of and nobody cares, or is willing to tell CPAP users they can't fly. This proves to me that the people in charge don't care about reducing COVID exposure.
I do wear properly-fitted genuine N95s while flying and have never had any flight staff tell me I couldn't.
They do this at a hospital I go to frequently (require a blue surgical mask uniformly) and I just put the blue surgical mask on top. Havent had any breathing problems or anything. The blue ones are pretty thing and useless in that state.
All they care about is following protocol, not efficacy.
Looking for stuff that's been okayed for kids in Korea has served me well. I got a crate of KF94s for my kids shipped. Of course, then it takes research and time to make sure you don't get ripped off with counterfeits and what have you.
Generally speaking, masks will be designed or optimized for heads in different sizes. Until you get to really young kids where they don’t fit, there’s no magical reason that they won’t work.
The only downside is the straps: they both go behind your head, one high and one low. They take a bit to get used to, but you can't put them on with a hat on. But the plus is that they are very comfortable for the long term. Sometimes, with glasses, I have to take the glasses off to get the mask off.
The ones with the blue straps, the straps seem to deteriorate quickly if left in the sun, but I've only had a couple where the straps broke.
You can get them small quantity on ebay, and ebay seems to police the sellers, for around $2 each. You can also buy them direct from 3M for $1 in quantity 440, or at least you were able to 6 months ago when we last looked.
I've been buying them from ISP: https://www.industrialsafetyproducts.com/3m-9210-aura-n95-pa...
(As a bonus, they have the 9210, which has better straps, retail you generally only see the 9205, which is ok too, but the straps are just rubber bands and they don't fit as securely.
>"An N95 is more protective because it has a better face seal in general than a KN95 or a KF94,"
N95 does not require manufacturers to test for fit. However, the headband normally ensures a better face seal. KF94 has a fit-test requirement, but it's bar is low -- 11% leakage to pass the test. The ear-loops really don't do much and in terms of face seal and filtering inbound air. Leakage is far greater source of pollutants than the filter failure (94%, 95%, 99% filtration).
I use common sense -- if the mask fits loosely and is easy to breathe in with, it probably is not filtering much.
Edit: I didn't mention anything about politicized matters or even covid. I discussed the mask certification standards and filtration effectiveness (well established before the pandemic).
My understanding is that for Covid your mask is expected to filter exhalation, protecting others from any virus you may have in your system. My understanding is that masks do very little to protect you from inhaling unwanted virus carrying particles.
Of course, it seems to me that a good mask should really be doing both jobs at once, with a good seal. Which means no beards and headbands. My understanding since the beginning of this pandemic was that everyone was going to get this bug, it was just a matter of "flattening the curve". So, why are we still talking about masks? I sometimes fear that the right has turned it into a political issue, and in response the left has ALSO turned it into a political issue, instead of a rational one.
However, I didn't see that in HN discussions. Now it seems goal posts have shifted, and HNers also expect inhalation protection. I'm assuming N95 masks have proven effective, so the bar was suddenly raised. Or something to that effect.
Once you're dealing with exposure to an environment filled with the fine airborne particles you need a well-fitted N95 or better to protect yourself. Although the virus itself is tiny it's traveling in particles closer to 1 micron which N95 type filters work great for. You can still be infected through your eyes but as far as I know that's very rare in normal non-hospital settings.
So that's self-protection, but why bother? It's true that at this point most people will be exposed eventually and with three shots of the mRNA vaccines people are unlikely to end up in the hospital. Several reasons. First, slowing rate of transmission will reduce overloading the hospital system. That saves a lot of collateral damage to people with otherwise treatable problems when they get turned away due to the crowds. Second, if you are unlucky enough to get sick enough to need a hospital bed you want that to happen when there is plenty of capacity, availability of drugs, etc. Third, the treatment regimens keep improving as the medical world learns better treatments and better drugs become available. Fourth, how sick you get appears to vary with how much virus you are exposed to. So even if your PPE is not perfect you can reduce your odds of serious effects when infected. Around half of people infected experience long-term lingering symptoms and there's evidence even in kids that number is not negligible.
It's pretty clear masks are effective both at an individual protection level and as a public health measure, I'm not sure how they got turned into such a political hot topic.
KN95s are a bit confusing to me in that, in my experience, they definitely don't have the common sense "this air is clearly being pushed through a filter" feel of breathing through a well-fitted FFP2/N95, but at the same time, don't give an obvious sense that there is a leak somewhere.
I find most N95s easier to breath in the many cloth masks simply because they actually hold their shape and don't collapse into your mouth every time you inhale.
For the past 2 years, haven't pro-mask people been telling anti-mask people to stop pretending that masks are so hard to breathe with?
It’s like wearing pants. You’d have a lot more mobility if you didn’t, but we do it anyway.
It’s fair to say that opponents have overblown the negatives, but there are negatives.
>In an open letter published today (July 6 2020), 239 scientists from 32 countries urge the World Health Organization and other bodies to address the potential for airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The authors write that a growing body of evidence suggests “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the virus spreads indoors through tiny aerosols—a finding that should be reflected in the WHO’s recommendations.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/scientists-urge-c...
How sad that it has taken this long to reach acceptance that you need a mask capable of filtering the air you breathe.
Several months, perhaps? The article you link to and the letter it references are both dated July 6 2020. Even now COVID-19 has only existed for a couple of years (not several).
It is impossible for anyone to have spent several years (by July 2020) doing anything relating to a specific virus or the consequential disease 7 months after the first known infection.
The Pacific Princess, where the virus continued to spread between passengers who were locked down in their cabins, was in January 2020, for instance.
Here's one of the scientists from President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS last year:
> I have had concerns that date back to april of 2020 about the concept of masking.
Needless to say it's a political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health, and yet at the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.
When you actually look at face cloth coverings, those cloth pieces of hang over your face, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.
In fact in studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking does or does not do.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
>Fitted particle-filtering masks like N95s are up to 75 times more effective at preventing infection with COVID-19 than surgical masks, according to a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://www.axios.com/n95-mask-protection-covid-958039c9-07f...
My child is too young to go to school. If my child was school age I'd likely unenroll this semester. If that somehow were not an option I'd send with an n95. Are you satisfied?
So one, you would need to know you were casually exposed (most folks don’t) And two, you would need to have a pretty good supply of masks carried with you at all times to replenish on every exposure.
1) not being able to touch your mucus membranes with your hands anymore
2) limiting the amount of air circulating near your face by limiting induced currents due to your inhale/exhale cycle
If I'm right, your conclusions about gaining the effectiveness of a simple cloth mask are completely off base.
Definitely curious if you happen to know of a study that looks at the mechanisms of protection for a non filtering mask!
If you can point me to a peer reviewed study extolling the virtues of cloth masking, I’ll read it. But pretty much all of the positive masking studies with any real statistical benefit of protection seem to be centered around n95 or surgical masks—worn correctly and disposed of after one use.
I don't need a peer review study to tell me to ignore the epsilon squared term when the epsilon term is already being argued to be marginal. If an article comes through claiming the inverse, that is surprising and worth communicating at large.
My point is that if a cloth mask is only partially effective for an incidental exposure than it must have been somewhat effective at a given moment, but due to virus size and cloth weaving…every moment that the particle didn’t reach your nasal passages due to that momentary chance then that virus still has a 67%-95% of entering you and infecting you every moment it is near you. So any incidental exposure becomes non-incidental.
Perhaps randomness and chance is magical. I always thought it wasn’t.
A) using incorrect concepts (moment in time? A 15 minute infection window turns into a 20 minute infection window)
B) simply irrelevant. Unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, cloth masks aren't trapping any relevant amount of virus
And I don't mean experts or lawmakers (that I know of), I mean in my area of the US, grocery stores and gas stations (sometimes) have signs saying put a plastic bag or gloves on your hands.
However, once you know the virus is fully airborne, you can focus on different things, like improving indoor ventilation in public spaces so you are constantly exchanging inside air for outside air.
We have HVAC systems that will help recover the ac/heat when you do this.
A lot of us were lied to about masks at the beginning of this, so it's not terribly surprising.
When we thought that Covid spread by the large droplets you spray out when you cough or sneeze, wearing a cloth mask to catch those droplets before they landed on people or surfaces that people will touch made sense.
I'd just like to say: the problem, and where the division (which causes bad health outcomes!) comes from is: deciding what your strategy is, and then trying to force other people to do the same thing.
If my strategy was: don't wear masks and hope to get omicron, and then I forced others to do the same thing, they would rightly be upset at me for it.
I'd be okay with the option, but not the requirement.
But we just have to imagine that, since it doesn't occur in reality, right? Vaccines actually have some verification before they are thrown into the world, they aren't just injecting Omicron into your blood stream (which, actually, many anti vaxxers would prefer, since they are paranoid about mRNA vaccines for some reason).
To me, I’ll wear a mask if required of a place I want to patronage, but will not at any other time. The efficacy vs discomfort equation is simply not worth it to me.
Dr. Gardam said, paraphrasing, N95 are good at filtering when you breathe in but when exhaling they are not so great (poor fit?). The medial masks were good filtering both in an out maybe not as good as the N95 for filtering inward of very small particles. N95 are best at filtering small particles but larger droplets can be filtered by either the surgical or N95 masks.
Eventually we agreed that I could come back with an N95 and wear their cosplay mask over my N95, which was acceptable per their official policy (and that it would be on me if I were to pass out). Why they couldn't lead with that option, or even post signs with examples of acceptable PPE combos, I don't know. What I do know is we're two years into this pandemic and ignorance continues to dominate at every level.
Confused that they enforcing wearing a cosplay mask.
All hospitals in my area make you take off your mask and wear a level 3 surgical mask.
If you want to double up, wear your own mask on top is fine.
Cosplayers are too busy fighting anti-maskers to see that the basic reality that each one of us is the main party responsible for our own safety, and from focusing on that dynamic will protecting others follow. Imagine if the politicization of respiratory protection had been around the red tribe wanting to wear P100 valved respirators, and the blue tribe wanting a combo that filtered output.
Practically I'm a little surprised by the cosplay under N95 requirement, as that makes it impossible to visibly inspect the cosplay and also makes the sealing of the N95 worse. Never mind having to step back outside after receiving the cosplay, to avoid demasking in a crowded area. Although I might be happier with it because I could wear my P100 half-face on top rather than not really being able to put a cosplay mask over the P100's side filters. shrug everywhere has their brokenness.
I have never heard of someone use cosplay/cosplayers that way.
Makes sense.
Off topic - where you from?
The most effective, cheapest solution was just to wear a properly fitted n95. Sure, vaccines good, retrovirals, yes, but this should have been done long ago. Given the airborne and aerosolized nature having a real mask would have gone a long way to reduce community spread. This was a known thing, not new science.
I think the issue is sadly political, once masks became a lightning rod, the idea of more mask guidance or more restrictive masks became a problem. Hard enough to get people wearing masks in the first place.
source: Medcram https://youtu.be/vN30emwcNS4
P100 is a comparable grade to HEPA, both 99.97%. Respirators are more comfortable and seal well easier than purely fabric masks, they don't pull on your ears, they don't fog glasses, it's just silicone making contact with your skin instead of gross wet fabric so they are much more comfortable. They are also much more effective for smoke and pollen.
I wear a 3M model 7502 face piece with model 7093 filters.
Remember when the feds were confiscating the current masks in transit? You can’t just overnight increase the production of these things.
No wrong. The CDC has written guidelines here in favor of exhalation valves on N95 masks (which are filtered), the guidelines specifically recommend against not forbidding such masks if they are NIOSH-approved N95 ones:
from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...
My N95 filtering facepiece respirator has an exhalation valve. Is that ok? Will it protect both me and others?
Yes, an N95 filtering facepiece respirator will protect you and provide source control to protect others. A NIOSH-approved N95 filtering facepiece respirator with an exhalation valve offers the same protection to the wearer as one that does not have a valve. As source control, findings from NIOSH research suggest that, even without covering the valve, N95 respirators with exhalation valves provide the same or better source control than surgical masks, procedure masks, cloth masks, or fabric coverings. In general, individuals wearing NIOSH-approved N95s with an exhalation valve should not be asked to use one without an exhalation valve or to cover it with a face covering or mask. However, NIOSH-approved N95 respirators with an exhalation valve are not fluid resistant. Therefore, in situations where a fluid resistant respirator is indicated (e.g., in surgical settings), individuals should wear a surgical N95 or, if a surgical N95 is not available, cover their respirator with a surgical mask or a face shield. Be careful not to compromise the fit of the respirator when placing a facemask over the respirator.
[end quote]
Many countries will require N95 masks (many of which have valves, so that is acceptable). So on a plane from Amsterdam to Beijing, you might have to switch masks during the flight (because the Dutch, for reasons, don't allow valves in favor of less effective cloth/surgical masks, while the Chinese...for reasons, require N95 masks that might have valves).
I do however use a 7502 with 2297 filters for high exposure and GVS Elipse for medium exposure like grocery store.
I use the 60923 for this purpose, but it's a bit loud in appearance.
The courts even prevent you from seeing your own children:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-judge-suspend...
I'm far from an antivax supporter but reckless obedience to the degrading of liberty would have me looking elsewhere quick
This whole pandemic has demonstrated abject failure of our institutions. It was very easy to pin it on a terrible micromanager whose most intelligent moment was brainstorming that people could inject bleach, but it's not like the CDC did an about face when the "experts" were left to their own devices either.
High quality N95+ masks and face shields should have been distributed door to door by USPS as soon as the manufacturing capacity became available, as well as testing kits that they're just finally rolling out (credit where credit is due), hand sanitizer, and whatever other Covid paraphernalia I'm forgetting from the past two decades^Wyears. Using any of these things is inconvenient and uncomfortable, but the point of leadership is to show people the right direction, ask them to do the work, and to acknowledge that it is indeed work. Instead we got pandering to irresponsibility and performative altruism, and laissez faire choose-your-own-solipsistic-adventure - want to sew ersatz masks from old shirts and pretend you're not in an industrialized society? Cool! Want to pretend to fight creeping totalitarianism by assaulting a grocery clerk? Also cool! Unsurprisingly, Covid Likes This :thumbsup:
One of the last things we need is even less faith in our public institutions and general society, but downplaying the scope of the failure out of tribal loyalty isn't the right thing either.
But when a fire alarm goes off and everybody leaves a building, you're not being clever by staying. Sometimes conditions change and it really does make individual sense for everybody to move in the same general direction.
As I've gotten older, and especially as hammered home by the pandemic, I've accepted that groupthink is unfortunately going to exist regardless. As such, it may as well be nudged towards positive ends like encouraging people to protect themselves and their community, rather than destructive ends like denying that a problem exists.
Staying behind had actually been the smart move.
For something that has wasted perhaps ten cumulative hours of my life, deferring to commonly accepted wisdom seems like the smarter choice.
Edit: Found a few industrial retail sites, I'll try them out:
- https://www.sycorp.ca/safety/respirator/3m-aura-9205-n95-nio...
- https://egrimesdirect.com/products/3m-aura-particulate-respi...
- https://www.internationalsafety.com/skus/3m-9205-box-3m-aura...
- https://apexlabco.com/products/single-pack-3m-n95-respirator...
Edit: Found a decent list of retailers here https://www.finder.com/ca/buy-n95-face-mask-online
You can checkout London drugs if they have one in your area.
The fit is nice.
Huge amount of n95 orders is leading to alot of backorders.
Also Uline has the the 3m 8210
KN95 can be found in Asian supermarkets quite frequently.
One tool is a candle test, where people put on a mask and try to blow out a lit candle. If the candle can be blown out while the mask is worn, it’s a likely indication that aerosols can go through, according to Aaron E. Glatt, MD, MACP, FIDSA, FSHEA, chair of the department of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau.
“If you can blow out a candle, that means that’s a relatively flimsy mask, it’s going to be a single ply, and it basically has holes in it," Glatt told Verywell. "If your breath can go through it, that means something else can come in as well."
I do think it's good that people learn to detect fakes, but the challenge in a way is trying to order 20 of them. You don't want to wait a week for the order to show up, and discover you now have 20 fakes.
Over earloops are generally consumer version with minor difference.
N95 aura or true n95 are all headstrap
Omicron can't be meaningfully stopped, but it can be rate limited.
From the spreading perspective, even if you are healthy and vaccinated, you might have it and you might be spreading it. Especially with omicron variant.
And from the catching perspective, even if you're careful, vaccinated, boosted, etc. you still can catch it and get sick. Maybe it's not going to kill you, but it turns you into a potential spreader.
I’ve settled on classic nurse masks for now because they seal well around the nose and dont cause my glasses to fog.
It’s time to admit defeat and plan for what that looks like and stop pretending like anything at this point is going to make this virus go away. It’s here, it’s going to kill about one person in a thousand of those left, and if you choose to not get vaccinated that’s your choice and if you’re not young you’re taking a significantly higher risk of death.
But unless you work in healthcare or care for the elderly you’re not going to do anything but slightly delay exposure to your neighbors because the new variant is so easily spread.
The moral issue is passed, the chance to save anyone but the most vulnerable is passed, and any efforts are only going to marginally delay the inevitable. You want to gamble and not get vaccinated, go for it.
People will be in denial about this for a long time and beating the morality drum for a long time, but in a hundred years a covid strain will still be around and people will be telling their children about how great grandpa got covid in 2020, like I just heard tell of my great grandfather getting the 1918 flu preparing to go out to WWI getting treated in a bed outside because there was no hospital space. That flu is still around this century and covid still will be next century.
Sorry, we lost, there are still going to be consequences but I can’t imagine anything changing regardless of what you do besides a matter of weeks of when you get exposed. Fauci said as much, that everyone being exposed was now more or less unavoidable.
If you disagree what long term changes do you think can be realistically achieved by doing anything whether or not it’s practical?
- Hospital capacity is limited, staff burnout is real, and delayed treatments for non-Covid conditions are occurring. Given Omicron's tremendously fast spread, slowing spread even slightly helps.
- Infection isn't an all-or-nothing strategy. Innoculum, that is, the amount of virus you're exposed to, matters, and a smaller innoculum may reduce severity of symptoms.
- There remain many individuals who are immunocompromised or who have multiple risk factors for Covid.
- Though Omicron's severity is lower, it is not zero. Looking at South Africa, it appears that net total deaths are about 1/3 of previous Covid waves. South Africa's peak was early enough that we're probably seeing peak mortality about now.
- Further mutation of Covid is likely, and the more cases and more variants of virus are spread, the more likely those become. We've seen variants with greater severity (Delta) and greater infectiousness (Omicron). A variant combining those traits would be highly unfortunate.
There are countries which are likely to see major Omicron outbreaks. I've been watching India's new daily cases double every 3 days since January 4, growing from 59k cases then to 533k on 13 January, pretty much precisely as I'd projected. (I was, and am, very much hoping for that trend to break. Given India's pretty clear testing and data reporting issues, hitting a numeric target may not be especially significant. But the point remains that in a country of 1.4 billions, even with a relatively low incident fatality rate, India could be looking at 20--80 million deaths. More if healthcare services are overwhelmed.
Access to, and proper protocols for masks, could help.
There isn't a zero risk of any number of more dangerous things. This is no longer high risk, at all, for reasonably healthy people who are vaccinated and boosted. (those who aren't are foolish)
I'm willing to wait out the surge, but after that, I am hoping those in my community (bay area.... which doesn't have overcrowding of hospitals because of high vaccination rate) are ready to get rid of the masks and get on with normal life.
This is especially the case for countries which have to date managed to contain earlier Covid variants. Australia comes to mind.
Or China.
Masking to slow spread seems highly apposite.
Good times for advice like this for masking were a month ago and a year ago.
It is time to admit defeat and act like it’s too late for those kinds of growth mitigations.
In the US, a few (mostly east-coast) states have peaked. West, central, and mountain, and south, not so much.
Given limited services and long distances in rural states, masking would be highly advisible.
(Numerous highly-advisable actions have, of course, been soundly rejected.)
Both the practice and empirical data on its efficacy would be useful in parts of the world Omicron has not yet hit.
I do agree the advice would have been far more useful 4--6 weeks ago. Call your local Timelord.
Whenever hospitals start deferring procedures, it's not great for health outcomes. One might hope that one outcome of this pandemic is more spare capacity in hospitals, but that's going to take a long time, if it happens.
On a personal note, I don't like being sick, so if I can delay or prevent that, wearing a mask isn't awful. And I don't like large gatherings, so I'm not missing out on much by avoind those.
This isn’t defeat though? Winning doesn’t mean nobody gets the virus, it means we’re minimised ham and impact as much as possible, where possible. We might all get it, but there’s no reason for us all to get it at the same time and cause undue stress on our hospital system.
> really don’t see the point unless you’re immune compromised or at some other high risk
Because I have an active lifestyle and don’t really feel like risking chronic fatigue or lung damage unnecessarily? Because I have things I want to do, and having to sit at home isolating and being sick impacts my social life negatively? Because even if it’s not covid, I’m kinds of liking not sharing the air with that random person on public transport with some infection?
The approach here should be cultural. Encouraging employees to not go to work when they are sick should be normalized. Labor laws should be revised to include more sick leaves factoring in how prevalent COVID-19 has become. Public spaces should be retrofitted and redesigned to allow for a better ventilation. Controlling what mask people wear and how they wear is just too difficult to implement. Government must shift their focus away from the action of its citizens to the environment the citizens participate in.
When I read comments like yours, I am very glad that I decided to stay in Japan at the start of COVID-19 instead of returning to US. Here majority of people wear masks, irrespective of type and fit, when they leave home and take off only after returning home. Only taking off mask when absolutely needed such as eating or drinking.
Wearing mask is all about reducing viral load rather than preventing infection completely.
I hope for better critical thinking and logical reasoning and discourse on forums like HN. But I guess I have become too old and jaded.
The peak happens when a high enough proportion of people have already been exposed it had it that the virus runs out of new people to infect. Because the growth rate for this variant is so fast, the post peak drop will be very quick.
Population dynamics with exponential growth are like that.
It seems like the only thing left to do is chase the impossible or just accept the situation and move on.
If you want to wear a mask, go ahead, you do you. But the time is quickly approaching where a government telling me I have to is going to be far beyond their legitimate purview.
I think our best chance is faster vaccine cycles and better targeting of the sequences to impede transmission.
The mRNA vaccines also seem to confer a significant level of durable cellular immunity against all variants, although they also don't reliably prevent infections.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
We likely never had this opportunity; omicron spreads too well and evades existing vaccines too well. The good vaccines are down to ~50% effective, and omicron is 2x as contagious as delta. There was a short window between vaccines getting approved and delta that heroic vaccination campaign could have worked. And I mean heroic. It would have literally had to be 90% of the world population in a few months. Factories never could have scaled to the point, there'd never be enough public trust to hit 90%, and too many countries are incapable of running a campaign like this.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surve...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
There's a fair amount of uncertainty but stack it up the likely negative outcomes and I wouldn't let my unvaccinated kid catch COVID if I had a reasonable way to achieve that.
I am rapidly becoming in the "vaxxed and done" camp.... happy to get vaccinated and boosted as many times as necessary. But after two years, this is no longer an emergency situation for the vaccinated. It is simply not a big risk anymore. All kinds of things are bigger risks.
I'm willing to wear a mask for a few more weeks but after that (when they say the surge will be mostly over), there is no point anymore.
My new year's resolution is that our institutions have until the end of the Greek alphabet to figure this out. I'll get boosters, but don't expect me to mask up for the Aleph-Tango-Susan-93 variant in 2024. Come hell or high water. I'm burying loved ones due to non-covid afflictions. If we blew it, we blew it. We can at least live while we die.
Within 10 minutes you'd probably have discrimination claims from angry hipsters, barbershops and a dozen different religious groups or something.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/FacialHairWmask11282017...
When I was an EMT we got fitted for them in case we had to transport patients with tuberculosis or other aliments.
Firefighters and other emergency responders are generally required to shave for this reason.
Yes. A little stubble, less so. (I'd wager it's still fairly effective at keeping the wearer's germs in, though.)
> When I was an EMT we got fitted for them in case we had to transport patients with tuberculosis or other aliments.
Sure, but as with the oil worker example, that's a slightly different scenario than a member of the general public going to the grocery store.
It speaks volumes, at least. Heckuva job, Brownie.
I'm still flummoxed by Fauci's -- let's call it -- equivocation about masks being pointless, for which he later apologized and explained he was trying to conserve the supply of N95s for medical personnel. There is certainly an admixture of manipulating the public to achieve a desired outcome (rather than leveling with the populace) and gross incompetence and callous indifference at play.
If they really believed it were that serious, I hardly trust they'd do any more than cover their assess.
When they decided they had to skip Xi variant, it was made pretty clear that the patricians have no intention of leveling with the plebs again.
There is no longer any reason to wear a mask or stay away from others if you are immunized, unless you are actually sick.