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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Based on my (admittedly) anectdotal evidence: there's been very little mask wearing for almost a year, and in that time a very large percentage of the people I've known have gotten various colds and/or COVID. (This summer, it seems almost everyone who hadn't had it yet, finally got it.)

The big shift happened when they lifted the mask mandate for schools here in early 2022: Our kids came back with a cold every 2 weeks, for approximately 2.5 months. That was not fun.

All of which is to say that it's not clear at all that we've been "storing up" a problem -- and if we have, much of it has already been let out of storage, so to speak.

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Counter-anecdote. I've never worn a mask, not once. I live in London - noteworthy population size and density. Still waiting to experience something resembling covid - I'll settle for a cold.

It would seem to me masks are precisely "storing up" the problem, especially with children and younger people who are not that much at risk. In retro, I guess masks and lockdowns only delayed the inevitable, which to some extent was justified, but I think as this article suggests, it has a price.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not that much at risk", the parent posted

> Our kids came back with a cold every 2 weeks, for approximately 2.5 months. That was not fun.

Noting also that frequent colds can lead to lifelong asthma conditions

Noting further that we really don't know the long-term effects of Covid on young people (both in the more frequent case of a speedy recovery and in the less frequent "long Covid").

Masks in school, and basic good hygiene (washing hands, having the school disinfect contact surfaces such as doorknobs multiple times per day, ...) go a long way to keeping everyone safe and healthy.

I haven’t looked at any data, but I wonder if the cold -> asthma correlation might be reversed, ie asthma as a condition leads to more vulnerability to colds

There is at least some pathogen->asthma correlation.

One of the things that doctors did was compare asthma rates between people who were already working from home to asthma rates of people who suddenly got thrown home due to Covid.

Asmtha went down more than expected in the people who suddenly got thrown home than in the folks who were already working from home. Since both groups faced roughly the same kind of environmental conditions (ie. pollution going down due to less driving), the excess decrease is posited to be purely due to pathogens.

Apparently, a not insignifcant chunk of asthma attacks are due to basically swimming around in continuous, low levels of pathogenic exposure.

Unless you’re proposing permanent masking in schools, masks were absolutely deferring the problem, leaving the cost to be paid all at once.

I certainly don't want healthy children wearing masks in school. What a dystopian notion. It's horrifying how some cruel and scientifically ignorant school authorities inflicted collective punishment on schoolchildren with mask mandates.

> It's horrifying how some cruel and scientifically ignorant school authorities inflicted collective punishment on schoolchildren with mask mandates.

Even if they did work, there is a cost / benefit that needed to be calculated that never was. All these “experts” myopically focused on one exact thing to the literal exclusion of everything else. And if you did raise objections or concerns you were (and still are) subject to a bunch of horrible retaliation.

After forcing kids to spend the lion's share of their childhood sitting at a desk the mask part seems trivial.

There were people (I’m people) saying this a long time ago. It became obvious that the only value of masking and lockdowns was to avoid short term hospital overflows and such measures should only have been in effect for a period of weeks during a few spikes. Otherwise the only thing anybody was doing is delaying when not if they got covid by up to two years.

But covid measures became irrational.

Well, there was also the possibility of delaying catching it until after the vaccine came out, but yes, 'flatten the curve' was all the rage.

Flatten the curve was all the rage until the curve was flattened and then it was just let’s keep doing this until…

Lockdowns continued over a year after the vaccine was available

Not sure why this is getting gray because this absolutely was the plan back in march of 2020. I recall UK government stating “everybody will get it, we just need to buy a few weeks to prepare hospitals for the hordes of sick patients”.

Then when those field hospitals closed virtually unused, instead of lifting restrictions and celebrating Covid wasn’t as bad as predicted, society decided to double down on the mitigations and continue them for two years.

That was one of purposes though. If every one caught COVID at the same time then hospitals would be overrun and some people would die as a result of lack of access. Masking and isolation flattened the curve to spread it out over longer time. Also allowed time for less deadly versions to overtake so when you did get it then it was less bad in general.

That was the stated justification communicated through structured propaganda, yes.

> In retro, I guess masks and lockdowns only delayed the inevitable

"Two weeks to slow the spread [while we build hospital capacity]" is what we were sold on, then it just sort of kept going and people forgot what lockdowns were meant for.

Isolation would be moderately effective, but the surgical procedure masks that people have been wearing are not effective against virus. N95 masks are needed for that, and they have not been available until recently.

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