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Comment by empath-nirvana | Hacker News Reader

My general opinion of it is that lock downs at the beginning were essential for slowing the spread of the disease and allow the hospitals to prepare for it, but there was a point where the virus was endemic anyway that all the masking and isolation protocols were doing more harm than good.

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I will agree that isolation for long periods could have had some negative impacts, but masking never did and never will.

The way things are going here in N America soon we’ll be wearing masks outdoors for the smoke and indoors for the pandemics!

Exactly, case in point is the abundance of mask wearing in Asian countries. They seem to go about their lives just fine.

They were doing it even before covid, although not to the same extent. I don't know why people have such a problem if someone wants to protect themselves from airborne illness.

If someone harassed you or a loved one for wearing a mask, that person is an asshole. If someone harassed you or a loved one for not wearing a mask, that person is also an asshole (caveat outside hospitals or care homes for vulnerable people).

Not even for children in the developmental stage of recognizing facial expressions?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628515/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6694...

So what are you arguing here, that there's a generation of children that can't recognize facial expressions? Seems unlikely to me.

That there’s a generation of children who were speech delayed and under socialized during critical development years.

A pretty uncontroversial view among those who had kids or worked with kids during that time.

Because of Covid science has proven masking is a waste of effort and resources. If you disagree you should really research the latest studies.

Here is a great starting point from 2021. https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask...

They are a failure. Globally. https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Global-Failure-COVID-Mandate...

One of the largest peer-reviewed European studies says... "These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage." https://www.cureus.com/articles/93826-correlation-between-ma...

Why? Because they are ineffective and were only introduced as a way to busy or "pacify" the masses.

Are you suggesting N95 masks provide no protection against airborne viruses?

I believe that is what pre-COVID masking in hospital settings has shown, yes. Possibly COVID is different from the flu.

But the difficulty for proving masking helps is: 1. If it only takes ~20 virions to get infected, then masking has to have a basically perfect filtering rate and be worn perfectly 100% of the time, neither of which is obvious. 2. With an endemic virus even if masks slow down spread they aren't going to reduce your likelihood of being infected overall.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm

> Consistent use of a face mask or respirator in indoor public settings was associated with lower odds of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result (adjusted odds ratio = 0.44). Use of respirators with higher filtration capacity was associated with the most protection, compared with no mask use.

I'll take a reduced risk, even if it's not perfect. Would you prefer to get covid one time, or five times? It's like arguing "why bother wearing a seatbelt, when it doesn't prevent injuries in accidents?"

Also, are you suggesting masking does not help with preventing influenza infection?

How did they account for people "doing something different" when wearing a mask? I.e. did they do a double-blind experiment where people wore masks that had intentional holes in them? So we can know that wearing a mask is the thing to do vs whatever it is that wearing a mask caused that person to do. I guess I'm asking or saying that this might have been some sort of "correlation is not causation" kind of thing?

I get that for whatever reason folks like yourself don't want to believe it, but trust me, masks work. Just ask anyone who works in asbestos abatement or BSL-2+ facilities.

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