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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

I know a guy who still wears a half-face respirator every time he's in public even for just a second. I think at this rate he'll be wearing it for the rest of his life, unable to accept a new level of risk and move on with his life. I'd like to help him but I see no possible way, he's convinced that I and 99% of the rest of the public are suicidally insane like people who play literal russian roulette.

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I get your perspective, but everybody has their own risk assessment and comfort, and yours is no more necessarily right than his :).

Some people still wear masks, some people still take booster shots, some people people still wash their hands, some people sneeze into elbows, some people stay inside, etc. Others may not do some or any of those things.

"Accept new risk" and "this is the new normal" is as validly executed by him as by yourself. (Also, honestly, wearing a mask in public may not be as life changing/limiting as it seems. I know people who haven't stopped complaining about seatbelts for 3 decades now, but it's a habit that doesn't bother me :).

> I get your perspective, but everybody has their own risk assessment and comfort

Yeah I get that, but with him it seems very out of character. He likes to ski and is a general aviation pilot; these aren't low risk activities. I hope he comes to term with the new normal soon because he's still young and spending the rest of his life paranoid behind a mask would be truly sad.

For him, the reward of those activities possibly justifies the risk in his mind.

I sometimes also mask in public, because it bothers me approximately zero.

But again, the risk stats and perspectives and acceptance may differ. You may need to work on yourself to develop empathy for your and his personal choices and stop thinking of him as "sad", more than work on him and try to "help" him :-). The word "paranoid" seems out of place as well - the risk is actual and demonstrable.

For example, skiing is fun. Flying airplanes is fun. And general aviation is quite safe for those who take it seriously. So while there's risk, there's also a reward. And that risk / reward ratio may be what they choose to personally accept.

There's no reward for getting covid! There's no fun in it! And many people either don't want to get it at all (given the risk of either bad immediate symptoms or long term impact), or had bad experience and don't want to recur, or don't want to contribute to chain and infect others yet.

Heck... I'm persuading myself to start wearing mask again (the only reason I stopped is that I work from home, but have a 2yo in daycare and 4yo in kindergarten which massively outweighs any risk I bring into house).

(I do want to ask though - are they wearing like n95 or surgical mask... Or as you mentioned in original post a full painting-sryle respirator with two big round filters etc? That, I'll agree, is a significant comittment if they don't have significant personal risk factors)

In my experience, a half-face respirator is more comfortable than a FFP2 (European standard similar to N95) or surgical mask. They have soft silicone seals, and bigger filters and exhalation valves that minimize breathing resistance. If you want to reduce your chances of getting COVID-19 it seems the obvious choice.

> He likes to ski and is a general aviation pilot; these aren't low risk activities.

So… spending micromorts on worthwhile activities, rather than on queueing at the supermarket? Sounds pretty consistent to me.

TIL about micomorts :). That is fascinating!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Literally micro-optimizing your risks? Yeah, that sounds totally normal dude. Make sure to wear a helmet everywhere you go just in case a tree branch bonks you on the head or something.

> He likes to ski and is a general aviation pilot; these aren't low risk activities.

So? These are situations where he is kinda in control no? Out in public, how much control does he have about people, with or without symptoms, going to the same shop?

I mask in close indoor situations. I am not paranoid. Why do you think he is paranoid?

I like to woodwork and walk.

Spending 3 weeks in bed with COVID before the vaccines existed made me super risk adverse to people and especially people coughing. You have no concept of how long a week in bed is, let alone 3 of them. The long nights in pain. The long days just wishing you could get through the enormous headache to rest and sleep. The powerless feeling that you can't even sit up enough to do anything you have previously enjoyed. Heck, I still remember my son bringing in my copy of Cyberpunk that just came out and I didn't even have the energy to turn on my laptop on my lap to install it. Even when I got COVID again 2 years later and it was just a couple days in bed, I get super pissed off when people belittle it and the people who try to stay away from it.

Just last Saturday night, I was out shopping and some lady was walking around with a "smoker's cough". I tried to stay away and not go back into places she had been. When I got in line to check out and got stalled in front from a lady with a huge cartload and the cougher got behind me and started hacking her brains out, I just abandoned my cart and left.

I am not spending that many days of my life being sick again like that if I can ever help it. So when I say that YOU NEED TO REPRIORITIZE YOUR EMPATHY. Take that to mean that if this wasn't on a forum that I need to talk nice-nice, I would not be talking nice-nice.

if I was in his shoes and I'd probably be worried about getting long covid and that stopping me from skiing or piloting.

The symptoms of long covid can be pretty debilitating and a lot of people just don't get better.

> For some people, Long COVID can last weeks, months, or years after COVID-19 illness and can sometimes result in disability.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

Also. I think it's rational for myself to wear a mask because getting COVID was one of the worst experiences of my life. It's like if I burned my hand on a stove and someone tried to convince me burning your hand on the stove is normal so no need to take precautions.

It was bad for me too. But I assume that the next infection won't be nearly as bad, because of built up immune response, several vaccine injections, and current variants being much milder than the initial one.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case

> Compared with those infected once, patients who were reinfected showed that they were more prone to complications in various organ systems and more likely to be diagnosed with long COVID than those infected only once. These findings were consistent regardless of vaccination status.

> For those who had COVID-19 two times or more, the data appeared to show a:

> Two times increased risk of death > Three times increased risk of hospitalization > Two times increased risk of long COVID and chronic fatigue > Three times increased risk of heart issues and blood clotting disorders

https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/do-repeat-covid-infections...

I suspect there's a lot of individual variation too.

COVID for me was exceptionally mild with the only annoyance being the total lost of smell for ~12 days. Otherwise, the dry cough wasn't any worse than the one I get when my allergies are in full force. Some people are just going to get worse cases and others won't. That's going to impact personal risk assessment.

My mother had an even milder case of COVID than I did (no cough), but RSV almost sent her to the hospital this past Thanksgiving. For all the fixation on COVID we tend to forget that there are other virus that can be lethal to certain demographics (e.g. advancing age).

This is an odd hot-take for an active globally invasive and life altering virus.

That person has assessed their risk level and determined that their community's disregard for their personal risk, negatively impacts their personal model. Therefore they have to use a different device to mitigate their risk.

Seems pretty logical, matches with known science, with a minor exception that the half face respirator may not offer greater protection vs a well fitting* N95/KN95

* well-fitting being the crucial note there.

"a guy"? I see people like this every day...and I'm one myself. Not outdoors, but when I enter a building.

We don't yet know the long term sequelae of an epithelial infection, nor do we know why about 10% of those infected appear to get "long covid". Why should I risk it when the burden of reducing the chance is negligible?

I also wear a seatbelt.

"I know a guy", as we grew up down the road from each other and I was a groomsman at his wedding. We've known each other for 30 years. This isn't some random guy I see on the street. I see maybe one in a hundred strangers in public still wearing a mask, which is why I mentioned 99% of the public. That's my estimate for how many people gave up masks. I take it you are among the 1% of those who keep it up.

It used to be 80% of people didn't wear a seatbelt. By your logic the 20% that did should have had someone try to "help them" be normal.

> It used to be 80% of people didn't wear a seatbelt.

A few years ago, 80% of people who wore a mask. Which way are these things trending? Wearing a seatbelt has become the normal attitude towards car risk. Wearing a mask was briefly the normal attitude towards risk, but has since become [again] an abnormal attitude towards risk.

If you're so keen to be abnormally safe and think everybody else is being unreasonable, why don't you get your three-point seatbelt replaced with a five-point harness? It's established well characterized technology that undeniably makes you safer You'll definitely be an odd man out rejecting social trends so expect to have people wonder why you're so paranoid. But by your logic you shouldn't care about that.

I don't understand what point you are trying to make. Are people with masks hurting you in some way?

> Are people with masks hurting you in some way?

they are making the people that want to pretend the virus is just something you have to live with instead of taking precautionary measures feel bad.

Oh, thanks! I will now straighten my shoulders and walk with pride, knowing I am repressing some busybodies who want to butt into my business.

Who said they're hurting me? People who live in fear are hurting themselves. I don't care, except in the case of my friend. I don't like to see my friend hurt himself, is that so radical? Radical to you maybe.

I think you have to understand that to your friend and a large number of people wearing a mask isn't hurting him.

I don't know where you live, but I live it's somewhere between 5 and 10%, asymmetrically distributed by age and social group.

I still attend scientific conferences this year that require 100% masking indoors and proof of vaccination to attend in person.

At my work all the scientist (mainly microbiologists) are still masking indoors, not just in the lab.

I don't care a whit if other people mask or not, but I do. I don't understand what kind of "help" you have in mind, but would genuinely be interested in learning.

One of the first proponents for hand washing and hygiene during medical practice wound up dying in a mental asylum.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7240806

What's considered normal socially is not always what's supported by the evidence at hand, and sometimes what that supports is well outside of the acceptable range of discussion or behavior at the time.

Are you truly concerned that this person has made an error in judgment based on evidence or do they just make you uncomfortable for breaking norms? Are you motivated to post about this because you've considered their reasons and think they've made a harmful, critical error in judgment or are you just seeking approval of your normalcy bias? Do you know enough about their health situation or their family's to be sure that their risk calculation is unreasonable?

The best course of action if you're absolutely sure that there's no threat to you is to ignore them and move on with your life.

What you just demonstrated is called Survivor Bias or Survivorship Bias:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

what about all the people who challenged what was "considered normal socially" and actually were proven wrong? One never hears about those.

I'm not sure what kind of strawman you're building here. Are you thinking that I'm arguing that all or even most norm-breakers are proven correct? I am arguing only that some norm breakers turn out to be prescient and thus overconfidence based on norms alone is treacherous and bound to be proven wrong at times as we learn more, and Normalcy Bias often prevents people from adequately assessing that risk. Here's another wikipedia link!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

A "strawman" ? you said, "One of the first proponents for hand washing and hygiene during medical practice wound up dying in a mental asylum."

Maybe if you'd added, "of course, lots of people who wound up dying in a mental asylum are forgotten, with good reason" then I would've had nothing to say.

As it was, you cited an example as though that proved anything.

> what about all the people who challenged what was "considered normal socially" and actually were proven wrong?

There are not many of those, because of herd mentality. (Edit: I mean Normalcy Bias, thanks "notabee")

If a person is unusual enough, they are dismissed as cranks without any sort of proof required.

This isn't even a response to anything.

notabee held up one example, which is relevant only if the argument was "everyone who challenges the norms is insane." That would be a counterexample, and only one is required.

as for "There are not many of those" I don't even know what to say. Of course those people were forgotten and there are no citations, because they weren't newsworthy. That was the whole point.

I don't wear a mask, but you should not judge. Probably some are people at a higher risk than you are - they might look "normal" and alright, but they don't have to tell you if they have heart diseases, diabetes or whatever.

There's a good chance your buddy has an immune disease or something along those lines. Or knows someone who does.

What's the harm? Especially when long COVID can cause long term effects that can cause professional harm (ie, an existential threat)

> I'd like to help him

Help yourself by minding your own business.

You know that's self-defeating advice right? You telling me to mind my business is you not minding your own business. You clearly don't live by this principle, and I won't either. I don't subscribe to the kind of radical individualism you are promoting, and you don't either. Nobody should, we live in a society. Everybody has a responsibility to speak their mind when they see somebody else behaving foolishly. You do so, you freely share your perspective on the way other people live and so do I.

I'm not telling you to do anything - are you hung up with how English uses second person possessive adjectives to communicate? I don't know if I have a solution to that.

"behaving foolishly" is a judgement call you made on someone else, for an act that doesn't really affect you directly. You yourself are allowing it to affect you - it seems to be overpowering you, maybe ask yourself why you allow it to. You do have a choice: just put it down. Keep carrying a load of heavy things, and you're not going to go anywhere very far. It is your choice. Have a good one.

If there's literally no downside for him to wearing a mask, why do you even care?

I thought the anti-mask revolution was because they didn't want to be "forced" but now nobody is forcing them and they still can't shut up about masks worn willingly by others.

It was always about forcing a consensus about what's normal, same with so much other human antagonization of outgroups.

easily one of my biggest annoyances about people online who say mask wearers in 2023 are sheep. There's maybe 5-10% of people masking when i'm on public transit or shopping and that's a pretty big maybe.

If I was sick, or if there was a meaningful sickness in the air, I would wear a mask.

But I wouldn't say there is zero downside to wearing a mask, atleast the way 98% of people wore one during covid. (The same one all day, if not a week, touching it, putting it in pockets, around your neck, on your greasy forehead, so on).

I used to wear a mask because allergies when I mowed the lawn or even dirtbiking during certain seasons. It absolutely reduces your ability to take it oxygen easily. I get winded a lot easier wearing a mask. Is that meaningless to children wearing them all day at school? Idk.

"It absolutely reduces your ability to take it oxygen easily."

This is absolutely false. There is very strong evidence that masks do not effect gas exchange. One example of many: https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/face-masks-may-inc...

Masks do make your lung muscles work slightly harder, but there's nothing wrong with that.

This is only talking about low oxygen demand scenarios.

"Each participant performed a six-minute walk test"

I've personally tested (out of curiosity) bicycling performance while wearing a half-face respirator that's barely noticeable during walking. Both measured speed and subjective difficulty were severely affected during high intensity exercise.

That sounds reasonable, but even then it doesn't mean someone shouldn't wear a mask. Their performance would be decreased, but it doesn't mean that it would be medically dangerous (they would not have low blood oxygenation, for example).

I'm currently dating a 6th grade school teacher. She said when they returned to school with masks the kids were for sure more lethargic and even woozy more often than she had ever seen in her 10 years teaching. As masks were removed over time, it went away more and more.

There are lots of other explanations for that. For example, it could be confirmation bias. It could also be that a lot of the kids had long COVID and the effects are wearing off over time.

Makes sense, since we have zero proof of any real reason, let's go with the ones with even less obvious explanations.

Children and long covid? Children barely got covid in the first place... Long covid? In so many kids a teacher could notice? Give me a break.

It occurred to me that cycling primarily involves heart, lungs, and legs. You train all of them simultaneously, so they'll naturally have balanced performance. If you selectively impair one of the three, it will become a bottleneck. However, it seems to me that the lungs have the easiest job (e.g. cycling is easier than tasks like inflating balloons), so it should be possible to recover almost all the lost performance by training with the respirator on, bringing the lungs back into balance with the heart and legs.

What's the point of that when there's no need to wear a respirator in the first place?

The point is to acknowledge a limitation of my testing.

Your first sentence and last sentence basically contradict each other....

It means your diaphragm has to do more work to open and close your lungs. However you’re still able to get plenty of oxygen.

I guess my personal experiences mowing lawns and dirtbiking in a mask are meaningless and false. I got it. I just have to do more work, but it's no harder, and I can still get 'plenty' of air, as long as I don't need more than totally sedentary.

People care because it impinges on the mass denial all of all the death and harm inflicted during the pandemic, as well as the ongoing dangers and unknowns of our new, post-COVID reality.

This isn’t uncommon in history, but it unfortunately tends to take a few cycles of mass death before humans adapt their culture and social behavior to the world as it exists (vs. how it was before or they wish it could be). We’re still early in this reality for COVID. It took decades for the reality of HIV/AIDS to change behavior around things like testing, condom usage, prophylactic drugs etc. Comparably, we’re in the like mid-1980s of COVID, even though it’s killed more people than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+ years.

Some of the more concerning research this year has been the immune dysfunction showing the same CD4/8 inversions and progression towards immune deficiency. Initially the goal was to look at the immune systems of Covid Long haulers but they had a hard time finding controls as a lot of the people who were apparently well were also developing immune issues. Both of the studies I read had to pay people who have never had Novid and put in substantial mitigations to ensure they didn't catch it to participate in the research.

This might not be all that dissimilar to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in impact on the sufferers other than the immune effects are showing up faster and its airborne and 95% of the population has had it. I sure hope it turns around at some point and it doesn't become C-AIDS, but it explains why Flu and RSV and sepsis et el are going crazy at the moment, immune systems are in bad shape.

Very few people are dying of COVID-19 anymore. There's no valid reason to change human culture and social behavior just because we now have five endemic coronaviruses instead of four.

I’m not sure why you think this. It’s on track to kill another 200K people this year. Before it’s emergence, this would’ve been considered quite bad for any other disease:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...

It's on track to kill 200 thousand people this year in the United States alone. It's likely that millions will die this year worldwide, and tens of millions will become disabled to some extent by long covid. The usual response is "this is a small number compared to the total population," but it's still millions upon millions of people. Health care systems around the world are already stretched thin, and the increased burden caused by covid will only make things worse.

Completely agree. Compared to the response to other diseases that have killed far fewer people, its quite wild how much this has been normalized.

I know several people who continue to wear masks for completely non-health related reasons. Perhaps he is trying to avoid interacting with you specifically.

What if he’s right?

when almost everyone has already had the disease and was able to observe what it did to them -- which is the state we're at -- it's pretty hard to say that everyone needs to protect themselves.

I know what COVID will do to me, because I had it already. He's not right. I was vaccinated, and the vaccine didn't work (it didn't prevent me from getting ill, get out of here with the 'better outcomes' bullshit, I'm healthy and COVID was still a flu-like illness for me, and I'm convinced the vaccine I was promised was 'safe and effective' did little or nothing) and masks didn't matter.

It's like asking why we don't go around with masks on 24/7/365 to protect ourselves from the flu. Well, I've had the flu, and it's unpleasant, but it isn't worth the many downsides of proper N95 masking, and anything less than proper N95 masking is pointless.

Most of the people I see wearing masks in public now are wearing completely ineffective cloth masks and a large number of them STILL wear them under their noses. These people are not thinking critically or looking at data. They're still just trapped in the media fear cycle from 2020.

I would argue you now know what COVID did to you that one time. You do not know what COVID will do to you.

yeah there have been studies showing repeat infection having an increasingly deleterious effect on your immune system. we don't know the long term harms associated with it.

I don't think anybody has answered the question "is every COVID infection an individual gets going to give the same level of response"? IE, will you get COVID and then get better, but later get COVID and end up with Long COVID symptoms? Is it random every time you are infected?

At least 3 big studies looking at this, the most recent of them on 150k people, so very robust numbers. Subsequent infections do increasing damage and each infection increases your chance of developing Long Covid and not recovering. People with existing new symptoms after a Covid infection also get worse very often.

Rather than building immunity we are accruing damage and the evidence underpinning it from the VA study and the more recent ones is massive.

Well, if that's true, it would be really bad (in a simple model it means basically everybody gets infected repeatedly and gets more and more damage and then most of the population has long covid). I am not hearing much concern this from my larger medical community.

Large numbers in a study is good, but if the study design isn't right, then large numbers won't make up for that. It's absurdly hard to really conclude reliably.

For example, from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/well/live/covid-reinfecti... """For many people who get Covid multiple times, subsequent infections will be as mild as or milder than their first, emerging data shows, likely because of partial immunity from previous infections, vaccination and the fact that the latest circulating variants generally cause less severe symptoms.""" which is much more consistent with my understanding of COVID repeat infections.

If you have a link to the VA study I will look at it.

The VA study in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3

"The Covid vaccine didn't have any effect onbthe severity of my infection" is the most utterly idiotic take if have read given the mountains of evidence that it massively reduces the severity of the infection

> I was vaccinated, and the vaccine didn't work (it didn't prevent me from getting ill, get out of here with the 'better outcomes' bullshit

How do you know it wouldn't have been worse without vaccination?

> I was vaccinated, and the vaccine didn't work

Thank goodness you got the vaccine! If your body hadn't been primed and ready to take on the real infection, imagine how much worse your body would have responded, and how much poorly you would have felt.

The existence of the human race says he is wrong..

Medieval Peasant 1: "I think we should stop dumping raw sewage near our water supply. It is probably making us all sick."

Medieval Peasant 2: "If it was making us all sick, how come only half of my children have died before the age of five?"

Don't forget to take your 10th injection and make sure to always have a dirty piece of paper in your pocket!

Right about what? That there is risk in taking off the mask? Of course he's right about that. Right about taking off the mask being suicidal, like playing russian roulette? He obviously isn't right about that.

There is no living with it. None. There's no immunity. Only continued sickness and damage. Masking is a protection to help stop the spread and if you are not helping, you're in the way of us trying to live without it.

You are spreading misinformation. There is immunity to COVID-19 just like any other respiratory disease.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

Our ancestors apparently lived with HCoV-OC43 after it killed a lot of people in the initial pandemic. That virus is quite similar to SARS-CoV-2 in terms of genetics and symptoms. And it's still around infecting people today. So relax, we'll (mostly) be fine.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/covid-1889

There is immunity in the sense of "the body is able to mount an immune response due to previous exposure." Early claims of immunity to infection didn't pan out, especially post-Delta. There are benefits to having immunity, but I believe they are often overstated. (I say this as someone who is currently wearing an N95 respirator around others 100% of the time, including around my partner and family).

Maybe they are immunocompromised or spend time with people that are? I had a friend that would never get together even after vaccines were plentiful and infection rates were low because he spends time around people that are.

This reminds me of a comment I saw there a few years ago, by an HN user who wears safety goggles every time they leave the house because they once almost walked into a low hanging tree branch.

Sadly, he'll lower risk of one thing and increase risks of another thing -- most likely, cancer.

27 years ago, there was a movie that perfectly shows that mindset:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114323/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5

If it wasn't covid, it'd be something else with people like your friend.

People who lived though the great depression often had trouble throwing things away, their kids sometimes would inherit the disorder and now we have hoarding television shows.

Prediction: in 30 years a TV crew will follow someone around who needs to go maskless in public for some reason (dental care, kiss wife on wedding day) as they struggle with it.

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