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Comment by o11c | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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