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Comment by throwaway920102 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway920102

Serious question, what percentage of people working at a Google office wear a mask during work? I'm at an office in NYC of a smaller but household name tech company a few blocks away that used to do in-office mandatory nasal swab testing and masks at one point but now there are no precautions taken at all other than "if you're sick, you have to tell us and not come in".

Curious if there's been a big bifurcation of covid precautions at workplaces that I'm just unaware of (since I only regularly enter one office).

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> Curious if there's been a big bifurcation of covid precautions at workplaces that I'm just unaware of...

It's almost certain that nearly all workplaces are doing nearly nothing in regards to COVID precautions. (After all, (because of the nature of stock investment market) COVID precautions don't generate shareholder value, and certainly have negative ROI for their parent-company's/owner's/whatever real estate investment portfolio.)

The variance will be due to a mixture of each individual's level of acceptable risk, and how clued-in they are about their local COVID situation, and COVID more generally.

COVID is here to stay, it is now an endemic virus like influenza or the array of "common cold" viruses. You are free to wear a mask and socially distance for the rest of your life, I'm sure in 1930 you could still find holdouts from the influenza pandemic of 1917 still freaking out about it.

But society at large has just accepted it and is back to carrying on like normal.

This sentiment is just as useful as "Nah, don't bother wearing a condom or any other barrier protection, those STDs are just all over the place." would be in the mid-1980's (and onwards).

Just to be clear...your position is that wearing face masks when around people indoors is the prudent choice in perpetuity? I honestly don't understand your perspective. What is it about covid19 that makes that necessary as distinct from all the other communicable diseases that humans have passed around for millennia? Or is it your position that wearing masks was always the smart thing to do?

> What is it about covid19 that makes that necessary as distinct from all the other communicable diseases that humans have passed around for millennia?

Neurological risks of long covid combined with the fact that 1 in 5 covid infections result in long covid in some form.

If you are a knowledge worker, long covid should be terrifying.

Are you going to wear a mask indoors forever?

Masking/distancing doesn't have to be workplace mandated to be a good idea. Especially indoors.

At this point, it's personal choice to protect yourself against Covid (and the flu, colds, et.al.).

For reference, since this is a private company, I work for a federal agency. My department is roughly 80 people. No one wears a mask.

I work for a local government agency and only come in once or twice a month but I probably haven’t seen a mask in the office in over 2 years.

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