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Comment by GenerocUsername | Hacker News Reader

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Mask in public if you are not feeling well.

Healthy people masking in public for extended portions of their life is untested and could cause new and unforseen issues.

Exposure to regular levels of background bacteria and virus keeps our immune system tuned. See War of the Worlds for pop culture level introduction. While the mask likely does not protect you from background virus and bacteria it can host all sorts of new growth right against your mouth and face.

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I had covid in 2021. I lost my sense of smell completely for a month, and I'm still not sure it's back to 100% pre-covid level. Now it looks like covid is going to be around for the rest of my life, but I don't want to have to go through that again every one or two years, losing more and more of my olfactory function after each infection. Until we get totally sterilizing nasal vaccines, I'm masking.

I’m sorry to break the news for you, but masking will not stop you from getting sick. It’s the other way around, it helps to reduce spreading when you are infectious.

Exactly.

These people are stuck adhering to the mask propaganda from 2020. The lies were 'justified' at the time because high adoption meant spreaders were covered.

Unless you have advanced medical grade masks and swap them regularly, surgical masks and other common covering do literally nothing to protect the wearer from COVID. Once spit particles are airborne, even N95s don't stop much. And yes I've seen the videos about static attraction. Which is maybe partially true for fresh masks, but the attic attraction fades quickly as your breath saturates the material with moisture

Not literally nothing. Some people will deliberately cough in your face, but most people will give you a little more personal space.

Rule of thumb: if you can smell what's around you – or what was around you 5 seconds ago – you're not protected from airborne biohazardous material. That said, there are masks that do protect you.

These statements on the aerosol filtration physics are simply incorrect.

What are you even talking about? I've been masking with 3M Aura masks for years now and only got three vax shots so far (because I barely ever leave the house and I've developed a fainting problem and anxiety in relation to a lot of situations now, I would get more shots if I could but w/e) and I haven't gotten sick yet. My father and my stepmother have gotten all of the vaccinations but my dad who leaves the house more often stopped masking after a while and he got sick and then got my stepmom sick (they live in another house separate from me). As far as I can tell masks are the only thing along with limiting exposure that actually stop spread.

Please, please allow me to ask you to interpret my words charitably and not as if I were calling you out or shaming you.

That masks only stop infectious spread is a commonly held view due to the documented and provable failure of public health organizations to ingest scientific knowledge, understand it, and act on it.

Masks in general—speaking of masks without any further specification of mask type or form—those do very little. What little they do is yes, mostly reducing spread I believe.

Masks that lie fully against the face without gaps and are made out of modern filtration materials, these stop the infectious aerosol no matter which way it’s going. In or out. Properly thought out masks fit for purpose basically stop COVID stone cold. These masks are known as “respirator masks” for some unfortunate reason.

The public health failure I mention is described here for instance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

Paper title: ”What were the historical reasons for the resistance to recognizing airborne transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic?”

That’s only true for cloth or medical masks. Well-fitting electro-static respirators (N95, FFP2, or better) do prevent you from getting infected with airborne diseases like Covid.

Here’s a recent meta-study coming to that exact conclusion:

> “[…] the subgroup showed a significant protective effect of using N95 respirators, particularly for medical staff.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...

It's still unclear to me that we should expect continuous reinfection with additive impact (eg, continuously losing olfactory function after each infection, as you say). That sounds fairly speculative.

> Exposure to regular levels of background bacteria and virus keeps our immune system tuned

> While the mask likely does not protect you from background virus and bacteria

If you believe the second statement, why does the first matter?

> it can host all sorts of new growth right against your mouth and face

Have you seen any studies on how quickly harmful growth can build up? I'd guess this to be pretty harmless if you change the mask regularly.

It both doesn't work, and if it did it would be net negative. Masks protect others from your spit, they don't protect you. If you are not ill and generating airborne spit the mask is useless

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