I am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so I do feel more protected now, but there’s still a risk.
I hear you. Having seen family who's suffered from brain fog and greatly reduced stamina ever since getting over covid, I want absolutely nothing to do with it. The fact that it has the potential to so negatively impact my means of earning a living as a developer (my mental faculties) makes it terrifying. If I lose that, I have nothing. It'd be like a carpenter losing dexterity in their hands.
Anything that can reduce my chances of a severe outcome or even coming down with it in the first place is worth it in my book.
Wait, are you saying Europeans are surprised talking about it is still a thing, because everyone wears them? Or because nobody wears them?
Just got back from Germany yesterday, and while masks are required on most public transport (but not airplanes), you'll see a decent amount of compliance (50%?) but not anywhere else indoors.
Minimal masking in public spaces on public transport, stores, airplanes, etc in my experience in Germany/France/UK. There's absolutely more masking going on here in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately I'm quite sure it's the latter. Even in Canada, in MTL where I live, on public transit it's maybe 5-6% that is masking. For most people the pandemic is simply "over", regardless of what the data says or how overwhelmed hospitals are.
To be clear, hospitals being "overwhelmed", i.e. their capacity, is a function related to personnel. When our state (WA) fired thousands of healthcare workers for not getting an experimental vaccine that few of them needed (natural immunity is a thing, as much as Big Pharma would like to suppress it), our capacity decreased because we lost nurses. It doesn't necessarily mean that _no beds are available_.
Im fine with that being a public health decision. Given how rarely mask mandates have been used it seems like public health officials prioritize choice except for extreme situations. That’s fair to my mind. At least in the US the Supreme Court has found public health can trump individual liberties up to a point, and that point is usually forced medical intervention. So they can’t force you to vaccinate. But they can levy fines or quarantine you by force if you refuse. This was decided several times but the key case was one where Boston was inoculating people against smallpox. Someone refused because they had already been inoculated and had had a bad reaction. They wanted to force it on him so he sued and it went to the Supreme Court. Instead he was fined for not inoculating. Interestingly compared to the covid vaccine, which had a whole kerfuffle, the smallpox inoculation was actually a pretty unsafe thing. The micromorts for the covid vaccines are extraordinarily low.
Small outlier countries like Germany, where I still see masks regularly in various settings, and where FFP2 masks are either still mandatory in public transport or just stopped being mandatory a few days ago. Also mandatory in doctor's offices, hospitals.
When I was in Germany at the end of this September, there were certainly plenty of signs saying masks were mandatory on public transport. Compliance with said signs, however, was well south of 50%.
And that's shockingly high for Massachusetts where it's probably less than 1% in general--outside of healthcare settings and probably a few percent higher on public transit.
yes and, you see "social signal" surgical masks and also clinical N-95 variations.. personally I do wear the N-95 at the grocery store at this time. I throw them out after a few weeks of use and use a new one. A box of ten is about $15 at a local hardware store near me.
For vaccinated individuals, being sick for two weeks is unusual. When I got covid the first time, before vaccines were available, I was sick less than a week. I had a few weeks of brain fog after that but it cleared up. I got it again last week and I was sick for only a day. Not any worse than any cold I’ve had before. Indeed I’ve had fewer sick days the last couple of years than I did the year my daughter started daycare.
I’m not going to go around wearing a mask all the time to avoid a couple of days of cold symptoms every other year. Getting colds is part of the human condition.
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
I actually just banned you for this because the post was so shocking and abusive. However, after looking quickly at your comment history, it's clear that the overwhelming majority of your contributions have been positive, so I undid the ban. Thanks for being a good user, and please just don't do this again.
If it makes you feel better, the majority of people dying of COVID now are actually vaccinated. So at least you can stop splitting people into in-groups and out-groups to wish death upon.
While I understand the sentiment of saying that a purely individual perspective is egregious, selfish, myopic and inappropriate for a situation in which individual selfishness can cause extensive social harm, it's not a good look to tell people that you hope their loved ones die.
I don't hope their loved ones die, I hope they become better.
I’m not coming from an “individual perspective.” I wore masks the whole time because I’m an obedient Asian who will do whatever social convention requires. But now the prevailing social consensus is to not wear masks, and I think that’s correct.
It’s anti-social to not wear a mask when society has decided to do so. But it’s perfectly fine for society to decide to prioritize normal interactions over safety and abandon the social convention of masking.
>It’s anti-social to not wear a mask when society has decided to do so.
Sure, because the efficacity of mask usage increases with adoption. The logic works in one direction, though, not both.
>I’m not going to go around wearing a mask all the time to avoid a couple of days of cold symptoms every other year.
This is the point I was referring to. Would you wear a mask if you had a cold and doing so could prevent other people from getting your infection? If other people wearing a mask while symptomatic could save you months of healthy time over the course of your life, would you reciprocate in turn? More importantly, if evidence was provided that the risks to mitigate were significantly worse than 'cold symptoms' would your calculus change?
Being killed by a falling brick is a very clear cost.
How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
Talking about cost without normalizing for probability of prevention is meaningless yet you want to frame the discussion to be purely about (low) cost of wearing masks.
We had a year of a pretty tough lockdown, most people wearing masks, distancing in grocery shops, restaurants and "non-essential" shops and companies closed, no public events, work from home, most people staying at home etc.
And yet people were getting sick with covid, even those wearing masks.
Masks alone won't protect you from covid. Even pretty hard core isolation might not protect you.
We basically have no idea how effective just wearing masks is. It surely reduces the probability but by how much?
Feel free to wear masks and hard hats but don't pretend you know for sure it's a rational choice.
If I was surrounded by falling bricks I’d definitely consider it!
For me the costs aren’t just wearing a mask or getting sick. I also have vulnerable people in my life. My partner, their partners, my elderly parents, friends with unknown connections.
If I walked around the grocery store without a mask I could at any time pick up the virus and even if I don’t get very sick I could give it to friends or loved ones. So then there is a mental load of worrying if I’m feeling fatigue due to poor sleep or onset of the virus (which is how it happened when I actually had it), and wondering if I should cancel social plans when I’m not feeling 100% normal.
If I am always wearing masks in public I can relax about it more when seeing friends. I’m being responsible and while accidents do happen I’m at least not being negligent.
I notice a lot of people not masking are only talking about themselves. It’s like they don’t think about how transmitting the illness affects others.
> Being killed by a falling brick is a very clear cost.
> How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
But wait, that's a very different question. The original comment was "I'd rather be sick for 2 weeks than wear a mask every day." You're not saying that you'd rather be killed by a falling brick than wear a hardhat every day, surely.
Not to defend the op. I wear a mask. But, people do make this choice all the time. They take a car instead of walk (AFAIK that means they're more likely to die). They don't wear a helmet when walking (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/falls). People make choices all the time to be less safe in a way that would have prevented deaths.
he'd rather _risk_ being killed by a brick than wear a hard hat everywhere. same as me. you should definitely wear one and a mask and also other safety devices like a kevlar west, hard tip shoes etc
Traumatic brain injury is much easier to attribute to a death, rather than viruses that are more likely to be involved in some other cause of death, like a bacterial pneumonia.
If I learned anything from COVID times, it's that attributing deaths is complex, and roughly up to whoever writes the death certificate
Generally everyone is vulnerable to falling bricks, whereas the evidence shows that those who will die from covid are most likely obese / elderly / smokers / diabetics / etc.
Also, imagine if said hard hat caused unknown long-term effects by itself. We know, for a fact, that some plastic fibers from masks end up in the lungs permanently. What happens when they go there? Nobody knows. How many of them are there in the average person? Nobody knows. What are the long term effects? Nobody knows. How does it affect lung development in both short-term and long-term, particularly in young people? Nobody knows. We just hope it's fine.
How would you compare these cited risks associated with mask wear with the risks associated with more likely C19 infections, and perhaps more important with the emergent recognition of risks associated with long covid?
My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.
Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.
Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.
There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
In which case, get vaccinated, and wear a mask yourself, if that concerns you. For those of us who have had COVID and recovered quickly (like myself, in ~2 days), you need to convince me that my mask-wearing protects anyone else, when they can wear masks themselves if they are so inclined. Even then, with 58% of COVID hospitalizations being vaccinated, and over 82% of the nation having had COVID at some point (according to IMHE), mask wearing and vaccination appears to be a deferment on the inevitable.
> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.
Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.
Disposable masks have been routinely used in healthcare since at least the 1960s. I would be extremely surprised if there are no studies of the long-term health effects of mask use. Especially since the people who could do such research are the ones who would suffer most from any adverse effects.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective. My wife, son and I have been masking with 100% consistency since April 2020 (in indoor/crowded outdoor places) and we haven't felt 'dehumanized' to the slightest degree.
It's not quite free; the bridge of my nose sometimes experiences some irritation, and we've had to deal with more than a hand full of hateful/snarky in person comments, but that's no biggie.
Does your son do it freely of his own accord, or only at the behest of one or both of his parents? I would check in with him in ten years as to how sanguine he feels about a rather uncommon rite of hygiene being imposed, or simply encouraged, during his childhood or adolescence for 2+ years.
It’s literally dehumanizing. Humans rely on being able to see each other’s faces for a wide range of non-verbal communications reasons. Learning to recognize faces and facial expressions is one of the first skills baby humans learn how to do.
Being from the south, we smile when we pass each other on the street. You can’t do that in a mask. Maybe you folks from NYC and SF don’t miss that—after all you can still glare at people with hostility wearing a mask—but it’s a major loss in quality of life for the rest of us.
Professionals wearing masks in specific contexts is different than advocating for ordinary people to wear masks in public settings.
Dehumanized by strangers isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've talked to multiple women who prefer to wear masks on public transit because they're less likely to get catcalled or harassed
Yes make sure to tell your doctor you think wearing a mask is before they work on you or you mother or your child. Tell them you think masks are dehuminizing.
Or just skip to what you really mean, tell your doctor who is going to operate on your or your child that you do not think they work.
You can't attack others like that here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Since you've mostly been posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments (all of which is against HN's guidelines), I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It’s sad you get downvoted. Mask wearing is incredibly dehumanizing in my opinion. It is a symbol of fear and control. It never ever should never have been mandated, only recommended.
Perhaps to some. That feeling is probably largely driven by one's overall outlook.
We started masking before any of the mandates because it just made sense to do so, to us at least.
> It never ever should never have been mandated, only recommended.
That's a hard question in my opinion. I naturally tend toward letting people do what they want unless they're clearly hurting others. Others have argued that masking does unambiguously reduce harm to others, but I don't find it so clear cut.
I'm personally less uncomfortable with mask mandates than the widespread shutdowns. Those shutdowns caused massive harm to people. Masking? Not so much.
Note I'm not quite willing, even now, to fully support mask mandates, now or previously. I see both sides of the issue.
> It’s sad you get downvoted.
Agreed, it is sad that opposing, perhaps uncomfortable viewpoints get pushed down.
Why do you think this? I see someone wearing a mask and I see someone with enough respect for their fellow man that they don't want to get them sick. That's not fear or control, that's compassion. I don't think compassion is uniquely human, but it still is humanizing.
Medical masks are not a symbol of anything. They’re a legitimate way to lower the risk of spreading germs from your own mouth and nose. They’re also marginally useful at keeping germs out. The fact that they got politicized in the USA is more a symbol of the problems with the USA than anything else.
How is it a symbol of fear? Masks for infection control have been used since the late 1800s. It's purely practical.
Maybe a little fear would be healthy for some people if it makes them act in a socially integrated manner. Anybody who's had covid probably doesn't want to get it again.
Think about it. It's only a symbol of control and dehumanizing if you don't want to do it. Is waiting at a red light or wearing clothes in public dehumanizing or a symbol of control? If not then what makes masks different?
And you don't want to do it because you can't see every X person who caught the virus dropping dead in front of you, since all negative consequences happen out of sight and come back at you with statistics months later you simply can't bring yourself to care, that's all.
Of course I don't want it. Why would I? It is like demands for intercourse from random strangers, claiming you're immoral for not caring about "benefits" for THEM. Mask IS dehumanizing, and IS a symbol of control, just like any forced sexual activity. Why breathing and face are suddenly considered less sacred than nether zone? "What makes it different", from masks, or pants, or waiting the red light? If consensual sex between lovers is a wonderful and most natural experience ever, with all soothing and healing aspects, why it is not appropriate to make it mandatory under some circumstances? Even more, why breaching sexual consent even in minor way is considered worse-than-murder in some cultures?
Wearing mask is as revolting as sex against one's natural "orientation". If someone thinks this is unreasonable and one should "get help" to "fix" it, I remind them that they may be fighting against strongly held "identity" belief. "Conversion therapy" is being declared evil, for some valid reasons. And I won't even say how I feel about forced, mandatory mask wearing.
Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do. Our brains have huge areas dedicated to recognition of subtle differences in facial features. We're literally wired for facial recognition. More than almost any other feature of our bodies, our faces define us as individuals.
Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong. I honestly can't believe I have to say this out loud.
>Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do.
1) Neither is wearing pants or a shirt. 2) Something being 'natural' doesn't make it right.
>Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong.
It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile. Let's saying masking always under all conditions is too much of an imposition, are there restrictions we can place that make the trade-off better?
For instance: Is masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons with an X drop in disease propagation worth not seeing people's faces in that setting for that time period.
To extrapolate this back to the pants/shirt distinction; human life would end in a generation if we weren't ever able to take off our pants and shirt as we would never have sex again, but the intolerability of that restriction doesn't make it socially accepted for me to rub my bare ass onto a bus seat.
We can't have a discussion about how best to adopt masks, pants, or shirts as a technology if the only way they'll be accepted is if they're always a pure benefit in any situation.
> It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile.
I don't dispute this. You're more than welcome to continue doing whatever you want and make that trade-off for yourself. I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold (assuming that is even achievable, which I don't grant).
But the metaphor of "pants" is absurd. I wear pants because they keep me warm and protect my soft bits and make me look snazzy, not because someone else is making a moral judgment about my choice of clothing being "the correct thing to do".
Yes that's the point. It's a reductio ab absurdem. The pant metaphor is obviously absurd for the same reason that the initial position you posited is absurd. In order to salvage your initial position, you need to differentiate the logic or premises from the absurd argumentation.
Pants and Shirts aren't symbols of fear and control despite being mandated in most areas of public life, but shackles, prison garb and other elements of clothing certainly would be. Therefore there's an element other than being mandated that makes clothing a symbol of fear and control. This is what the pants metaphor shows.
>I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold.
This is also reductive (not the personal choice aspect, but rather how it ties into the original discussion of masks as symbols of fear and control); would you agree with the faces over mask rule during a surgery with patients susceptible to infection? Would you consider hospital rules that OR staff wear masks during such surgeries to be authoritarian overreach?
I think if you're willing to admit that 1) there are public health concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) that there's a trade-off to be made, then "I won't be participating" is a bit too absolutist to flow from the remainder of your beliefs. Certainly you can try refining a condition like "masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons" to be more or less restrictive rather than ignoring the issue altogether.
If we can do that, we can have a more meaningful discussion about where masking could be appropriate, rather than discussing whether or not it should occur at all.
You still need to clarify how having to wear pants and shirts is not an instance of control over you. Because it is, and you only don't mind that control because you agree that you should do it. Use the same principle here.
Btw idk about others but I wear a mask indoors with strangers, like in public transport or shops. I get to see all the faces I want to see and show mine outdoors or when video calling or if they are close friends or cohabitants.
Wearing a mask in public has only one cost for healthy people: a dirty mask can make you sick so you must have a clean mask, and that costs either money or time spent washing (and chance of washing it wrong)
I think you are overstating your case. The eyes are the important thing. You can cover someone's mouth without affecting recognition performance, but you can't cover their eyes. Lots of research available on this, starting with https://www.jstor.org/stable/1421414
Secondly, your primate brain also wants to look at the genital area, but, again: pants.
Same. And I’m just getting over the flu, which was rough. A world where we constantly mask to avoid any illness at all holds 0 interest for me. I’ll take the COVID.
There’s a lot of people in my life that don’t want to get sick. And I don’t want to have to cancel plans with them every time I feel a little fatigue, because 99% of the time that’s just due to weird sleep. But if I wasn’t masked I would be constantly wondering if I was getting sick and if I should cancel plans. My parents are elderly, my partners partner is vulnerable. There’s a lot of people in my life that can’t afford to get sick because they would infect their entire household.
I guess it’s fine if no one you hang out with cares, but that’s not the case for me.
I should also note that I don’t work with other people. I might feel differently if I had to mask at work all the time. I do keep a mask for the 2% of the time at work I interact with others. But the biggest thing is grocery stores. Not masking there you’re just asking to elevate community transmission. You’re increasing the risks for others. I’d love it if the virus was gone, but it just isn’t.
It doesn't have to be that dichotomous though. I don't wear a mask at work (which is well ventilated and people are pretty responsible about staying home when sick) but I do in higher risk situations (E.g. a plane flight)
The only people I see wearing masks are American tourists in the airports ( last 6 weeks Gardemoen, Kastrup , Keflavik, Arlanda )
Duck bill mask clad Germans generally stay in Germany. And they look insane. Like warning signs of nature insane.
Public announcements in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, from epidemiologists and ICU doctors recently is to stay the <f**> home if you are sick. If sick dont go out wearing a mask since it protects no one and, even if immuno compromized, live like you did in 2019 you are not protected wearing a flimsy surgical facemask and you need to socialize and not lock yourself up for the rest of your days.
And once you are not sick anymore, go back to work.
Don't bother the currently overloaded hospitals unless something is very wrong, you know when your cold/flu is over.
So no , presumably democrat american internet stranger.
Dont wear a mask, If sick stay at home. Dont go out, face covered, and think you have saved a life.
Mask is pointless.
Hand washing still applies though.
Don't think handwashing has been controversial since dr. Ignaz Semmelweis in 1865 was declared insane and put in an asylum by the medical establishment for suggesting that hand washing prevented doctors from spreading disease between their patients.
If the other people around me actually followed that guidance you might have a point… except that covid is transmissible even before you get sick and even when you never do get sick. So people can’t stay home if they don’t know they’re contagious. And again, people don’t follow the guidance either.
I also don’t wear a surgical mask, I wear a KN95 because I’m not a fool.
Your suggestion of staying home if sick is one I agree with. Unfortunately I cannot make others do this. In fact, where I live in the USA I come across people who are visibly/audibly ill in my daily life: air travel, public transport, grocery store, and so on. I would prefer if these people stayed home, but can I make them? I can wear a mask, and I do (typically N95 in public places). If others think I look crazy, that is a small price to pay to avoid a few weeks of being sick or infecting someone else. Particularly my vulnerable family members.
There is more to life than a myopic focus on avoiding one specific illness. I’ve got a million other problems in my life to worry about. Catching Covid isn’t anywhere near the top of that list.
This applies to society as a whole as well. The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself.
> The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself.
This seems much easier to say if you haven't been impacted by a serious case. I have friends who were similarly unconcerned, and who felt very differently after a month long battle with COVID, and as they continue to struggle with the after effects.
So yes, there's more to life than a myopic focus on avoiding one specific illness, but the actual impact of that statement and a closer look at the actual risk tradeoffs makes things a bit less obvious, and I'm not convinced that most of the behavior people are exhibiting is myopic.
> The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself
This is a statement that needs quite a bit of evidence to back it up. I think it's safe to say that no one knew what the 2nd and 3rd order effects of trying to avoid COVID itself would be, and those effects are indeed significant. But neither can we say that we should have gone back and let the first rounds overwhelm and collapse hospital systems, the impact of which is something we can't even begin to understand right now.
The things we do to avoid covid also help with avoiding other respiratory infections as well, all of which are pretty terrible to get in case anybody forgot about them.
But saying that covid isn't causing damage is itself highly myopic.
I haven't even had a cold in years. Masks are brilliant. I even prefer to wear one now while bicycling, even though there is no health reason to wear one outdoors, just because it keeps my nose warm.
I am a resident doctor and based on my reading and general gestalt most healthy people aren't likely to get "long covid". Also confounding, a significant portion of long covid seems to be a mental health diagnosis (as evidenced by https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/depression-an...). People who are anxious / depressed are reporting they have "long covid". This same group is more likely to report physical disabily for other reasons eg non-specific back pain.
Masks are unlikely to have protected you much unless it’s a tight fitting n95 mask worn around the clock. This topic has been beaten to death on here, not sure why people continue to cling on to masks as anything other than security theater.
The primary mechanism these things are spread by is water droplets in the air expelled from the nose and mouth. A sick person wearing a mask will expel more moisture into the mask, and less into the air.
None of this is binary. It's not sick or not sick. There is a viral load component, where a persons body can fight off a certain amount of virus.
I was under the impression that droplets are only part of the picture and that sick people are in fact spraying tons of much small particles into the air as they breathe.
Whether the droplet/aerosol float through the air has to do with much more than particle size.
"There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed."
That's not my point at all. I didn't make the droplet vs airborne distinction.
I mean that the masks can and do stop some droplets and larger particles, but smaller particles pass through and around them readily. It seems like really small particles might be causing infections with newer variants. But I'm also not sure what we even know for sure about this at the moment. A lot of mask research has been don with modeling or lab setups to spray liquids through them. The narrower set of real world studies cast a lot of doubt on anything but N95s worn properly. So I'm not sure where that leaves us.
The question I have is, do masks actually lower viral load meaningfully if the individual viruses are being shed and blown through the mask? Put another way, particles large enough to be stopped by most masks may not be the primary vector of infection for new strains of COVID and we have no real clue.
While I agree that the parent comment is making huge assumptions about delivery options people have access to (both for geographical and for cost reasons), there are options in the middle.
The majority of stores (grocery and otherwise) introduced curbside pickup options early in the pandemic, which at least provides more options for someone who doesn't have access to or can't afford delivery, while removing or minimizing the time they need to spend in-store.
Not a perfect solution, but the options are not "delivery or starve".
Can you provide a reference to a discount grocer (since you are replying to a comment about affordability) that offers curb-side or delivery without fee? I am not aware of any.
The moving of the goalposts aside (which were originally "order in or starve"), Target and Walmart are two major examples, since you specifically mentioned “discount”, and all of the major grocery stores in my metro area (Chicago, so YMMV) have a curbside pickup option.
Some of them charge a service fee for pickups under $35, but from what I recall, the bigger chains do not. And with prices these days, you'd be hard pressed to do a grocery run that costs less than $35 unless you need a single item, but if you only need a single item, this is no longer a conversation about starving.
As for free delivery, I believe some of them offer free delivery for orders over a certain size, but I was focused specifically on non-delivery options.
Bottom line: there are many more options than “go in the store or starve”.
COVID symptoms (coughing in particular, which is a big spreader of particles) can last weeks. I don't know many people with multiple weeks worth of food in their fridge unless they have a deepfreeze (large chest freezer).
That's hardly a good faith interpretation of the post you're responding to. Do you actually want to discuss something or are you just looking to insult people?
> Not wanting to bother someone else is silly, since it results in bothering way more than one person
I agree with you.
> Most could ask friend or family for help
Most but not all. An alternative is asking a stranger (government programs where I am ended almost a year ago), strangers are kinder than people realize. But asking for help is challenging for many people.
I guess I’m skeptical, isn’t the majority of covid spread through prolonged close contact? Running into a grocery store without a mask for fifteen minutes seems extremely low risk compared to other activities.
I recently got it via short contact (3 weeks ago, was positive until yesterday, still have a cough).
I went to an amusement park. None of the people I was hanging out with had it nor tested positive before or after (they were all testing regularly) so the only other explanations are random people I passed at the park, food that was contaminated, or random covid virus in the air.
Of course my getting it via short contact does not invalidate the idea that most of it is spread via prolonged contact. But, given I just caught it via short contact I'm not going to stop taking prevenative measures in situations with only short contacts.
The evidence is pretty mixed, and even the studies showing the strongest effects have mask wearing yielding something like a 50% reduction in transmission.
I haven't seen anyone model what this looks like on longer timescales. Does this mean that you're just delaying the inevitable? If so, and the disease is mild and we're not going to overwhelm hospitals with the infected, what's the benefit?
You can't do a study that way. People do or do not wear masks based on emergent social acceptance, regardless of government actions. If you want to do a discontinuity study you have to evaluate actual mask usage in the real world and discover a boundary discontinuity. You can't just do it by jurisdiction and assume that the government proclamations work. People wear masks when they aren't required, and they may not wear them when they are required.
Yet we’ve been hearing since the beginning of 2021 that they’ve been proven to have been much more efficient by the coalition parliament which has come up with this idea.
I wear a flomask every day when I'm out and about and it works great. You don't need to wear it "around the clock." You just need to wear it when you're inside and there are people around you who might be infected.
Well, in that case, it's easy. Other people who are concerned can wear a mask, and said water droplets will land on their mask instead of their face. Problem solved, we have no conflict.
As for why we hate it, here's a good reason for me personally. I have to wear glasses, as I have an extreme prescription coupled with astigmatism. It's so bad LASIK is (or at least, was) high-risk. Wearing a mask with glasses is a miserable experience - you can't stop fogging them up without touching your mask every several minutes to adjust it, defeating the point because you're not supposed to touch it. In which case, wearing a mask (for me) is a self-defeating exercise. There are other reasons but that's my personal biggest one.
At this point, I’d tend to agree. However, this is a bit of a broad and inaccurate statement. Wearing masks gave society time to catch up in terms of vaccinations and other measures.
OP has entered basically every COVID thread since 2020 to make the same kinds of comments. I guarantee, you're not going to dissuade him. You're exactly right, though, COVID and its associated "symbols" like masks have turned into a weirdly politico-religious topic for some.
Are cases really rising? It looks maybe a little higher than the summer right now, maybe depends on the area. Nothing like the last two autumns, thankfully. We'll see about winter. They keep saying some new variant is going to break through but I don't see it yet.
In my area, cases are rising fairly rapidly and certain hospitals have begun to rescheduling electives on the basis that they're overstressed. This is concerning because winter is just getting started and transmission rates when people are indoors are higher.
That said, I think the seasonal wave we're anticipating is a product of when our winter hits and how hard our winter hits - other areas might have very different experiences overall.
Never again. Caught COVID, vaccinated friends also caught COVID, vaccinated individuals are now 58% of hospitalizations, and long term effects of both long COVID and having microplastics embedded in your lungs are both unknown. However, long COVID is just long, but microplastics are forever. I've chosen to be mask-free and anyone who doesn't like that can mask themselves.
Caught a medium severity case of omicron almost exactly a year ago when I was triple vax'd.
Took the bivalent booster about 2 months ago then went on a cruise and directly after to re:invent.
Since then had multiple exposures with people around me getting week long fevers. So far I had something in my system that made me feel "slightly off" - but nothing worse.
Yay antibodies.
I'm a big believer in "more antibodies the better" - but I am also on the side of "COVID amnesty". The pandemic was an immensely scary time for everyone, and got co-opted by politics of all stripes. We need to forgive each other and move on.
I now support everyone's choice - with the standard exceptions (Childhood vaccines, don't go out when sick, respect others).
> The pandemic was an immensely scary time for everyone
I was in a truck fixing heavy equipment at mines, construction sites, oil & gas pads, and the only thing that changed was I could calculate drive time based on mileage because most everyone was at home. I didn't get fake safety gear or a big bonus check for sitting at home.
Not everyone was scared. Mine sites were great because behind the gate everyone was normal. Unlike the OSHA scaremongers, MSHA eventually released guidance which said roughly, "Policies to stay home when sick are always in effect and miners are always safe and keep being safe. And safety."
One mine site had their yearly pig roast with tables under a tent that Spring, and everyone was shoulder to shoulder, no masks, no gloves, no gel stations. It was awesome.
I think an additional benefit of the masks is that they signal something about the person's Covid conscientiousness -- which I suspect affects how likely they are to be a carrier, and how likely they are to be careful about spreading it if they are.
(Though that signal didn't help me in Trader Joe's the other day, when one of the few employees wearing a mask (only surgical), turned out to have a phlegmy cough. In that case, I imagine the logic might've been, "You're obviously sick and probably spreading something, maybe Covid? We don't pay you to stay home. Strap on the least effective mask you can find, which suddenly we believe in, and get out there and superspread among shoppers!" :( )
Signalling as communication of information (e.g., "I'm following these practices, which tells you something about what to expect about things that might be important to you"). Not the "virtue signalling" meme talking point to dismiss.
> In addition to the pathogens it tests for, WastewaterSCAN measures an extremely common, harmless plant virus that is consumed when people eat. It is called pepper mild mottle virus (or PMMoV). By measuring the concentration of PMMoV genetic markers per dry weight gram of wastewater solids, WastewaterSCAN can account for how much viral material is recovered from each sample and changes to the “fecal strength” of that sample. For example, heavy rain that drains into a wastewater system can dilute the strength of a particular day’s sample.
OK, that's pretty clever and it sounds useful, so I guess I should turn on that toggle. But then I read further and see this:
> Our analysis suggests that both the concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 genes measured as copies per gram of solid waste and those concentrations normalized by PMMoV are proportional to laboratory confirmed COVID-19 incidence rates in the sewersheds.
How can both things be proportional? Do they actually mean positively correlated?
If raw data is already proportional to lab tests, then it doesn't seem like there's any benefit from normalizing.
I think a lot is being lost in the translation here. I mean, Verily's analysis is a laboratory *determined* COVID-19 incidence rate in the sewersheds right? How is it any different from the laboratory *confirmed* incidence rate they compare to? As far as proportional, I think you are right. When laboratory confirmed goes up, both Verily concentrations also go up. When laboratory confirmed goes down, both Verily concentrations also go down. I doubt there is a constant scale factor operating here unless the laboratory confirmed is using a similar method of normalization (i.e., they all start with copies per gram dry weight).
Wastewater analysis is a new and very difficult measurement problem. There's continual discussion of how to do the analysis, and no strong consensus in the field.
This is the best part of science: not knowing, but working to discover.
The post holiday gathering spike is rather obvious. Not just for COVID but for everything. We really should have test kits, and people should test BEFORE travel. A national level policy of full refunds if tested positive (for any illness / disease) could help prevent the needless spread of illness.
> The post holiday gathering spike is rather obvious. Not just for COVID but for everything.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
It's not a "holiday gathering spike". It's literally the same respiratory pathogen pattern we've seen for as long as we've bothered to look: in the winter, as we go inside and the air becomes cool and dry, respiratory infections go up. The viruses evolved to work this way, because it's a great survival strategy when your host is a social animal that doesn't/can't live outside in the cold.
It happens in parts of the world where Christmas and Thanksgiving aren't a thing (see Japan and China and Korea right now). It happens on the opposite schedule in the lower half of the planet (even where Christmas and/or Thanksgiving are a thing).
This impulse to blame/scold people for a natural phenomenon is unnerving.
>This impulse to blame/scold people for a natural phenomenon is unnerving.
Yeah, but as far as our governments will share more information on this, this SARS-CoV-2 virus was invented by people in a lab, and it escaped from a lab, due to human error.
They didn't. They're having a big spike, right now [1]. It's going to end up being bigger than the summer wave. They had a big spike last winter, too, but they weren't testing as much then.
Comparing the absolute magnitude of these spikes is fraught, because they depend on the number of tests being conducted, (which was rapidly increasing over the course of last year), as well as the many other behavioral changes that were happening at the same time.
Recent studies suggest it's not just staying indoors or viruses hanging around longer in cold/dry air. Exposure to cold temperatures may suppress specific immune mechanisms in respiratory tract. See paper out this month, Huang et al "Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm–mediated nasal antiviral immunity" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167492...
Sorry I don't have a link but I read few years ago that dry air typical of heated indoor spaces in winter means that virus (or maybe virus + moisture we breath out) stay suspended in the air longer
Diseases are inevitable. It's not all that useful to be testing for every random disease that comes up. Testing doesn't help. Lockdowns don't help. Even mRNA treatments don't help. You WILL get Covid. You WILL get the flu. And your immune system will get stronger as you get exposed.
Covid used to be novel. Now it's endemic and mutates multiple times per year. It's looking more and more like Covid will be with us for decades if not forever, just like the flu and the common cold.
Your 'inevitable' comment reminds me of the novice security mindset where something either Secure or it is Not Secure.
In the world of security, you grow up, leave behind the simple binary descriptions, and assess impact of event and threat you're defending against.
This applies to disease safety as well. It's not just 'inevitable' or 'preventable', but there is a difference between getting sick once a year and getting sick every month. Between working in a hospital and working from home. Between being sick by yourself and spreading it to your extended family.
There is a risk assessment to be done, and calculated measures to be taken.
It is worth all of those things... when you have a novel pandemic to blunt.
However, once the disease is characterized, you have effective treatments and protocols for the most sick, and you have decent rates of vaccination and recent infection... needs shift.
The critical factor is {max hospital ICU capacity} + 1 more seriously ill person, and when you're dealing with exponential growth rates and a virgin population, that can be hit pretty easily.
The fact that we didn't (in most parts of the world, for most of the time) is a triumph of modern health policy.
There seem to be some amount of long-term risks associated with covid that aren't present in influenza though. I hope to continue avoiding covid myself.
gah!
Sure fine whatever. you'll get covid. but how many times? If you test and you discover you currently have covid maybe don't be a raging asshole and give it to your family and friends!
and while I'm on it, since we are all getting it why wouldn't you get the v word? It will help strengthen your immune system (as will getting covid) and the bit that people keep missing out it will lessen the affects you suffer when you get it.
Wastewater surveillance is a pretty crazy technology. My neighbor works on projects using it for wildlife tracking, and they can get startling amounts of information about what is going on in a given watershed. What (e.g endangered) animals are present, what animals humans are eating, etc. And all the way down to the viral level, obviously.
Sorry, my comment was a bit misleading: as the other commenter noted, they are doing testing in rivers, etc. When animals defecate/urinate onto the ground, some of it eventually gets carried and aggregated into flowing water.
Popped in to share this one, it has COVID data on my area while the Verily site doesn't seem to yet.
I've been using wastewater data to adjust my behavior since official testing and reporting is down and under-reporting cases. Detected COVID goes up, I reduce my exposure and remind my vulnerable loved ones. Detected COVID goes back down, I adjust my behavior accordingly.
Oddly, this site doesn't report for my local counties that are listed as having submitted data to CDC's NWSS (King and Pierce counties in Washington State).
I wonder if the more "popular" counties are pay-walled or something?
EDIT: According to the site, "County Selection:
Counties associated with each location were provided by our sampling partners, and correspond to the primary county served by each sampling location. In the county-level section we highlight a subset of counties which had at least 21 weeks of data and whose sampling locations represented at least 10,000 individuals, as well as the primary counties of our sampling partners in the Biobot Network."
So I'm curious what other factors are excluding the largest (by population) counties in Washington?
I don't find it suspect (well, suspect of what exactly?) as a native to these cities but I may lack perspective. Go one city over all over the Bay Area and you get wild differences. There's a lot of land between north bay cities too. Also, weren't we all just using these divergences a year ago to back up Covid statistics - i.e. Santa Rosa was higher than surrounding cities from my recollection, and that was "expected" one you knew the areas.
an eighty year old in either place may rarely talk to anyone, while a commuting Dad with kids in pre-school may get involuntarily exposed every single week. There is some truth to geographic locality for disease, but there is also Car Culture in the USA.
This is not suspicious at all. San Rafael has a combined sanitary and storm sewer system. In the California rain season their sewer is diluted with rain water. Novato has separate sanitary and storm water systems.
I remember during the tail end of the pandemic someone posted a link to a big spike in wastewater COVID testing in our city's sewers. So I decided to pay close attention to the COVID test rates/hospitalizations for the next 2 months. But I never ended up seeing any correlation. The trendline stayed stagnant, before declining as it did everywhere else.
I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.
Depending on when/where that was during the pandemic,
unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless,
and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors).
Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard...
...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem.
Wastewater facilities are almost always run by local government. I expect it takes time to get buy in for a project like this. I didn't see if there was a grant to cover the testing, but you at very least need a worker to package up samples and mail them to a lab.
Still, this is tremendously useful where there is coverage, and looks like enough data to make sampling type of conclusions. Hopefully we'll eventually see some kind of network effect.
For example, I'm in the NYC area - and Newark NJ has coverage. There is enough overlap that I expect flu and covid curves (including strains) to be close enough to be interesting.
With fewer people commuting to work there's less overlap, but enough new yorkers have family in NJ and vice versa that I suspect suspect Newark should be pretty accurate for NYC +/- 5-15% with a lag time of a week max.
It's not on the Verily page because Santa Clara's monitoring isn't a Verily project. The page has "Source: Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN) project by Stanford University"
The longer a society wears masks, the sicker everyone will be when they eventually come off. In the formerly overly cautious US Northeast, kids are getting sick left and right this school year. And COVID is the least dangerous bold-faced name they need to worry about.
This is an absolute myth. There is no evidence of "immunity debt", and serious public officials parrotting this nonsense are doing real damage. It's a tempting explanation because it's simple and seems to make intuitive sense, but it's just wrong. The explanation that has much more evidence is that everyone and their dog caught COVID, and COVID has been directly linked to lasting immune system damage, making everyone more susceptible to catching these other viruses.
It seems anything that could hurt pfizer or Moderna stock is "misinformation".
"In fact, Furness likens the immune system to a collection of photographs. When people take photos and put them away in an album, the photos don’t fade over time just because they aren’t being looked at regularly."
By that logic I must not need my yearly flu shot because my flu "photo" hasn't faded. Clearly if I wasn't exposed to rsv (and it's most recent variants) my immune system can fight it just as strongly because I have that photo from two years ago.
Also, tetanus vaccines every 10 years, that must be bs.
Yes but the tetanus toxoid is the same toxoid it's always been. It is disingenuous to suggest that the immune system doesn't atrophy some with time. It's much more nuanced really, but humoral immunity in particular wanes with time.
Furness seems to have only a cursory understand of immunity (despite all his credentials). Boosters and yearly flu shots just some simple examples of how the immunological world does not work the way he describes. Too many public health officials are unwilling to admit they made mistakes and gave bad recommendations early in the pandemic. He should correct his errors or step down.
It seems that we are perpetually on the verge of the next big wave, the next scary variant. I am always told by administrators that cases are rising even though I am having trouble finding patients on the floor with covid.
Wear a mask and wash your hands folks!