New Covid wave has begun and masks should be worn again, scientists warn
3 years ago by Collision Resistance to c/world
I’m in Europe and it’s anecdotal but there are SO many acquaintances that are sick with corona right now. Also not particularly mild, some are in bed since 1+ week with bad symptoms. Fuck this virus and fuck the people who don’t care about the well-being of the person next to them.
Japan here. Both wife and I have many sick coworkers. Nearly all of them were corona positive.
I worry that long covid is going to be one of the things that breaks the global economy long-term (likely leading to accelerated automation), if we can't sort out a therapy for it.
Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it's going to have huge knock-on effects
Meanwhile, we still don't even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.
Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there's an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there's plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name
Also in Europe (Germany) and there have been a lot of people OOO due to illness. So far my family has stayed free of it.
I'm in Finland. Haven't heard a thing about corona from anywhere other than news for the longest time. It's like it vanished
It blows my mind how upset people get about masking. During the two primary years of Covid where I isolated and masked religiously, I didn’t get sick once or even have allergies (despite visiting parks often).
Now companies have RTO and try to get everyone in on the same days so illness spreads like wildfire. People sitting right beside me hacking their lungs out.
It blows my mind how upset people get about masking
The pandemic is when I gave up on the notion that diehard conservatives had even a shred of intelligence or morals. I couldn't believe what I was hearing from them.
I used masks, got the vaccine and boosters, washed my hands religiously and so on. Still got sick. With something as transmissible as corona a lot of it is just luck, good or bad
Right, but that doesn't mean your precautions were worthless. Even if you are eventually going to catch it, delaying the infection reduces how much it can spread and means fewer people get it at the same time (reducing the impact). Some of these precautions will also reduce the severity of the illness, which is a huge win for you personally! Of course none of these precautions are perfect, but they're still helpful and limit the damage caused by the pandemic.
You're probably already well aware of this, of course! I've just seen a bunch of people saying things like "well I did X and I still got sick, so we shouldn't do X", which I don't think is the right conclusion for something that impacts the entire population. There's billions of dice rolls in this equation, and you got some bad luck (I'm sorry you got sick :( ), but I think you still gave yourself better odds and improved the odds for everybody else as well, which is great!
I think we should do those things but just that doing all of the stuff isn't a guarantee. It just betters your odds. I did all we were recommended and got hit with it, meanwhile a friend of mine did none of the recommended things (almost the opposite) and hasn't got it so far. Lucy bastard.
I wear masks but I absolutely hate it. Maybe if you work from home you don't notice, but wearing that thing for 9-10 hours can be a real pain. On top of that you miss a lot of a person's face, I had to meet a lot of new people during that time and it was hard.
I’m not saying it’s enjoyable. It’s especially awful when it’s hot & humid, if you wear glasses, or when wearing for a long period of time. But when the alternative is increasing the chances of catching/spreading a dangerous virus… well there isn’t much of an argument against.
People do not want to be told what to do. They do not want to be inconvenienced.
Personally I hated wearing a mask. it was a huge pain in my ass, and mostly unnecessary most of the time except on public transit or in like a very crowded place like a grocery store.
In what non private residence enclosed places are you alone? I can't think of any. Are you talking about hotels or... Because yea that would be ridiculous. But also, since you're alone it's not like anyone can enforce the mandate or even know you're not following it.
Nice anecdotal story. I know many people that masked and still do and got multiple brands of vaccines and multiple boosters and still got sick multiple times. So which one of us is correct? Neither. There are far more variables that matter.
What a twist!
Do you not understand what "reduction" means?
👐 You don't understand, oh kaaay? 👐 This person knows many people who washed hand, very often, very clean, and they still got sick. Many people are saying that masks is a very bad thing 👐 and not at all a way to prevent China virus which is a Democratic hoax...instead we're looking very hard at cleaning in the lungs 👐 isn't that right doctor? 🫲
Antivaxxers and antimaskers are a shitplague.
How sick did they get? Consider that people who get vaccinated aren't just less likely to get it, they're also less likely to have serious cases.
IMO people should wear masks if they have to go out with any cold/flu type illness. Stops them spreading their germs to other people.
I'm recovering from my first bout with Covid after dodging it for 3.5 years. Pretty mild, a couple shitty days of fever and congestion etc nbd. Wore a mask to the grocery store today in a red state and got stares. I seriously considered not wearing it at all because none of these mouth breathers would do the same for me during peak Covid pre vaccine, but ultimately decided to do the right thing. If only that were as contagious as the virus.
"Pre vaccine" lol
Covid spreads easily because people who have it are often asymptomatic.
For god's, sake, it's been 3.5 years. How do people still not know this?
In the US a lot of workers don't get paid if they don't show up to work because they have no paid time off.
In the US they often combine sick days and vacation days, so if you miss work while sick, you are using your vacation days, which are very limited.
No, if your sick you stay home. If you might spread of dangerous disease of which people and their immune systems are largely unused to dealing with and you otherwise cannot tell if your sick, then you wear a mask.
While I understand your sentiment life is not as black and white as that and some people cannot just stop everything they are doing because they are sick. I believe there should be more protection for people who are sick so they can recover.
Why hear mask? Dont leave the house. But the police should make sure this happens!
Physician here. Masks absolutely reduce transmission and the chance of contracting COVID.
Here is the definitive study on the subject.
Here is a video of a presentation by one of the authors along with some demonstrations and explanations.
TLDR: Here is the Abstract:
There is ample evidence that masking and social distancing are effective in reducing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. However, due to the complexity of airborne disease transmission, it is difficult to quantify their effectiveness, especially in the case of one-to-one exposure. Here, we introduce the concept of an upper bound for one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles and apply it to SARS-CoV-2. To calculate exposure and infection risk, we use a comprehensive database on respiratory particle size distribution; exhalation flow physics; leakage from face masks of various types and fits measured on human subjects; consideration of ambient particle shrinkage due to evaporation; and rehydration, inhalability, and deposition in the susceptible airways. We find, for a typical SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectious dose, that social distancing alone, even at 3.0 m between two speaking individuals, leads to an upper bound of 90% for risk of infection after a few minutes. If only the susceptible wears a face mask with infectious speaking at a distance of 1.5 m, the upper bound drops very significantly; that is, with a surgical mask, the upper bound reaches 90% after 30 min, and, with an FFP2 mask, it remains at about 20% even after 1 h. When both wear a surgical mask, while the infectious is speaking, the very conservative upper bound remains below 30% after 1 h, but, when both wear a well-fitting FFP2 mask, it is 0.4%. We conclude that wearing appropriate masks in the community provides excellent protection for others and oneself, and makes social distancing less important.
reduce
Sadly, a huge portion of the American public don’t have this word in their vocabulary. Masks and vaccines either eliminate all risk, and “work” or don’t completely eliminate all risk and therefore “don’t work.”
This lower ape thinking inflicted so much unnecessary death and suffering here.
It's an intentional thing, pushed by propagandists. Thinking in absolutes reduces the need for critical thinking skills as whole. When you can make people boil everything in the world down to a binary, its very easy to tell them how to think, and equally easy to define the "out" group you all hate.
To wit, when masks "work or don't work", you can look at the people telling you to wear masks, and because masks "don't work" they're wrong, and if they're wrong, then the people we aren't telling you to wear a mask are right. You should always follow people who are right... right?
There are definitely people who pushed this thinking and benefitted from it. But it takes root because it has essential appeal. The brain is an expensive organ and people go out of their way to eliminate complex thought, because it’s hard work. Humans instinctively look to other humans because that provides a shortcut: why spend those 200 calories figuring something out when your neighbor already has and you’d just be reinventing the wheel.
I think something like 30% of the US have an IQ below 80. This is a very real issue with the public itself. It is preyed upon, but it isn’t totally imposed by a shadow conspiracy. It’s the way people are.
Was following you until you brought up IQ. IQ tests were invented by racists to do racism. I.e., the tests were geared towards white people purposely to skew results when POC took them. Look up the history. It is equal parts horrible and fascinating.
It’s the forced tyranny that is a problem. Why Covid is such a big deal. The sheep need to go hide in their bubble and stop imposing their will on others. Do as I say or suffer is their way of operating.
That’s a little problematic when one person can infect everyone else. People, including you apparently, need to understand that personal freedom ends where it starts causing consequences for others. It’s an interconnected society more than ever, not just a collection of separate, independent heros, like some enjoy believing. If you think asking people to cover their cough is tyranny instead of just good sense and manners, then you are the problem. If folks could behave responsibly, we wouldn’t need mandates. But you can’t, and routinely think your freedom entitles you to put others at risk, so mandates you get.
TY! Also a physician. So tired of this discussion. Everyone is masked in my clinic. Anecdotal, and my partner and I are still covid free, and hope to continue. Masking, distancing, hand washing, and isolation when sick, these simple, time tested, behavioral changes can significantly reduce risk of infection.
⭐ <-- my lemmy gold for you, excellent writeup
You know, even before COVID-19, there would be flu, rsv, etc. outbreaks and there would barely be a blerb about it. People would send kids to school sick, literally everyone would catch it, and it sucked. Maybe less lethal, but it still sucked. And I always caught whatever was going around cause we just didn't have the culture here.
At least now there's more recognition, some people might wear masks, and there's a fighting chance I don't catch the thing everyone gets that season (at least in California where it's still ok to wear a mask without ridicule).
Except my sister gave me COVID two months ago since I let her stay here to avoid homelessness. Can't fix bad habit family members, and getting a false negative on a test gave her confidence to get me and my baby sick. Ugh, bad times.
where it's still ok to wear a mask without ridicule
Serious question, why are people being ridiculed for wearing masks in the US? Is this generally how it goes in all of the US?
I'm from Asia and most countries here have been wearing masks even before the pandemic for multiple reasons - pollution, not wanting to spread sickness including the basic cough and cold not just flu or COVID, when at a clinic or hospital, etc. I wear a mask even when I just have allergic rhinitis just so that I don't accidentally blow snot all over somebody else. No one would bat an eye here if you wore a mask.
I don't understand the negative connotation to wearing masks and why anyone would care if you're wearing one.
US culture is founded on individualism at the expense of everyone else. A lot of people buy into the idea that any kind of government imposed action, even as minor as wearing a face covering that even helps the wearer, is a horrible tragedy and assault on their ability to make bad decisions. Those people are belligerent and numerous.
The US government were also months late to handling COVID, and the conservative leadership in power was actively demonizing safety protocols such as masks, vaccines, social distancing, etc not to mention their own Center for Disease Control, to the point that a fair percentage of the population is distrustful of medical science and unwilling to consider those safety protocols.
A lot of the news media (left and right) focused on things like getting people back to work in spite of the ongoing pandemic so it really forced the narrative away from collective safety and survival into economic prioritization and the illusion of normalcy.
The news media also focused on the demonizing by conservatives for more advertising clicks instead of promoting the safety measures by the CDC as reasonable and worth listening to.
You either seem to have people who just care about themselves and their comfort and beliefs only, or people who pretend to care about others, only to satisfy their ego and beliefs in the process, sometimes at the expense of the group they pretend to care about.
Politics, the party in charge decided that the best response was to pretend the problem didn't exist and maybe it'll go away. Wearing a mask is a very public sign that there is a problem.
Yeah. In Malaysia before covid, every flu season i could see some people(not a lot) start wearing mask, and people masked up as well in hazy season. Just before Covid become the pandemic i can see people already started to wear one before the mandate. Of course, nowadays some butthurt netizen will still jab at those wear mask here and there, but other than that, i still see people wear mask everywhere i go, which is a great thing. Sanitary and personal health shouldn't be something that get ridiculed.
But then again, it's Asia, and SARS is pretty big back then.
Maybe before the pandemic someone somewhere might have said something but not now. Even living in a rural area people don't say anything at all. I don't know where that user got the idea that you'd be ridiculed.
I don't wear a mask anymore, but people glare at people that do. I also got a lot of harassing comments when I was wearing a mask last year.
That's interesting, guess it's different around here. No one says shit and I'm in the rural south.
because wearing a mask is for pussies.
it's really as simple as that. it's seen as weak and pathetic and makes you an object of ridicule.
Protecting others is weak and pathetic? Alrighty then. Bet you're a "Christian" too.
Those outbreaks didn't kill a million people Ina year, and did not strain the hospital system to the point of breaking.
Well, there was the Spanish flu which also lead to mask mandates and other social safety measures as covid.
It's certainly more deadly, yes. That's why it got more attention. But I'm young and the risk to me is about the same, plus that's not really my point. I'm mostly saying that I'm grateful people actually care about hygiene for once, 2020 the first time in my life I didn't catch "the thing going around" since I didn't have a jackass coughing on everything at work or school.
Mask mandates are not about protecting you, they are about limiting the spread throughout the population. You may have even had it with no symptoms and gave it to someone else, and the spread in the population as a whole is the threat.
I haven't seen a trend towards people caring about hygiene around the midwest.
I am mostly referring to the shift here in voluntary masking, but yes, Midwest would be a bit different. When the mandate ended here, people continued to mask up if they (1) are at risk, (2) feel a little ill, (3) just felt like it. If I tried to mask up in 2018, I'd get weird looks!
And yeah, hand washing picked up, too, although not sure if it kept up. One perk of living in a blue area of a blue state in any case.
I'm not sure if there will be any more mandates because of masking fatigue, but the science does say that one way masking is still effective.
Flu absolutely killed a grip of people when it was new.
It eventually became endemic and what we live with now. More or less what we have with covid. It will rear its ugly head every year as it mutates. Some will get it and have a rough time, some people's immunity or vaccine will help make it less deadly contagious as it was in 2020.
Life goes on. Wear a mask or don't, but we are way past the point of putting the genie back in the bottle
If half the population wears a mask during a pandemic, it won't slow the spread very much.
Leaving safety measures as a personal choice for contagious diseases is like letting everyone decide whether or not they want to stop at red lights based on personal preference. Sure, you can be in a rural area and pretty much ignore most stoplights without a collision, but in a city the negative effects will be rapid and deadly.
Sure but I don't think we are in the pandemic anymore.
Again wear a mask or don't. I don't give a shit. I'm personally done with them until rates start to spike again, or for when I travel on an airplane.
Hmm I mean thousands of people (mostly the old) still died of flu every year. So kinda lethal.
Some 40 to 70 thousand people in the US die every year from the flu. I think the big thing is most people don't care until it affects them personally. It's been weird seeing covid coverage be all, "THINK OF THE DEATHS" as if that meaningfully would change much
1 million+ vs 70k... hard to compare COVID to flu
40k to 70k isn't even correct. https://www.cdc.gov/...
Meth is hard.
you can't say that in that provided any context to what you disagreeing with. I simply repeated numbers from other people a million plus people have died from covid flu number apparently doesn't line up with reality but I didn't research it before I responded
Honestly I’m sad for everyone that works manual labor. Wearing a mask absolutely lowers the chance of both transmitting covid and getting covid, but working in 90+ degree weather lifting heavy shit for 8 hours a day wearing a mask sucks. It gets moist as all hell and fogs your glasses.
Source: I unloaded trucks outside all day 5 days a week for the entire summer of 2020 and 2021.
I mean I understand why people do it, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck and doesn’t make work just a little less tolerable for those having to deal with it.
Have you worked manual labor in a mask in the summer?
I have. The one time I got COVID, it felt like 40-50C all week plus humidity, I was masking with an N95 the whole time when I was around people, but because I was working an outdoor music festival, 95% of the people I was around wasn't.
I especially could barely get out of bed, had to use my inhaler about 5-10 times a day cuz it kept triggering asthma attacks, my limbs hurt so fucking much, I was nauseous and light-headed and had insane brain fog. It got better after 2 weeks but I was only really ok for about 4 hours a day and could only be vertical for about 2 or I would get really sick.
I had long COVID for about 2-3 months after that, which included severe brain fog, struggling to breathe, and easily got tired all the time.
I also get COVID-like symptoms when I get the vaccine for 2 weeks all 3 times I got it.
I really wish people would understand that masking is to protect other people by not spreading it to them, not yourself from getting sick.
Id rather be sick for a week than wear a mask doing physical labour.
What do you do for a living? For many, wearing a mask while working is a recipe for guaranteed heat exhaustion. I'm not subjecting myself to that, and if the illness is anything at all like the last time I had it, it was a goddamn cold.
Wearing a mask in a hospital full of people with compromised health and all sorts of contagions floating around is a really good idea.
Wearing a mask outdoors in the summer time on a construction site full of other able-bodied people is just fucking silly.
What kind of construction work are you talking about if you're not wearing a mask? Anything that produces fine dust or requires working with volatile chemicals like paints and aerosols requires you to work in a mask at all times. Do you have any work safety regulations in your country?
Who says you won't be one of the 15 percent who get long covid?
What did they say like 76 percent of the population has had one strain or another of covid?
Even if masks are totally effective, all you're going to effectively do is delay the inevitable. You will catch this; it's only a matter of time. I choose to get it over with.
I'm in Australia and half my kids class was sick last week. Me and the kid both tested positive today. It is pretty rough.
Nobody here cares at all any more. This is my first but most people are on their 2nd or more go around. Its not even discussed, there are zero masks, and people are sending their kids to school sick.
All our care and caution just in the bin because people just don't give a shit
There are 7 million dead people who I'm sure would argue that point if they could. Do you think a respiratory disease spreads through some other means? Or do you just not understand anything about the situation?
It might have to do with the fact that by far most of the population has some degree of immunity now due to infection or vaccination, making the disease much less lethal than it was, and now completely comparable to other flu viruses. I don't want everyone to freak out every time some mild disease is in season. Yes, it sucks to get a cold, and it sucks to get the flu, but if nobody ever catches them we will have very low levels of immunity in the population, making it far worse when people do eventually catch them.
After covid I was bedridden a couple weeks because of common colds. Thats never happened before. The amount of people hospitalised due to other diseases than covid also spiked (we have statistics for this). The reason was that very few people had gotten sick for two years, so nobody had any immunity agains anything they weren't vaccinated against (which is most cold- or flu viruses).
So your standpoint is that you want people to walk around making each other sick regardless of the consequences? And your reason for this is that you spent two weeks in bed? That's whacky man
So your standpoint is that you want people to walk around making each other sick regardless of the consequences?
I never said that. I said that if nobody ever gets sick, the consequences are much larger when disease does spread. Just check the statistics for any country post-covid lockdowns, and you will se a spike in non-covid related respiratory disease. Plenty of doctors and researchers have pointed out that the reason was very little respiratory disease during lockdowns/quarantining periods leading to low immunity in the population. I want to minimise the consequences long-term, and I'm saying that I prefer to get mildly sick once or twice a year over getting extremely sick every other year.
And your reason for this is that you spent two weeks in bed?
It seems like you didn't even read the whole paragraph. As I said, what I experienced wasn't unique, but something we could also see in statistics over hospitalisations. I'm lucky enough to only have been in bed, but for people with preexisting conditions, the same infections could have been much worse. Again: If most people get mildly sick every now and then (as we always have) we prevent outbreaks from wreaking havoc and hospitalising a bunch of people when the do happen.
No, most people don't have some degree of immunity. They found out very early during the pandemic that Covid damages the immune system and that you can basically assume you won't gain immunity. Stop pretending it's the flu.
Fun fact: if you got sick during the first wave, getting it again will not result in any immunity.
I'm not pretending coronavirus is literally a type of flu virus. It just happens to be a novel flu virus that we don't have as much exposure and immunity to yet. There are plenty of historical examples of what happens when a population is hit by a virus that it has little or no immunity against, even though that virus is relatively harmless to those with immunity.
That is not an argument against vaccines, and it is not an argument against all the precautions that were taken when Covid-19 first hit. Those were both necessary for the population to build as much immunity as possible, with as few as possible deaths and as little as possible sickness.
It is an argument for the fact that Covid-19 must be treated differently now and in the future vs. how it was initially treated. It is now a virus that most of the population as some degree of immunity against (due to both infections and vaccines). If you doubt that that's the case, just look at the reproduction numbers for Covid-19 outbreaks, which are still ongoing. In the initial waves, just a handfull of infections were capable of spreading to entire countries, killing thousands, within just weeks. If a handfull of people get Covid-19 now, that is no longer the case, even though we aren't quarantining people. This is a direct result of herd immunity. Just like we have flu season, where different flu viruses spread in local epidemics, Covid-19 will continue to spread in local, seasonal epidemics in the foreseeable future (likely "forever"), but it is no longer the same threat as it was when nobody had any immunity to it.
That is not how the immune system works. There is lots of info about it and it is very complicated, but stuff that has been around for literally ages, that coincided with humans evolutionary path, have been basically added to a permanent watch list and so our immune system goes haywire at the slightest hint of one of those invaders presence. Covid is still considered a novel virus, regardless of it being a few years since it's existence, and our immune systems haven't had time to find a good defense against it. This is a simplification, but think of covid or other viruses like a key, but a rapidly changing (mutating) key and the immune system as a really elaborate lock, that also changes (but incredibly slowly, comparatively) and yeah that's all I've got. Source: I'm in undergrad studying to be a microbiologist.
Yes, Covid-19 is still considered novel, but saying that we are dependent on evolutionary-scale changes to develop immunity is just wrong. The immune system learns to recognise infections relatively quickly, which is literally why vaccines work. It's also why people typically only get infected by seasonal epidemics once in a season, because we quickly build a short-lasting "immunity" to the virus that is in season. Source: Masters degree in chemistry/biotechnology.
because wearing masks did shit. that's why.
vaccines did.
it's not about science. it's about public perception. masks didn't stop covid. vaccines did.
people will not wear masks again. they would probably get another vaccine though.
ending covid = getting rid of mask mandates, in the publics viewpoint.
Ok, in this context you are right in spiritt. Masks are stoping tje spread, but in the grand scheme of things it is mostly about slowing it down.
However I don't think saying the masks do nothing is right at all. Masks are still useful.
It's funny, I didn't get COVID while I was wearing a mask, but caught it after we were vaccinated and I stopped wearing them.
I'm not just going to downvote you here, because I think this is an information problem.
Here's a cool video about mask efficacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GndKYJ4uBI
And a study on the topic: https://www.cdc.gov/...
The tl:dr is that masks are ac5ually extremely effective at reducing infection by respiratory diseases if both the infected and uninfected parties wear them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=3GndKYJ4uBI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I've never stopped wearing a mask in public transport/while grocery shopping etc. and I don't think I will =/
Fuck I am so sorry. Gonna continue wearing the mask for people like you especially.
I still do, though nearly zero of that is due to virus stuff. I'd say for me it's 95% I'm too lazy to retrain myself to keeping a neutral expression, 4% because hiding my ugly mug seems polite, and 1% sickness reduction ( combination of allergies, flu, covid. Etc)
Valid
Me neither. I'm also in a part of the United States where people seem to give a damn at least a little more. I'm never the only person wearing a mask in the stores I shop at. And shockingly (not really), we have a lot less COVID-19 than the national average.
So, not planning to stop any time soon.
Are you sure they weren't just being recorded anymore? How many people continued to test themselves and informed the responsible people? I know at least in Germany we don't have any accurate numbers anymore.
For me that would just be anecdotal data and I would not base my actions on that.
Maybe "something" = "at high risk of getting stick?"
Ah a medical expert as I can see. Please go ahead and enlighten me: where is your systemic proof of the ineffectiveness of masks as a precaution to reduce the spread of Covid?
If it's not too much to ask, please be so kind to provide the statistics regarding the different severity levels and corresponding number of cases of Covid while comparing that to the common cold.
Imagine the survival rate without precautions. (e.g. look at Italy 2020)
they didn't do anything for Rona
You're wrong.
Swedes were encouraged to work from home if possible and limit travel within the country. In addition, people aged 70 or older were asked to limit social contact, and people with COVID symptoms were asked to self-isolate. The goal was to protect the elderly and other high-risk groups while slowing down the spread of the virus so the healthcare system wouldn’t become overwhelmed.
As the number of cases surged, some restrictions were imposed. Public events were limited to a maximum of 50 people in March 2020, and eight people in November 2020. Visits to nursing homes were banned and upper secondary schools closed. Primary schools did, however, remain open throughout the pandemic.
Face masks were not recommended for the general public during the first wave, and only in certain situations later in the pandemic.
Maybe instead of speaking your mind you can speak with facts next time.
Politically it will be suicide for the democrats.
Did you form that opinion from social media? Because there are certainly plenty of Democrats who were upset over masks, but you would never see it on Reddit. Though Republicans are probably more likely than Democrats to be against masking, as I vaguely recall from some polls on covid.
Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.
Looks like I'll be masking for 8 hours straight on my flight home. It's a bastard (my glasses fog up constantly), but that's life.
I just hope it gets tamed before term starts since I'd rather not be forced to teach hybrid again (the style of lesson where every student loses)!
Look into mask tape, it's double-sided tape that goes along the inside bridge of the mask. I buy a pack of 100 strips on amazon and it lasts me a couple months. Cheap and easy and completely solves that issue.
Thanks for this! I will definitely be getting some 😊
Will try this out - thanks for the tip!
The fog means it's not fit properly. Air should not be escaping over the bridge of the nose it should diffuse out of the entire mask. Either the strips across the top are not being bent correctly to contour the nose or the mask just can't be made to fit your face shape and you need to try something else.
No, it doesn't. Exhaled breath emitted through the filtration material can still cause glasses to fog.
My wife and I are going to the US from Japan in roughly a month. Our first flight is something like 12 hours. Not going to be a fun one. I'm hoping her first time in the US and mine in 5 or 6 years isn't spent with corona. We're also visiting my elderly grandparents for what may be the last time, but I'd certainly rather not MAKE it the last time by bringing disease with.
I don’t wear glasses full time, just sunglasses and reading glasses, but they’re really hard to make compatible with masks. Fogging up sounds like an inconvenience but you basically can’t see within seconds. I wonder if a lot of people opted for contacts or lasik during this period to help compensate. Regardless, yes, masks on flights just make sense. It’s a huge number of strangers in a very close space and not something you need to do every day. You’re not exercising or socializing or moving about in public so why not just mask up and sit tight.
Buy a few good reusable masks (that you can run through the washer) that have a metal strip inside to conform to your nose. Have the top of the mask up high on the bridge of your nose and push down on it so the metal strip conforms to your nose shape. Rest the plastic feet of your glasses on top of the metal strip, so that they're resting on the mask and not on your nose. That's what I figured out keeps my breath from escaping the top of the mask so it eliminates fogging.
Don't do this. Any mask that you can wash is useless for protection. You need an N95/FFP2 or better.
Good luck getting the ignorant masses to mask up these days.
At least locally there's a clear anti-mask attitude. There is no way you can get a middle aged man, who listens right wing media, to wear a mask again. They reminisce the last time like a lost unjust war and because covid didn't hit bad here, they think it was just a hoax of the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah, I think that ship has sailed. When the covid wasn't as bad as originally thought and with the reports that masks weren't all that effective even the people who were gung ho aren't likely to mask up anymore. And I'm not trying to downplay covid or mask effectiveness, but rather talking about the feeling people have right now.
Covid WAS as bad as originally thought!
The whole point of the precautions was to reduce the spread enough to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and more time to release a vaccine before everyone got it. Hospitals were very close to collapsing in a lot of areas, and if it had not been slowed it would have been far worse.
Don't confuse successful mitigation with the disease not being as bad as originally thought.
Covid WAS as bad as originally thought!
It was feared as something that would kill people left and right with almost biblical proportions, as the modern day black death or something. You can blame media for overhyping it to sell the news I guess but a lot of people got the idea that it would be a lot more than it actually was.
Don't confuse successful mitigation with the disease not being as bad as originally thought.
It wasn't as bad as we thought at first and we managed to make it another season flu almost, so of course people are going to regard the thing as no big deal now. And it would be a really hard job to convince them otherwise
It absolutely was not just another seasonal flu. Do you have any idea how many people died?
It's just that people don't consider it that bad to get it and are under the impression that masks don't do anything. Of course with a sentiment like that people moved on, in a way and stopped masking or caring.
As an avid mask wearer I'm here to say that the critics are right, masks don't do anything. They don't make it harder to breathe, think, feel, or exist out in public...oh and they don't do anything to your lungs, liver, kidneys, heart, or brain...unlike COVID...that shit can fuck you up.
We're used to viruses that have narrow cell types they can infect. Rhinoviruses can infect mucus membranes in the head and maybe throat. Influenza can infect the same plus lung tissue.
These coronaviruses can infect so many cell types. Because it's spread via the air, it almost always infects mucus membranes of the head first, then moves to lungs (or maybe it infects lungs first in some people). So we think of it as a respiratory virus at first.
Now we know it can infect tissues of the gut, fat, T cells, and the testes. There was a wave of orchitis/epididymitis that was discovered to be coronavirus caused. I'm not sure if it's considered COVID, I think COVID is the respiratory disease caused by coronavirus, but not sure about other diseases. Similar to how the varicella virus causes two diseases: chicken pox and shingles.
Do you think the severity of infection is important? Meaning, if previous variants were wiped out and the only variants still spreading were less severe than a common cold, would you keep wearing masks?
What's the point of this hypothetical? It's both not remotely close to where we are currently and has redefined the consequences to absurdity.
"Would you still wear a mask if the consequence of infection was a single light sneeze?"
"Would you wear a seat belt if the only consequence of car crashes was a small bruise?"
Yes because I don't want car crashes to spread to those are driving safely
The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time. So it's likely that each new covid strain is less harmful than the last. I'm wondering where you draw the line?
Personally, preventing a light sneeze isn't a big enough reason to wear a mask.
The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time.
That's not actually a real thing. It was a theory by a guy in the 1800s that's been soundly debunked but spread because people want to believe it's true.
The CDC declared the end in May in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/...
Even if they knew someone who died, they insisted it wasn't covid, even to the point of keeping it off death certificates.
I wish we'd never forced masks to begin with. There wasn't nearly enough natural selection from the whole thing. Let em kill themselves.
How at this point are there still so many people who don't understand what masks are for? It's not primarily to protect yourself, it's to bolster the whole herd's defenses by reducing spread.
The mask isn't for you, it's for everyone else. It's not that fucking hard to understand.
That's simply not true. A good n95 or n99 mask will absolutely prevent you from catching it. I spent 2 weeks around people with COVID and I wore my mask, and I never caught anything.
The problem is that everybody wears fucking cloth masks when we've had n95 masks available for 2 years and people complain that masks don't work. Yet doctors use them, construction workers use them and people in labs do all the time.
What you said and what I said are both true.
N95 masks will protect you, but the reason good and well-adjusted people want others to also wear them is to protect everyone else, especially immune-compromised people for whom a COVID infection could well be life-threatening.
And of course it's also a numbers game. If even 10% fewer people get infected, across a large population that's a quite significant number of people who aren't clogging up hospitals and calling out sick from the work force.
"I think I'm smarter than the experts" energy in every single comment, lol
What a shit thing to say. Slightly less healthy people still write songs, hold the door for you, transport food, build things in factories, design new technologies, yet you've decided the world would be better off without them. Fuck you, seriously.
Putting aside your wanting disregard for human life, the virus not only killed people it also left people messed up for life. A close friend of mine was a fairly successful white collar worker, due to brain damage I have my doubts he will ever be able to work again. He was 37 in 2020. Also has two kids. Who I guess now get to see daddy struggle with driving a car and talking for over a few minutes.
you know young people are still getting long covid right?
Even though I share your morbid enthusiasm about humankind, you might possibly admit in some corner of your heart that there might be some people who don't deserve to die or get long term health issues from Covid. Aren't those, who might be worth saving from your point of view, important enough to try to participate in measures which might help to reduce the risks for them?
The survival of humanity and keeping earth habitable for most species currently alive, requires a more utilitarian mindset. Making decision with our feelings got us where we're at. People aren't going to change in mass anytime soon. So, some people need to die. If that can skew the way that vote for abject failure and are less productive for society, it's a bonus.
The flimsy masks are more beneficial to others than the wearer. Preventing moisture leaving your mouth/nose.
I raised this exact point to a relative on a similar issue (people on the road during a major blizzard).
That said, there are many jobs where you don't need to be there in person. Saying "if you feel sick stay home" (or similar) should be encouraged as it's necessary to enforce this expectation that if you can stay home, you should.
Thanks to the COVID infection I already had and some other illness, I have no sick time left. So if I get it again, I have to take the entire time I'm sick unpaid.
Now I'm lucky in that I can work from home and would do so while able but contagious, and we can afford me to take a few days off unpaid, but plenty of people are in my situation and can't afford a single unpaid day.
Agreed, but it's pretty standard in U.S. businesses- if they give sick time at all.
Definitely. The vast majority of US citizens are one paycheck away from financial disaster.
I have a coworker who is here with me today ay my job. he's horribly sick and lost his sense of taste but still insists on working and the managers let him. so I'll probably have covid next week.
People are often forced to as many live from salary to salary. My country had a genius idea to reduce longest sick time doctor can prescribe without commission to two weeks from previously two months. Imagine how great that must be for everyone having to work their asses off. Especially considering that a lot of salaries are minimum wages and the rest of the salary is tied through KPI bonuses and stuff. So if you miss a day or two a month there goes majority of your salary.
Laughs in no sick time hours
Well, if they do attack you, you can sue them and then own their double-wide? I don't know if that's a win or not, though.
The double-wide might already have nuts on it!
you realize that civil suits take years and a lot of money? not all of us have 50K in the bank to hire a lawyer for 2-4 years so we can get the payout.
I've stopped giving handshakes to almost anyone, favouring the ol' terrorist fist jab instead. I get awkward reactions sometimes but some people seem to get why. Masking up again is gonna be fun, can't wait to hear the vaxxosckeptics tell me all about how everything is a hoax again.
Please don't make me feel old.
jesus fucking christ. they had an entire department working to imagine shit up about the Obama administration and terrorist fist jab is what they air?
what a bucket of chodes
And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they're just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.
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Please don't make me feel old.
I totally missed that back then. Go figure.
What would testing achieve now, anyways? Since there is no mandated isolation we can just treat it like any other disease and stay at home until we're healthy, no matter if it actually is covid
Hm maybe I should've held off on giving away all my extra masks..
I kept mine, still have a huge package. My thought was to use them in the winter months anyways. Always like that about countries like Japan. Even if it's not a deadly worldwide pandemic, I think we can do a bit to spread less sickness with really only a tiny inconvenience.
True that. I still have the washable ones so I guess they'll have to do for now.
I've never stopped but it's made me depressed when I was seemingly the only one doing it :/
Please consider wearing one any time you're out of your home during any resurgence. You can be a carrier and shredding while asymptomatic. If your masking keeps even one elderly person from getting COVID, isn't that worth? Even if it just lowers the chance they'll get it by a few percent?
Covid mostly spreads through asymptomatic cases. Ignorance kills (or causes long covid).
Id be surprised if anyone actually does this. I don't think anyone cares anymore.
I am worried about my grandma though, she's old and covid has a way with old people.
Caught and fainted twice. Rough go this stuff.
Werent their antimask protests in Europe?
The masks they peddle in stores are labeled as "not for medical use". I mean, damn! They have holes in them that I can see through with my bare eyes!
Masks that are protective, are called respirators and are part of a class of equipment called PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). The word "Personal" is in the name, because it is designed to protect the wearer, not those around the wearer, and is limited by the rating (P100 being the rating that will actually reduce the risk of some viral infections a reasonable amount, while N95 is for larger particulates like airborne dust and pollen). Will they (including those rated for dust) help reduce the risk of spread from the wearer to others around her/him? Of course, but only as long as the virus didn't go airborne and, even then, "only" up to 20% reduction in risk. Airborne viruses, like the coronavirus family of viruses, are able to penetrate the fibers and travel, but the layers of the respirators and non-medical masks slow that travel considerably.
I don't think that people should be required to wear masks. If you want to wear one, please do so and protect yourself with your PPE. If you'll see me around, I'll be wearing mine. But if you don't want to wear it, I believe that that's your freedom over your own body. It's your choice not to wear one, just as it is my choice to wear one. If someone makes fun of you for wearing a mask, I believe it to be your freedom to punch them in their throats.
The issue, as far as I've noticed, is that people think they know something, when none of us really do. Even our scientists are waffling back and forth on the subject. We all do what we feel is best for us and ours, and we should allow others to do the same to them and their.
Additionally, if someone around you is terrified, and would prefer you wear a mask, I think you should wear a mask (or not be around them). As I've said, we're flying blind, and, sometimes, we need to feel safe whether or not we really are. Just be a good human.
Lastly, up to 20% reduction in risk of spread isn't anything to sneeze at, after all (pun intended). Do the right thing, whatever you feel that is, and respect others as they do their right thing.
[E] You don't have to agree with me, but it is scientifically accurate. I hope you don't disagree with the "be a good human" part, though, since... why would you not be a good human?
Economy and politics instead of human rights and health. Yeah I see you bootlicker.
Tell it to the billions that work in slavery so you can buy fashion and MacBooks. 🥾👅🤡🤢🤮
But human rights and health would be impacted if half the population died. Water treatment facilities and the like aren't completely staffed by progressive, mask wearing, considerate individuals. There is a lot of infrastructure that would fail pretty damn quick.
Plus 4ish billion people dying isn't really something we should want lol i'd settle for "hopefully getting COVID re-fucks your brain into recognizing empathy and social responsibility" for those people.
Less is more. Have to start somewhere. Billions of people who only want weath over anything else need to go. Whether they are innocent or not. Capitalism is a fucking disease and you defend it.
If you think a suddenly halved population would bring anything other than war, famine, disease and dysfunction, you don’t know how the world works. There are already countries right now who don’t have enough people to staff their healthcare industry.
But hey keep calling me names and engaging in fantasy. It will be much easier and more fun than engaging in this difficult material substantially.
"press X to doubt"
As somebody with family in the extremely high risk of death category twice over, I'll make sure we're all extra careful.
Unfortunately, masks only protect others, not yourself, and so we must rely on the intelligence of others around us to wear masks to protect their loved ones and the at risk British population.
So, we shall see. Mark my words, if these people kill my family, I will never forgive them. Right wing antivax tossers and left wing apathetic idiots, I'll never forgive either group. On my deathbed in the 2080s I won't forgive them.
They do.
From: Verma, S., Dhanak, M., & Frankenfield, J. (2020). Visualizing the effectiveness of face masks in obstructing respiratory jets. Physics of Fluids, 32(6), 061708. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0016018
TABLE I. A summary of the different types of masks tested, the materials they are made of, and their effectiveness in impeding droplet-dispersal. The last column indicates the distance traveled by the jet beyond which its forward progression stops. The average distances have been computed over multiple runs, and the symbol “∼” is used to indicate the presence of high variability in the first two scenarios listed.
Mask type Material Threads/in. Average jet distance
Uncovered … … ∼8 ft
Bandana Elastic T-shirt material 85 ∼3 ft 7 in.
Folded handkerchief Cotton 55 1 ft 3 in.
Stitched mask Quilting cotton 70 2.5 in.
Commercial maska Unknown Randomly assorted fibres 8 in.
2024 elections in UK? I didn't know that.
The 2024 elections... Next year? If it was last year, would you say it JUST HAPPENED to coincide with the midterms? Give me a break
Hahahahhajaj you can wear them at you house if you want
Lol right? Eff that.
Saying that people should mask up is not authoritarian.
When a pandemic is killing thousands a day, and wearing masks is the best solution for everyone, requiring masks in grouped spaces is not authoritarian any more than prohibiting drunk driving because that also has a decent chance of killing others.
Saying they should is not authoritarian, yes. Mandating they do so under penalty of law is.
And for sure, authoritarian measures are sometimes genuinely necessary in strenuous circumstances. But I'm pretty damn confident that if you polled Americans about restoring mask mandates, you would see pretty overwhelming opposition against it. Imposing it despite that would be unquestionably undemocratic, and yes, authoritarian.
Nobody was required to wear masks in their own homes or cars or minding their own business in the open away from others.
I don't see the difference between mask mandates during a pandemic and laws about needing to stop at red lights. Both are there to avoid deaths caused by others, and both are reserved to specific situations that involve interactions with others. There have been zero proposals to expand mask wearing to other diseases, it was an extraordinary event on the scale of the Spanish Flu.
Are basic traffic laws authoritarian?
Is there maybe a middle ground where some laws are necessary because of vast potential harm that can be mitigated by small requirements when interacting with other people that are not authoritarian?
We clearly agree that mitigation of some level of harm is worth reducing people's freedom. The core question is, how do you determine where the line is?
Democracy generally demands that the people have some kind of say here, and the vast majority of Americans would strongly oppose restoring mandates now. I don't think you'd find that level of support for eliminating traffic laws. I'm fairly confident that most people at this point think that masking should be an individual decision and would not support the use of government force to impose their use on others. That might be strongly different from your own view, but that's democracy for you.
The govt telling anyone to do anything is authoritarian.
The issue is if you agree with what the govt is telling you, or not. It's only authoritarian when you disagree.
So laws telling people to keep their hands to themselves in public, to drive under a certain speed in a school zone, and to stop at red lights are authoritarian if the person disagrees. Gotcha.
A child's view of government
You didn't respond to their drunk driving comparison. Is it ok for the government to mandate against drunk driving, and to penalize those who violate it?
What does that have to do with authoritarianism?
Nobody was forced to do shit except on things like planes, which is their right. You just would be refused service for your choice not to wear a mask. Nobody was even forced to vaccinate because it didn't hold up in court. Oh wow looks like the system worked.
And I roll my eyes when you tell us we need to "heal." Maybe the side that refused to wear a measly mask (I'll give you a hint: Trump supporters) should have stopped being plague demons and making it an issue in the first place.
I'm waiting for my gov or health authorities to recommend it. Otherwise I don't think I'll wear one.
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Hey everybody! Lets all return to the office! Quick! Commercial real-estate landlords aren't rich enough. We need to fill those buildings ASAP!
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