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Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

maskssavelives.org

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Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#31

Post by pwinnski »

dgrin91 wrote: post #26
virgilp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one, it's insane to say "masks don't help" in the same phrase where you say "we need them for the medical staff". Which one is it?

I think the key phrase in that tweet was "general public". Medical professionals who are in close contact for many hours of the day, day after day, do not count as general public.

That is absolutely true. Still, if masks are necessary for medical professionals, it's ridiculous to say they don't help anyone else at all. And yet, that's what our government is saying.

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#34

Post by stevavoliajvar »

detaro wrote: post #32
stevavoliajvar wrote: post #30

Iran doesn't have 80k cases https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/

same number as shown for Italy, so copy-paste mishap?

can be, hopefully they will fix it

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#36

Post by ksk »

StavrosK wrote: post #5
dmlittle wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wearing a mask is not a 100% protection against getting infected Most things are never 100% safe. Wearing a seatbelt does not guarantee you won't be injured in case of an accident, it's still something everyone recognizes it's a good thing to wear. I wonder what the tipping point is in terms of something being silly to do vs. it makes sense to do it for the general public. I would guess that social stigma plays a b…

It's an example of fallacious thinking, "if it's not 100% effective, that means it's 0% effective".

And then you end up with proposing hand-towels, bandanas and scarfs ...

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#37

Post by viklove »

nerfhammer wrote: post #19
2T1Qka0rEiPr wrote: post #14

I'm sorry, but the proof made on this site in support of the efficacy of wearing a face mask appears to be simply looking at a small sample of countries and finding a correlation between two variables. Completely putting the should we shouldn't we debate to one side, I'm not sure this site really contributes to this discussion in a scientific/novel way...

Country-sized groups of people are not small samples. There may be other biases but that's not one of them.

Why don't we look at Mexico and try to draw some conclusions? None of this data is useful as long as governments continue to stifle the freedom of information. Every country is hiding numbers from the international community, I'm not so sure we can trust Japan's numbers (or anyone's) to be honest...

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#38

Post by xiphias2 »

mbreese wrote: post #18
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree that this is nothing more than correlation at this point. I'm all for a double-blind study and would love to better quantify mask-wearing. I am saying: wearing masks seems like an easy thing to do that could potentially limit the COVID-19 infection rate.

And it could also give people a false sense of security. Masks may be helpful, but only in concert with other practices. Distancing is going to have a much larger impact on limiting the viral spread. If you have a bunch of people wearing masks that are only partially effective start gathering in large groups, you run the risk of negating all of the good generated from distancing.

Social distancing itself doesn't work. When I go to a shop, I always see people without masks, or even having masks but not using them properly (it's supposed to be on the mouth, not on the chin). They are the people who just don't care if they kill other people by chance, even thought the radio is talking about the seriousness of coronavirus all the time in the shop.

I always use a P100 full face mask when shopping, because I have respiratiory illness and scared of getting sick and breathing even harder than I can right now.

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#40

Post by nojvek »

I don't think people are against masks. The message is that we don't have enough masks for everyone. Because they are so limited, doctors and healthcare workers are at the highest risk, since they are exposed to the virus the most. Please make masks available for them as they'll have the best use for masks. They can save themselves and other people having the biggest impact.

Singapore is a small country and had capacity to distribute masks to everyone. US is at a much larger scale. I'm sure if we have a billion masks, we'd be giving a couple to everyone.

Masks are definitely effective, but US is so grossly underprepared for this pandemic that we really have to make a tough choice. Our manufacturing economy has been going downhill as we've been offshoring things to China and other countries. This is a huge blow when we can't build things that are dire to save us.

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