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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#651

Post by giantg2 »

323 wrote: post #628
giantg2 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no actual reduced inflow of air due to mask wearing, certainly not one that you would detect physiologically." Depends on how you measure it and what you mean by physiologically detect. Generally, the resistance of breathing through a ("good") mask is not automatically detectable, but does exist and one could detect it if they are attentive. Your body tends to increase tidal volume and/or respiration rate because of…

Notice how they said "no reduced inflow", not "no increased effort".

They've since edited.

"EDIT: other commenters response to this comment made me go look up some original research on the topic. As a result, I fully retract what I've said below. I found several papers that report substantial restrictions of airflow from wearing a correctly fitted N95 mask."

Re: The case against masks at school

#652

Post by lancesells »

sanderjd wrote: post #603
lancesells wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm vaccinated and think everyone capable of receiving the vaccine should get it but turning people away is cruel. That's science-fiction dystopia cruelty in my opinion. Now if a hospital is full and at capacity maybe there are some calculations but just turning people away is wrong.

They were explicitly talking about the case of hospitals that are struggling with capacity issues.

Ah. My misunderstanding.

Re: The case against masks at school

#653

Post by brimble »

dsl wrote: post #406
perardi wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and? The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you…

I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.

> If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning

In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.

Re: The case against masks at school

#654

Post by AnthonBerg »

pcmoney wrote: post #643
AnthonBerg wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Masks don’t help much It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol. As an example, this Lancet paper captures it well: ”Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2” , The Lancet, 2021. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6…

Masks as used by 90% of the mask wearing population which is only 40%? Of the total population dont work well* If you feel like you should wear an N95 properly to be safe then you should do that. But let’s not pretend we can get everyone to properly wear N95s

Whether people currently wear a particular type doesn’t indicate whether they are effective.

If people knew that they actually are effective, more would wear them.

Re: The case against masks at school

#655

Post by lovich »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #622
alsetmusic wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.

Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination. Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a…

> Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement.

I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage

Re: The case against masks at school

#656

Post by acdha »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #591
watersb wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually want to hear good reasons for avoiding vaccinations, because many people care a lot about that. I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer. I don't agree with an argument from stand-my-ground,…

Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated. A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection. Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me. You've probably spent the…

> Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.

It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.

Getting boosted, even after having been infected, is a cheap and easy way to reliably keep your immune response high without unpredictable timing. It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.

Re: The case against masks at school

#657

Post by acdha »

twblalock wrote: post #637
clutchdude wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with many things, nuance is a subject that many on HN fail to grasp. They believe that masking is a binary decision and that once made, the die is cast. Rather, if we tied masking mandates to thresholds of community spread and encouraged/provided high quality masks, the public would at least show medical professionals we're interested in keeping another body out of the morgue, aside from the obvious vaccination ne…

> Rather, if we tied masking mandates to thresholds of community spread and encouraged/provided high quality masks, the public would at least show medical professionals we're interested in keeping another body out of the morgue, aside from the obvious vaccination need. At this point, mandates have convinced everyone who will ever be convinced. There is no more convincing in our future. A subset of people will always…

> At this point, mandates have convinced everyone who will ever be convinced. There is no more convincing in our future. A subset of people will always reject masks and vaccines.

This is defeatist and I don't think it's true. Most of those people have never had a mandate — as we've seen everywhere those have actually been implemented, there are a very few dedicated antivaxers and a whole ton of people who are comfortable repeating their shiboleths as long as there's no personal cost. Once they're forced to accept the consequences of their decision, a significant fraction cave. They'll never admit that they spent the last couple of years parroting lies but at least they're vaccinated and far less likely to be tying up a hospital bed.

Re: The case against masks at school

#658

Post by ajford »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #588
ajford wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this ignores the fact that a death of a loved/cared for individual is the most "minimum quality of life" you can get. Sure, being able to go watch a family movie together used to be a big family thing, but we can't do that anymore. Our QOL has dropped in that regard, but it's far less impactful than saying to heck with it and going to the theater and having my kid or an in-law catch Covid and die. Long Covid e…

> To me, this ignores the fact that a death of a loved/cared for individual is the most "minimum quality of life" you can get. Counterpoint: my grandmother spent her last two years in perpetual loneliness because of covid measures in care homes preventing our family from ensuring full time visitors.

Up front here, I'm in no way attempting to demean your loss.

As a counter-counterpoint; Buddy of mine by way of a local community group lost his elderly mother in a care home because someone decided to come in to visit last year while unknowingly covid-positive. It swept through the wing and at least three other residents died from Covid complications. My friend himself ended up catching it from his mother and was in ICU when she passed herself.

Lack of social connections can be overcome with virtual communications. It's not the same as true face to face interaction, but it beats killing someone with your mere presence.

Re: The case against masks at school

#659

Post by pnutjam »

taylodl wrote: post #304

General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors. And i…

As a wise person once said, "Mind your own business". Take care of yourself and those around you and the rest will fall into place.

Re: The case against masks at school

#660

Post by xyzzyz »

sleepybrett wrote: post #586
xyzzyz wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now granted our schools are, frankly, criminally underfunded. They’re not, they’re one of the best funded schools in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_... the US is 66th by % of gdp

Yes, we're not at the top of spending on education as a percentage of GDP. Similarly, we're spending less on food as a % of GDP than Mexico, and much, much less than Somalia. Does it mean that US is not spending enough on food? That we're underfed compared to Mexico or Somalia? No, it just means that using percentage of GDP as a measure of something being over/underfunded is ridiculously wrong.
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