The case against masks at school • Hacker News Board

Re: The case against masks at school

#891

Post by throwawaythekey » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 5:30 AM UTC

BeefWellington wrote: post #831

throwawaythekey wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see https://twitter.com/orwell2022/status/1486330027549544452 Sure, you can deny some people medical treatment if you want to reduce the load on the hospital by a bit but it does not go away!

> Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see I think people underestimate how big a number 5% of a population of most countries -- even small ones -- actually is, especially when compared against available health care resources.

About 1/3 of the covid cases in the ICU where I live [1]. No idea how that stacks up compared to total ICU capacity (I think https://twitter.com/VicGovDH/status/1486225759874486273

Re: The case against masks at school

#892

Post by throwaway22032 » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 5:52 AM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #165

throwaway22032 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which "drop everything" makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we'd do it naturally. But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit. I tend to think that people who operate in…

> Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. I'm sympathetic to your point (and I love to play piano), but I can't help but ask, if we slightly reword your claim: would you be willing to take responsibility for spreading coronavirus to n other people so you can play the piano? Edit, to be clear: I'm not talking about the piano, or surface transm…

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Re: The case against masks at school

#893

Post by beerandt » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 5:56 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #445

elzbardico wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humm... no. Things don't work like that. On the contrary, exhaling through what is essentially is a sieve is only going to promote aerosolization.

Exhaling through a sieve still blocks the largest wettest particles, and limits the distance virus is forcefully expelled through the air. Again, it's not perfect, but infection is purely a numbers game. The more virus you can deposit on a mask, or a sleeve, or even a sieve, the less virus is in the air and the longer it takes for a virus to go from a mouth on one side of a room to a receptor on the other side of a r…

It catches the largest wettest particles and then launches them into the air as smaller particles upon the next cough.

Which is why some of the new omicron studies show cloth masks to be worse than no masks at all.

And partially explains why omicron seems more capable of defeating real world mask use.

Re: The case against masks at school

#894

Post by throwaway22032 » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

jasonshaev wrote: post #224

throwaway22032 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which "drop everything" makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we'd do it naturally. But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit. I tend to think that people who operate in…

Referring to other humans as "subhuman" is disrespectful, at best. Where do you get off saying ANYONE isn't a "living being[s] with spirits and hopes and dreams?" Having different priorities than you do does not make someone "subhuman" and I would seriously reconsider the language you are using.

No post body was provided.

Re: The case against masks at school

#895

Post by projct » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

rcurry wrote: post #801

tjr225 wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things have forced us to all drastically alter our lives in the forms of economic and social lockdowns like covid has. It is a pretty silly thing to compare.

Covid is old and busted. Now all you have is OMG Omicron that’s just basically an annoying flu, you go ahead and lose your mind over it - it’s a free country. I’m still freaking out about dioxin so I don’t have time for this shit.

Covid killed 3895 people yesterday, with a 7 day average of almost a 9/11 of people every single day this past week.

Re: The case against masks at school

#896

Post by throwaway22032 » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:11 AM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #266

jaywalk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is him playing the piano spreading anything aside from possibly joy and happiness? What a ridiculous thing to say.

Yeah, sorry for not being more clear, but I wasn't talking about that person, or the piano, or about the odds of someone contracting COVID from surfaces. I was using the quote to illustrate what I see as a difficult pair of values to balance that situations like masks in classrooms, or other shared-space restrictions, really throw into painfully high relief: how do we collectively, as a society, balance our own perso…

No post body was provided.

Re: The case against masks at school

#897

Post by bradknowles » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:12 AM UTC

WillPostForFood wrote: post #730

ianferrel wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses. Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.

I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated comb…

60% still strikes me as dominating, because the percentage of the US population that is over 60 years of age is way less than 60%.

Re: The case against masks at school

#898

Post by autoexec » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #857

autoexec wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extremely minimal? compared to hospitals being overrun, people getting seriously ill and dying (2,200+ US deaths every day) continuing economic harm and disruptions in education yeah it's pretty small thing that it's a little harder to communicate because your voice is muffled and you cant watch people's lips form words.

The benefit is always vastly overstated with masks, and the cost always downplayed. You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience. Reality? Masks don’t seem that effective, they may reduce spread in some circumstances, but there’s so little evidence that mask mandates (the way we do them in America) have done much good. Obviously there’s a risk reduction on an individual leve…

> You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience.

Masks lead to fewer cases and yes that means happier hospitals. The science says that masks work and the majority of people accept that fact. Mandates work too, but only to the extent that they are followed and enforced. In fact they work so well that a certain embarrassed republican governor who had evidence that they work decided to try to hide that information from the public so he can keep pushing anti-mask lies to his base (https://missouriindependent.com/2021/12/01/missouri-health-d...)

The real problem with tracking the effectiveness of mask mandates comes from fact that case numbers and deaths are easy to track, but it's much harder to track the number of places that refuse to enforce the mandates that are in place or the number of people who decide to ignore the mandate or try to get around them by dick-nosing.

It's a difficult problem because there are a lot of reasons people oppose mask wearing. For some it's just simple petulance. Insisting on stricter enforcement of mandates just gets stronger push back from those folks who'll stomp their feet and take a very "You're not my mom!" attitude about anyone telling them what to do. Others have just been mislead by misinformation and they can be reached out to and informed but so many have made mask wearing political and it's extremely hard to get people to listen to facts that they've built an identity around rejecting.

Mandates aren't the ideal. I genuinely wish they weren't needed (both because community spread was lower and people had more faith in science) but because we're stuck with a percentage of the population that is anti-mask for whatever reason the best we can do is try to drag them kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by issuing mandates and hope that enough of the anti-maskers in our communities will do their part that it helps.

Re: The case against masks at school

#899

Post by jlawson » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #683

sleepybrett wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convincing that 40% to get vaccinated while members of our elected government preach to that particular choir about how things that are partially or mostly effective (masking, vaccines, etc) are NOT effective simply because they are not 100% effective is a losing battle. Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or…

The denial is so palpable. I know a couple in their early sixties who refused to get vaccinated because "COVID is way overblown". They were both regular weight and normal health. The wife contracted COVID and died in the hospital. Later, when asked if he was going to get vaccinated, he said no, because "COVID is no worse than a cold." He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID,…

Consider what he would have to accept if he faced the truth: That his incorrect beliefs directly caused his wife's death.

Not surprising he'd perform basically any level of mental gymnastics to avoid that.

Ego-protective delusions are extremely common and most are motivated by far less than this.

Re: The case against masks at school

#900

Post by timr » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 6:57 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #780

timr wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead? It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufa…

I don't understand why you would be against getting a free booster, or even a shot every 6 months. Is it more harmful in Israel? Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics. Either they are had something else (like a flu or a cold, you wouldn't know without a test), or something about natural immunity isn't working. I won't speculate, I believe its the for…

> Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics.

People who have had Covid are at least as well-protected against serious illness as anyone who is vaccinated, and probably more so given the latest variants:

> During October 3–16, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 18.2–21.4) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 55.3-fold lower (95% CI = 27.3–83.3) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 57.5-fold lower (95% CI = 29.2–85.8) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm