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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#921

Post by walkhour »

Hokusai wrote: post #337
psyc wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wearing masks whenever possible doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've been loving it that COVID has normalized wearing a mask in public because I'd like to do it all the time for the rest of my life without being judged for it. But I don't want anybody mandating it. I've been trying to work out in my own mind why I switched to being more, uh, 'deontologist' if you will, several years ago. I'm just starting to almo…

> Americans debating every day whether strongly authoritarian and invasive measures are OK, if they save lives. In Europe seatbelts are mandatory, and it is forbidden to smoke in most places. I think that these are reasonable measures. I think, for the exact same reasons, that mask mandates are reasonable. In public transport is mandatory to wear at least a t-shirt, as skin to skin contact gets unhealthy fast. And re…

> it is forbidden to smoke in most places.

I've always felt Europeans had no trouble throwing the cigarette smoke to your face, and that Americans were conscious this is extremely rude and went out of their way to prevent it

Re: The case against masks at school

#922

Post by ya_throw »

joshuamorton wrote: post #883
lr1970 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. This statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospital…

> Recorded deaths do not differentiate between "died from covid" and "died while covid positive" making death statistics hard to interpret. This has never been true and remains false.

The UK Government Covid death statistics literally say "deaths with Covid", and are defined as "deaths within 28 days of a positive test".

So it is true, and always has been.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

Re: The case against masks at school

#923

Post by ya_throw »

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…

>They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.

Do you have a source for that? The percentage of Covid patients in ICU wards in the UK peaked at somewhere near 30% for a short period in January 2021.

>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.

Now I do know this to be true, but it's not due to the absolute numbers of Covid patients. In my experience (as I know several people in frontline healthcare), its the side-effects of Covid restrictions making healthcare impossible to provide.

Re: The case against masks at school

#924

Post by AnthonBerg »

throwawaythekey wrote: post #787
AnthonBerg wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N95 masks are not at all difficult to breathe in in my experience. Not at all.

> N95 masks are not at all difficult to breathe in in my experience. Not at all. My default assumption would be that if the mask doesn't make it more difficult to breathe then it is unlikely to be effective. The filtration mechanism should introduce friction which you then have to compensate for with additional pressure in your lungs.

It’s a natural assumption!, and it’s important to address it. Basically the filter material is… almost indistinguishable from magic? It’s a beautifully balanced construction of materials science. From the perspective of gases, the mask is almost transparent. From the perspective of aerosolized particles, the mask is a wall of electrostatic forces and difficult luck rolls. It’s sort of like a wide reef that the tide may pass over but just isn’t traversible by boat; And all boats are steel and the reef is magnetized.

As a statement of technically accurate fact: I wouldn’t have been able to imagine how easy it is to breathe through a 3M Aura 9320+ FFP2 mask. Not before trying one. It’s… magic? –Feels like magic! These ones: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_LB/p/d/v000078838/ – pretty much the same mask as the 9205+ N95: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/v101146024/

“Duckbill” type masks are great too, like Kimberly-Clark / Kimtech pouch respirators: https://www.kcprofessional.com/en-us/products/scientific-and... … These might be the most comfortable article of clothing I’ve ever worn? Like really seriously. Very easy to breathe through. No drag or inertia at all. The 3M Aura mask has the edge in breathability though – feels impossibly transparent. I believe it’s due to the material itself. The duckbill type gets its breathability through using more material and a bigger airspace. I’d love to try a duckbill made out of the material in the 3M Aura. (Secret tip: If the duckbill is creased just right it looks more like a Stormtrooper than a duck. The free bread is nice though.)

I’m reading the Wikipedia page on HEPA filters now. Trying to get a better feel for how the material works. Seems like part of how the close-fitting masks can be made so easy to breathe through is that the possible speed of air flowing through is limited. Anywhere in the range of airspeed that we can breathe aerosolized particles in or out, the filter material causes slight turbulence in the atmospheric gas, it flows and eddies around the filter material – the air flows around the material – but the aerosol particles have much more inertia and hit the filter. I actually hadn’t understood or appreciated this aspect before now.

Re: The case against masks at school

#925

Post by DeWilde »

TameAntelope wrote: post #627
nradov wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't robots. There's nothing primitive or optional about the need for physical social interaction. The people who disagree with you aren't wrong, they simply have different subjective priorities and values.

There absolutely is something optional about the need (as in food, water) for physical social interaction, and the people who disagree with me are , factually, incorrect, know they're incorrect, and are acting selfishly at the cost of human lives. Is it entirely pleasant? No. Is it temporary? Yes. You will survive without physically being around your buddies for a few years while a global fucking pandemic is resolved…

That is one way of looking at it, the other is why force yourself to suffer if neither you nor anyone around you is at threat from the virus.

My threat model is different, everyone around me is healthy and young--with I myself being the only one with a chronic condition leaving me more vulnerable to Covid but still no that much--locking myself would be more unhealthy.

I don't see it as selfish, I'm not forcing anyone who is at risk to take the risks I am taking. They can stay at home for as long as they want, it is their life after all.

Re: The case against masks at school

#926

Post by LewisVerstappen »

nostromo wrote: post #750
dahfizz wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of thing that just drives me crazy. If the mandates were at the very least logically consistent, I would not consider them a burden. "You are not allowed into the restaurant unless you are masked, but you may immediately take it off once you've walked 10 feet to your table" is nonsense. Forcing you to leave the coffee shop with everyone unmasking to drink anyway is nonsense. It is security theater. I…

The crazy thing is this is creating a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists. When the media, the government and "science" double-down on policies we all know are total bullshit, it makes people lose faith in the media, the government, and "science."

Science is based off independent verification of results i.e. the scientific method.

The "Science" that we're supposed to "#believe" is based off peer review where a huge fraction (in some cases... a majority) of results cannot be independently replicated. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Re: The case against masks at school

#927

Post by yellowapple »

JPKab wrote: post #775
katbyte wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe take your kids out of public school then? Your kids are not the only ones there and don’t take priority over everyone else’s (and the teaches)

So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is. The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. V…

> The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period.

That's just deaths, though. What about other long-term effects? Long COVID and MIS-C come to mind.

> TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR.

And you'll notice that schools tend to take measures to prevent drowning - namely, barring unsupervised access to bodies of water deep enough for kids to drown.

> The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks

Maybe there should've been?

Re: The case against masks at school

#928

Post by edmcnulty101 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #885
edmcnulty101 wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well. Not accurate AT ALL. NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage. Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard. https://www.npr.org/sections/heal…

> Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.

We're talking about ICU capacity. That's what flattening the curve is all about.

Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia.

Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU?

Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.

Re: The case against masks at school

#929

Post by abdulmuhaimin »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #906
cpursley wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, your kids might be a bit dumber or less socially adjusted. What absolute lunancy; certainly you're trolling. Taking the position of sacrificing children is the position of the villain movies.

The argument is that we make this trade off in order to minimize the maximum terribleness, not just because it's convenient. Fwiw, we name this trade-off all the time. If you think your kid is getting the best possible experience for their development at school then you are pretty naive. School is largely about improving worst case educational outcomes, not fostering maximum growth.

IMHO, having a whole generation slightly dumber is more concerning. I prefer the trade off be something else.

Re: The case against masks at school

#930

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

watwut wrote: post #907
colpabar wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this. You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I'd just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing anyone , or encouraging a productive discussion? I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are va…

> I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I am not so sure. HN is the most "covid is just a flu, masks and respirators dont matter, teachers should teach when sick with covid those lazy bastards" place I regularly visit. I would be surprised if vaccination rates did not followed the same general political alignement.

HN, whatever it's faults is not just one side on this (or many other) political battles.

Encryption is probably the only thing that most people on HN agree with.

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