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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#371

Post by throwawaygh »

ngngngng wrote: post #299
CamperBob2 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. You have some good points up until this one. Go to your local hospital and ask them how they'd like it if their case load went up by 2x due to a lack of "halfway measures." In some places, that will be OK, while in others, it will be utterly catastrophic. Obviously that doesn't justify ridiculous overreactions to unmasked toddlers, as you p…

> In some places, that will be OK, while in others, it will be utterly catastrophic. Maybe? But I already live in a place that did away with all COVID restrictions some time ago (not to mention they were never as harsh as elsewhere to begin with), and the situation here is barely worse than places with prohibitive restrictions.

> and the situation here is barely worse than places with prohibitive restrictions.

Are you sure about this?

I lived in a metro area in the middle of anti-COVID restriction land for a portion of the pandemic. Our hospitals were slammed during every surge, mostly with COVID cases from outlying counties.

Tiny rural hospitals didn't have case spikes, but really only because they functioned purely as funnels to the metro hospital systems. In one case, a county never had more than a single digit number of ICU admissions! Of course, the dashboard failed to mention that the sole hospital in that county only had a single digit number of ICU beds... guess where their overflow patients ended up?

At least in our case, if you looked at statistics on dashboards you got one story, but if you paid attention to the actual source of cases -- as opposed to which ICU the patient was sent to -- you got a very different story.

Re: The case against masks at school

#372

Post by michaelmcdonald »

smhenderson wrote: post #348
Hokusai wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In Europe belts are mandatory I'm having a hard time understanding this one... Are you literally saying that belts that hold people's pants up are mandatory?

Seat belts.

Re: The case against masks at school

#373

Post by smhenderson »

maxsilver wrote: post #354
smhenderson wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe belts are mandatory I'm having a hard time understanding this one... Are you literally saying that belts that hold people's pants up are mandatory?

It's probably a reference to seatbelts

Duh, thank you, that is completely obvious and why I didn't get that reading it is beyond me!

Re: The case against masks at school

#374

Post by autoexec »

remarkEon wrote: post #305
standardUser wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. It's not about protecting the individual children (at least not primarily, because they are so low risk). Whether or not this is still a useful approach probably depends on the locale. It seems like places where the Omicron wave is rapidly ending, having children wear masks is entirely…

>The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity? "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children to…

> People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?

You mean like calling in the national guard to help alleviate the problem or busing in nurses from all over the country, or creating temporary wards, or fighting to get more ventilators and medications? All of those things and more have been happening.

> "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children

Not only are you minimizing the benefits here, but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones. That is not something that makes sense to me. I want to make my choices based on our best understanding of the evidence we have right now, not based on things that may or may not ever happen in the future.

Right now, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when community spread is high in your area are proven to do a lot of good to help prevent very real harms. That's enough for me.

Re: The case against masks at school

#375

Post by naasking »

TameAntelope wrote: post #233
sfotm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really true, regardless of whether you like masks or not. There have been one or two level changes with respect to how much risk you're introducing to those around you as well as the personal accountability of those you'd affect. It's not surprising that different people have different tolerances for these risks. Even without the above factored in, this is sort of like saying that not using your turn signa…

It's not about individual risk, it's about collective risk, and honestly it's quite selfish to consider the COVID risks only with regard to yourself. And Omicron has made it so the risk profile is effectively the same as when this pandemic started; you will get it, you will be contagious for a time, and you will infect others. By looking at that risk and accepting it, you're throwing away the work you've previously p…

> It's not about individual risk, it's about collective risk, and honestly it's quite selfish to consider the COVID risks only with regard to yourself.

Is it wrong to be selfish? That seems be an implicit assumption in your argument.

Re: The case against masks at school

#376

Post by adolph »

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.

That claim is misinformation, please edit and delete. Medicine as a field is very broad and plenty of other conditions are being treated.

Re: The case against masks at school

#377

Post by tlear »

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…

People stopped having kids once they could(easily available birth control). Trying to connect it to COVID or Climate change is not supported by any data whatsoever.

Re: The case against masks at school

#378

Post by autoexec »

vikingerik wrote: post #370
autoexec wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. Putting literally anything in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to help to some degree. It's not as if the crook of our arms are rated to filter viruses, but that hasn't stopped health organizations all over the world from recommending the vampire cough for years. It's true that a mask alone isn't enough to guarantee anyone's safety and while community spread is high sending kids into…

Your face hole is not virus spewing if you aren't sick.

Too bad you can't know if you're sick or not until it's too late. It's one of the reasons this virus spreads so quickly. Even if you're not sick wearing masks also helps to protect you from getting sick. It's win/win for extremely minimal effort/inconvenience.

Re: The case against masks at school

#379

Post by speedgeek »

ngngngng wrote: post #275

Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…

https://www.tabsynth.com/product/badger-seal-mask-fitter/ I broke my nose playing baseball in high school and have an odd shaped ridge that prevents the metal in the mask from forming a tight seal. I use these to prevent fogging, works great for me.

Re: The case against masks at school

#380

Post by naasking »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #24
throwaway22032 wrote: post #21

The case against masks is quite trivial and generalizable across most industries. Today, a teacher now has two realistic options: a) self-isolate indefinitely, either teaching remotely or quitting their job b) contract coronavirus at some point Given that, masks are an irrelevance. A teacher who is clinically vulnerable and unwilling to roll the dice is left only with the option to quit their job, regardless of wheth…

I mix in society, wear masks everywhere, and have yet to contract coronavirus.

> I mix in society, wear masks everywhere, and have yet to contract coronavirus.

Or you did and were asymptomatic. Something on the order of 70% of cases are largely asymptomatic IIRC. Unless you're claiming you got a PCR test every 21 days since the beginning of the pandemic?

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