In contrast, the last time the general public has had an issue with a pandemic has been so long ago that deniers and downplayers had an easy game with their bullshit. Had wearing fucking masks not been that politicized, I'd wager a very good portion of the 6.6 million people that died to COVID would still be alive. And to come back to my gay friend, at least in his community there were almost no COVID cases.
Also vaccination drives. I'm good friends with a few gay guys, and they all rushed to get vaccinated, even despite being in committed long term relationships. There was, metaphorically speaking, absolutely no fucking around with this one.
I saw so many studies that showed that a properly fitted mask makes a massive difference in how protective it is compared to other mask types. Where can I get a mask fitted? Never even saw anything about fitting masks other than "it makes a huge difference and we do this for nurses".
Clearly much of the air goes around the mask. Sure a little metal piece at the bridge of the nose makes this a little better, but why did nobody seem to work on a proper solution for this? How about a mask with a rubber seal that goes around it?
This kind of stuff could have saved thousands of lives, yet we seem to not even have tried.
I think the fatality of COVID was just right to create a societal mess. Fatal enough to kill tons of people. But not fatal enough to get everyone on the same page that some sacrifices need to be made to rein it in. At the same time some people also had practically no symptoms, creating more opportunity for disagreement.
But I definitely agree that mask for should have been a big push. I'm not sure that sealing the gaps around the nose is that much of an issue from a transmissibility perspective, but it can make a significant difference in terms of comfort for those wearing glasses. And masks that are not comfortable don't get worn.
I wore one of these: https://envomask.com/
They're relatively heavy compared to paper & fabric masks (not to mention expensive), but the gel seal made it quite comfortable and it was the only thing I found that I could wear all day without ever fogging up my glasses.
Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.
As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)
EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)
It was obvious by mid-2020 that this situation was severely overblown, and that pretty much every reaction was far more harmful than beneficial.
Unjustifiable and baseless paranoia caused severe inefficiencies within medical systems that are inefficient even at the best of times.
A particularly unfortunate aspect was how the wider medical community itself, including regulatory bodies, immediately and ruthlessly shut down any of the questioning and feedback from physicians, scientists, and even some politicians that would have brought light to the harmful policies much sooner.
Instead, we had to wait two years in some places for common sense to even begin to return. It should never have been like that to begin with.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-all-but-give...
Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort?
Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not the least bit surprised.
Don't trust government agencies to tell you what they need, they'll always ask for a Moon mission.
Well yeah, it’s hard to recall the dozens or hundreds of people you may have interacted with over the course of days or weeks. It is however much easier to contract trace sexual partners, unless of course you’re engaging in repeated anonymous sexual encounters...
It wasn't just personal responsibility and willingness to get vaccinated and reduce number of partners. Gay men shouted from the rooftops at public health authorities to get them to step up testing, treatment, and vaccination campaigns very early, when many doctors were ignorant, unable or unwilling to take it seriously.
It's obvious isn't it? Handwashing isn't a badge you can wear. Meet somebody in public and you'll know if they're wearing a mask or not, but you won't know if they've washed their hands recently.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9250256/
> "To develop clear and simple guidance for the public, further work should focus on identifying the specific times when HH should be performed in different communities and situations. In the meantime, current guidelines should be followed and should be based on evidence summarised here. Resources to support frequent hand washing, if hand washing facilities are available, or alternatively ABHR, should be provided in schools, workplaces, and public spaces and HH should continue to be promoted"
There are some more recent studies (2022) that take a similar evidence-based approach to masking effectiveness, noting for example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9017682/
> "The author pointed out that with active COVID-19 patients, who may contaminate the environment, a mask will not protect healthcare workers or other people if they are not accompanied by hand hygiene, eye protection, gloves and a gown."
The autopsy of the governmental and medical responses to the pandemic (and the original source of the outbreak) will make for interesting reading for years to come.
That's a nice sentiment I guess. Meanwhile my gay friend didn't stop "socialization" during the pandemic except first few early months. According to him he must've had COVID at least 4 times by now. If you add natural immunity, vaccine and asymptotic transmission he was getting exposed to COVID pretty much all the time.
This is nothing against gay community. This is against idolozation of certain communities and demonization of certain other communities to fit certain political narrative. Reality is more complex and nuance.
Assuming he is a young man, then caution for the first few months meant he was cautious until mortality statistics revealed that the risk to himself, and presumably his partners, was minimal.
From a purely scientific perspective, and regardless of one's political leanings or preferences, it was obvious from the start that widespread everyday masking simply isn't effective, nor is it practical.
If such masking was even just somewhat effective, the entire situation would have been over by mid-2020 at the latest. That clearly wasn't the case.
Even in large regions with strictly-enforced masking (even outdoors, in some cases!), combined with numerous other onerous restrictions, we still saw massive case number spikes. Those would not have happened if masking worked.
Of course, there are also the numerous harmful effects of masking that must be considered. It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.
Hopefully, society as a whole has been reminded how masking just doesn't work, and that's exactly why we didn't bother with it until this recent debacle.
Because you seem to mean it as "prevents 100% of transmission", and therefore anything less than that means masking isn't effective.
And that's simply untrue. Masking does, really, truly, assist with covid spread. It doesn't prevent 100% of transmission, because nothing does, especially something that requires active participation, but yeah it helps a lot if people actually do it.
It's likely a large part of the reason that I've never caught covid, despite a fairly active social life and continued in-person office work for almost a year now. And why the social events I attend, where you can have a hundred people in close quarters breathing on each other haven't had recorded transmissions, despite recorded isolated cases.
> It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.
There's no evidence for any of these claims, and in fact you'll find the accessibility community strongly favors masks as immunocompromised people exist. Widespread seasonal masking has been common in other countries for decades (since SARS-1, two decades ago), and there's no evidence that it causes childhood development issues. There's, like, one academic paper whose conclusion is that mask wearing makes it difficult for preschoolers to detect the emotion of a person wearing a mask. But any extension of that to impacts on childhood psychological development isn't academic, it's you making things up.
The costs associated with widespread everyday masking are severe. You even quoted the ones that I'd mentioned earlier.
Just to overcome those severe costs, masking would have had to consistently bring astounding benefits.
At a bare minimum, that should have been a nearly-complete end to the transmission of not just this virus, but others, as well.
Unfortunately, we didn't see that happen, because masking isn't effective.
We experienced the severe costs of masking, but without receiving any benefits from enduring those costs.
This was demonstrated by what's among the largest set of scientific experiments ever performed, involving many millions of people, in many nations, and over two years of masking in some cases.
Yes, and stated that they are, for the most part, not actually costs.
Masks don't cause accessibility problems, they don't cause child development issues, they don't cause social strife when consistently warn and enforced, and they don't cause abusive policing (police don't enforce mask mandates anywhere in the US, and consistently were one of the least compliant groups!).
You can't keep lying about these supposedly "severe" costs when anyone with eyes can see that they're made up. I mean you can, but it's your credibility lost.
Masking certainly does cause accessibility problems for many people.
For example, people with mobility and other issues involving their fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and ears can find it quite difficult, or even impossible, to put on, to wear, or to remove a mask.
Masking can also aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular-related medical issues.
Masking can aggravate PTSD and other psychological issues.
Masking can cause problems for those with hearing-related issues, as it can make it difficult to hear the muffled voices of others, as well as making lip-reading impossible.
In jurisdictions where accessibility is considered important, the forced masking bylaws or legislation typically had accessibility-related exemptions, because masking does cause severe accessibility problems for many people.
The harmful social impacts of masking take many forms.
Among the most egregious were when exempt individuals were denied service, reasonable accommodation, and in some cases employment.
Such people also faced significant harassment when in public, even in so-called "tolerant" societies. Sometimes this would involve verbal abuse. Sometimes it would involve having creeps take and share photos of them, in attempts to socially shame them. Sometimes it would unfortunately involve physical abuse, even with the police being the perpetrators at times.
A less-visible aspect to this very real threat of harassment was how some people just stopped participating in society as much as possible, even at the cost of financial, psychological, and social harm to themselves.
Forced masking, especially in schools, has definitely had a negative impact on the education and development of children. This manifests in various ways, including communication-related delays and difficulties, trust/fear-related issues, immune system deficiencies, and so on.
Perhaps you were spared the worst of this based on where you happen to live, and luckily didn't have to experience the costs of masking yourself.
Others, however, suffered significantly because of masking, even if you may not realize it.
I have.
> For example, people with mobility and other issues involving their fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and ears can find it quite difficult, or even impossible, to put on, to wear, or to remove a mask.
This is minimal and solvable. If someone needs assistance putting on a mask, they need assistance with other daily activities and so can get that assistance as well.
> Masking can cause problems for those with hearing-related issues, as it can make it difficult to hear the muffled voices of others, as well as making lip-reading impossible.
This is also solvable, with for example clear masks that are used in speech therapy contexts.
> Masking can also aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular-related medical issues.
This is not true, there's no support for this in the literature. While full-face respirators can reduce airflow, facemasks like those commonly worn and recommended don't decrease airflow or O2 intake significantly enough to matter. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot breath through a mask either the issue is psychosomatic or you should be wearing a plastic face mask that provides you supplementary oxygen, because you are not sufficiently able to breathe on your own.
> In jurisdictions where accessibility is considered important, the forced masking bylaws or legislation typically had accessibility-related exemptions, because masking does cause severe accessibility problems for many people.
Please cite them.
> Among the most egregious were when exempt individuals were denied service, reasonable accommodation, and in some cases employment.
Please cite them. What is a reasonable exemption from mask wearing if a building requires all present to wear masks?
> A less-visible aspect to this very real threat of harassment was how some people just stopped participating in society as much as possible, even at the cost of financial, psychological, and social harm to themselves.
Lots of people do this for many reasons, for example the large swaths of people who (rightly or wrongly) still feel unsafe going out and about because of the dangers of Covid and the fact that most areas in society don't mask. Personally, I feel those people, even most with immunicompromisations, are overstating the risks associated with involvement in society. By the same token, I think the people you describe are overstating the risks of masking. I cannot conclusively say whether one faces a greater real issue than the other. What I can say is that masks to provide conclusive benefits, so the imagined risks of people who fear them are less of an issue to me than the imagined risks of people who overestimate the dangers of covid and other airborne infectious diseases.
> Perhaps you were spared the worst of this based on where you happen to live, and luckily didn't have to experience the costs of masking yourself.
Given where I live and my social circles, I and those around me masked far more aggressively and for far longer than the majority of the united states. I'll reiterate that there have been few to know real negative impacts from these policies.
This brings us back to our cost/benefit analysis from earlier.
The repeated waves of infection in many regions when forced masking was in place show that the benefits of widespread everyday masking are minimal, and perhaps even non-existent.
Combined with the significant costs of masking, we can confidently conclude that masking is not effective, and therefore should not be considered to be a technique that works.
To the extent that I said there are accessibility concerns with masks, I have also claimed that all are solvable while continuing to wear masks. Further, the idea that someone, somewhere, might be inconvenienced isn't enough to suggest that they shouldn't be used or mandated, that's silly.
> and as such have a severe cost associated with their use.
I never stated this, please do not put words in my mouth. If you're going to not only lie about the science, but also lie about what I've said, I'll disengage. Your need to lie should demonstrate to anyone else following along how reliable your claims are.
You continue to hold masks to a comical standard, and lie about them to do it. Don't.
I was in the hospital for 2 days when my wife gave birth, and I was supposed to wear the mask 24/7. Luckily they didn't enforce it strictly so I was able to sleep without the mask.
That is why vaccinating and wearing masks is so important: you're not just protecting yourself, but also those who legitimately cannot get vaccines (e.g. due to allergies), where the vaccines are ineffective (people with autoimmune disorders, on immunosuppressants or with a generally non-respondent immune system), or who cannot wear masks at all or for prolonged amounts of time (e.g. people with claustrophobia or weakened lungs).