That person has assessed their risk level and determined that their community's disregard for their personal risk, negatively impacts their personal model. Therefore they have to use a different device to mitigate their risk.
Seems pretty logical, matches with known science, with a minor exception that the half face respirator may not offer greater protection vs a well fitting* N95/KN95
* well-fitting being the crucial note there.
We don't yet know the long term sequelae of an epithelial infection, nor do we know why about 10% of those infected appear to get "long covid". Why should I risk it when the burden of reducing the chance is negligible?
I also wear a seatbelt.
I still attend scientific conferences this year that require 100% masking indoors and proof of vaccination to attend in person.
At my work all the scientist (mainly microbiologists) are still masking indoors, not just in the lab.
I don't care a whit if other people mask or not, but I do. I don't understand what kind of "help" you have in mind, but would genuinely be interested in learning.
A few years ago, 80% of people who wore a mask. Which way are these things trending? Wearing a seatbelt has become the normal attitude towards car risk. Wearing a mask was briefly the normal attitude towards risk, but has since become [again] an abnormal attitude towards risk.
If you're so keen to be abnormally safe and think everybody else is being unreasonable, why don't you get your three-point seatbelt replaced with a five-point harness? It's established well characterized technology that undeniably makes you safer You'll definitely be an odd man out rejecting social trends so expect to have people wonder why you're so paranoid. But by your logic you shouldn't care about that.
they are making the people that want to pretend the virus is just something you have to live with instead of taking precautionary measures feel bad.
What's the harm? Especially when long COVID can cause long term effects that can cause professional harm (ie, an existential threat)
But I wouldn't say there is zero downside to wearing a mask, atleast the way 98% of people wore one during covid. (The same one all day, if not a week, touching it, putting it in pockets, around your neck, on your greasy forehead, so on).
I used to wear a mask because allergies when I mowed the lawn or even dirtbiking during certain seasons. It absolutely reduces your ability to take it oxygen easily. I get winded a lot easier wearing a mask. Is that meaningless to children wearing them all day at school? Idk.
This is absolutely false. There is very strong evidence that masks do not effect gas exchange. One example of many: https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/face-masks-may-inc...
Masks do make your lung muscles work slightly harder, but there's nothing wrong with that.
"Each participant performed a six-minute walk test"
I've personally tested (out of curiosity) bicycling performance while wearing a half-face respirator that's barely noticeable during walking. Both measured speed and subjective difficulty were severely affected during high intensity exercise.
Children and long covid? Children barely got covid in the first place... Long covid? In so many kids a teacher could notice? Give me a break.
This isn’t uncommon in history, but it unfortunately tends to take a few cycles of mass death before humans adapt their culture and social behavior to the world as it exists (vs. how it was before or they wish it could be). We’re still early in this reality for COVID. It took decades for the reality of HIV/AIDS to change behavior around things like testing, condom usage, prophylactic drugs etc. Comparably, we’re in the like mid-1980s of COVID, even though it’s killed more people than HIV/AIDS did in the past four decades.
This might not be all that dissimilar to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in impact on the sufferers other than the immune effects are showing up faster and its airborne and 95% of the population has had it. I sure hope it turns around at some point and it doesn't become C-AIDS, but it explains why Flu and RSV and sepsis et el are going crazy at the moment, immune systems are in bad shape.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...
Help yourself by minding your own business.
"behaving foolishly" is a judgement call you made on someone else, for an act that doesn't really affect you directly. You yourself are allowing it to affect you - it seems to be overpowering you, maybe ask yourself why you allow it to. You do have a choice: just put it down. Keep carrying a load of heavy things, and you're not going to go anywhere very far. It is your choice. Have a good one.
Prediction: in 30 years a TV crew will follow someone around who needs to go maskless in public for some reason (dental care, kiss wife on wedding day) as they struggle with it.
I know what COVID will do to me, because I had it already. He's not right. I was vaccinated, and the vaccine didn't work (it didn't prevent me from getting ill, get out of here with the 'better outcomes' bullshit, I'm healthy and COVID was still a flu-like illness for me, and I'm convinced the vaccine I was promised was 'safe and effective' did little or nothing) and masks didn't matter.
It's like asking why we don't go around with masks on 24/7/365 to protect ourselves from the flu. Well, I've had the flu, and it's unpleasant, but it isn't worth the many downsides of proper N95 masking, and anything less than proper N95 masking is pointless.
Most of the people I see wearing masks in public now are wearing completely ineffective cloth masks and a large number of them STILL wear them under their noses. These people are not thinking critically or looking at data. They're still just trapped in the media fear cycle from 2020.
Rather than building immunity we are accruing damage and the evidence underpinning it from the VA study and the more recent ones is massive.
Large numbers in a study is good, but if the study design isn't right, then large numbers won't make up for that. It's absurdly hard to really conclude reliably.
For example, from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/well/live/covid-reinfecti... """For many people who get Covid multiple times, subsequent infections will be as mild as or milder than their first, emerging data shows, likely because of partial immunity from previous infections, vaccination and the fact that the latest circulating variants generally cause less severe symptoms.""" which is much more consistent with my understanding of COVID repeat infections.
If you have a link to the VA study I will look at it.
How do you know it wouldn't have been worse without vaccination?
Thank goodness you got the vaccine! If your body hadn't been primed and ready to take on the real infection, imagine how much worse your body would have responded, and how much poorly you would have felt.
Medieval Peasant 2: "If it was making us all sick, how come only half of my children have died before the age of five?"
Some people still wear masks, some people still take booster shots, some people people still wash their hands, some people sneeze into elbows, some people stay inside, etc. Others may not do some or any of those things.
"Accept new risk" and "this is the new normal" is as validly executed by him as by yourself. (Also, honestly, wearing a mask in public may not be as life changing/limiting as it seems. I know people who haven't stopped complaining about seatbelts for 3 decades now, but it's a habit that doesn't bother me :).
> Compared with those infected once, patients who were reinfected showed that they were more prone to complications in various organ systems and more likely to be diagnosed with long COVID than those infected only once. These findings were consistent regardless of vaccination status.
> For those who had COVID-19 two times or more, the data appeared to show a:
> Two times increased risk of death > Three times increased risk of hospitalization > Two times increased risk of long COVID and chronic fatigue > Three times increased risk of heart issues and blood clotting disorders
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/do-repeat-covid-infections...
COVID for me was exceptionally mild with the only annoyance being the total lost of smell for ~12 days. Otherwise, the dry cough wasn't any worse than the one I get when my allergies are in full force. Some people are just going to get worse cases and others won't. That's going to impact personal risk assessment.
My mother had an even milder case of COVID than I did (no cough), but RSV almost sent her to the hospital this past Thanksgiving. For all the fixation on COVID we tend to forget that there are other virus that can be lethal to certain demographics (e.g. advancing age).
Yeah I get that, but with him it seems very out of character. He likes to ski and is a general aviation pilot; these aren't low risk activities. I hope he comes to term with the new normal soon because he's still young and spending the rest of his life paranoid behind a mask would be truly sad.
For example, skiing is fun. Flying airplanes is fun. And general aviation is quite safe for those who take it seriously. So while there's risk, there's also a reward. And that risk / reward ratio may be what they choose to personally accept.
There's no reward for getting covid! There's no fun in it! And many people either don't want to get it at all (given the risk of either bad immediate symptoms or long term impact), or had bad experience and don't want to recur, or don't want to contribute to chain and infect others yet.
Heck... I'm persuading myself to start wearing mask again (the only reason I stopped is that I work from home, but have a 2yo in daycare and 4yo in kindergarten which massively outweighs any risk I bring into house).
(I do want to ask though - are they wearing like n95 or surgical mask... Or as you mentioned in original post a full painting-sryle respirator with two big round filters etc? That, I'll agree, is a significant comittment if they don't have significant personal risk factors)
I sometimes also mask in public, because it bothers me approximately zero.
So? These are situations where he is kinda in control no? Out in public, how much control does he have about people, with or without symptoms, going to the same shop?
So… spending micromorts on worthwhile activities, rather than on queueing at the supermarket? Sounds pretty consistent to me.
Spending 3 weeks in bed with COVID before the vaccines existed made me super risk adverse to people and especially people coughing. You have no concept of how long a week in bed is, let alone 3 of them. The long nights in pain. The long days just wishing you could get through the enormous headache to rest and sleep. The powerless feeling that you can't even sit up enough to do anything you have previously enjoyed. Heck, I still remember my son bringing in my copy of Cyberpunk that just came out and I didn't even have the energy to turn on my laptop on my lap to install it. Even when I got COVID again 2 years later and it was just a couple days in bed, I get super pissed off when people belittle it and the people who try to stay away from it.
Just last Saturday night, I was out shopping and some lady was walking around with a "smoker's cough". I tried to stay away and not go back into places she had been. When I got in line to check out and got stalled in front from a lady with a huge cartload and the cougher got behind me and started hacking her brains out, I just abandoned my cart and left.
I am not spending that many days of my life being sick again like that if I can ever help it. So when I say that YOU NEED TO REPRIORITIZE YOUR EMPATHY. Take that to mean that if this wasn't on a forum that I need to talk nice-nice, I would not be talking nice-nice.
The symptoms of long covid can be pretty debilitating and a lot of people just don't get better.
> For some people, Long COVID can last weeks, months, or years after COVID-19 illness and can sometimes result in disability.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
For better or worse, they are self identifying themselves as having neurotic personality types.
Jokes aside, do you wash your hands normally like 99% of the public, or do you do the full surgeon scrub each time? Still wearing a mask in late 2023 is like the full surgeon scrub, most people don't bother with that.
Enjoy your downd00ts here on HN, because no one in the real world will put up with another round of your lockdown masking nonsense.
They have another round of vaccines ready for you to beta test by the way. Enjoy!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114323/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5
If it wasn't covid, it'd be something else with people like your friend.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7240806
What's considered normal socially is not always what's supported by the evidence at hand, and sometimes what that supports is well outside of the acceptable range of discussion or behavior at the time.
Are you truly concerned that this person has made an error in judgment based on evidence or do they just make you uncomfortable for breaking norms? Are you motivated to post about this because you've considered their reasons and think they've made a harmful, critical error in judgment or are you just seeking approval of your normalcy bias? Do you know enough about their health situation or their family's to be sure that their risk calculation is unreasonable?
The best course of action if you're absolutely sure that there's no threat to you is to ignore them and move on with your life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
what about all the people who challenged what was "considered normal socially" and actually were proven wrong? One never hears about those.
Maybe if you'd added, "of course, lots of people who wound up dying in a mental asylum are forgotten, with good reason" then I would've had nothing to say.
As it was, you cited an example as though that proved anything.
There are not many of those, because of herd mentality. (Edit: I mean Normalcy Bias, thanks "notabee")
If a person is unusual enough, they are dismissed as cranks without any sort of proof required.
notabee held up one example, which is relevant only if the argument was "everyone who challenges the norms is insane." That would be a counterexample, and only one is required.
as for "There are not many of those" I don't even know what to say. Of course those people were forgotten and there are no citations, because they weren't newsworthy. That was the whole point.
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
Our ancestors apparently lived with HCoV-OC43 after it killed a lot of people in the initial pandemic. That virus is quite similar to SARS-CoV-2 in terms of genetics and symptoms. And it's still around infecting people today. So relax, we'll (mostly) be fine.