How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick?

Re:How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? by sokoloff on Sunday October 01, 2023 @05:10PM (#37730841)

I think hospital workers experience with wearing masks (and the resulting "they have chosen a mask size and from experience have adjusted the mask to make it comfortable and effective") and the ability for the hospital to prohibit facial hair in their workers that's incompatible with effective mask use are key differences between hospital staff and Joe/Jane Public on the streets.

In terms of being weird: there are enough people wearing masks and most people literally care more about what they're going to have for dinner than whether or not you're wearing a mask. If a mask helps your family, don't worry about the epsilon weird aspect (as I'm sure you have already calculated).

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Re:How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? by AnthonBerg on Sunday October 01, 2023 @05:41PM (#37731151)

Well said. Thank you.

I think I can also pretty decisively say that hospital purchasing optimizations give face-fitting masks a bad rap. The FFP2 masks that hospital staff wear here are cheap and very uncomfortable. This bleeds into society as a negative view.

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Re:How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? by sfblah on Sunday October 01, 2023 @06:06PM (#37731374)

Occam's razor here is that your interest in masks is a mental illness, and not because someone in your family is so immunocompromised or whatever that the mask is standing between that person and certain death. Is it possible that the latter is the case? Maybe. But in my view almost all cases of people stubbornly wearing masks are just psychiatric in nature.

I know my comment will just make you angry, because "you're different". But, maybe someone else will see it and consider their psychological state on this topic.

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Re:How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? by AnthonBerg on Sunday October 01, 2023 @06:24PM (#37731559)

I wish upon you severe illness and the humility to deal with the repercussions to your worldview, and happiness.

I wish for your life to be long and healthy; and the lives of your loved ones too. And in that, let me give you advice to trade for your judgement of my place in life and my actions and sacrifices and loss. The advice is this:

Read. The academic. Literature.

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Re:How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? by kbelder on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:30PM (#37740496)

I know a family who still wears masks in public because their daughter is very sick, very weak, and they don't want to risk her getting covid. Perfectly sensible. I also know people who wear masks in public because they're a little nuts... just can't let go, or politically or psychologically hung up.

So what can you say? You see a stranger wearing a mask, you don't know if it's for a good reason or not. Probably the odds are that it's an emotional or psychological hangup, but it may be for a really good reason. So you need to just shrug and let people do what they think best for themselves. They're the ones responsible for themselves.

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