Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city(publichealth.verily.com) |
Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city(publichealth.verily.com) |
Wear a mask and wash your hands folks!
Anything that can reduce my chances of a severe outcome or even coming down with it in the first place is worth it in my book.
Except for 1 or 2 outlier countries masking is over.
* Unless they are familiar with U.S. politics
Just got back from Germany yesterday, and while masks are required on most public transport (but not airplanes), you'll see a decent amount of compliance (50%?) but not anywhere else indoors.
Minimal masking in public spaces on public transport, stores, airplanes, etc in my experience in Germany/France/UK. There's absolutely more masking going on here in the Bay Area.
I’m not going to go around wearing a mask all the time to avoid a couple of days of cold symptoms every other year. Getting colds is part of the human condition.
How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a mask most of the time when in public?
I guess it’s fine if no one you hang out with cares, but that’s not the case for me.
I should also note that I don’t work with other people. I might feel differently if I had to mask at work all the time. I do keep a mask for the 2% of the time at work I interact with others. But the biggest thing is grocery stores. Not masking there you’re just asking to elevate community transmission. You’re increasing the risks for others. I’d love it if the virus was gone, but it just isn’t.
Duck bill mask clad Germans generally stay in Germany. And they look insane. Like warning signs of nature insane.
Public announcements in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, from epidemiologists and ICU doctors recently is to stay the <f**> home if you are sick. If sick dont go out wearing a mask since it protects no one and, even if immuno compromized, live like you did in 2019 you are not protected wearing a flimsy surgical facemask and you need to socialize and not lock yourself up for the rest of your days.
And once you are not sick anymore, go back to work. Don't bother the currently overloaded hospitals unless something is very wrong, you know when your cold/flu is over.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/overlakaren-restriktioner.... https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/smittskyddsla....
Use common sense.
So no , presumably democrat american internet stranger. Dont wear a mask, If sick stay at home. Dont go out, face covered, and think you have saved a life. Mask is pointless.
Hand washing still applies though.
Don't think handwashing has been controversial since dr. Ignaz Semmelweis in 1865 was declared insane and put in an asylum by the medical establishment for suggesting that hand washing prevented doctors from spreading disease between their patients.
I also don’t wear a surgical mask, I wear a KN95 because I’m not a fool.
This applies to society as a whole as well. The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself.
This seems much easier to say if you haven't been impacted by a serious case. I have friends who were similarly unconcerned, and who felt very differently after a month long battle with COVID, and as they continue to struggle with the after effects.
So yes, there's more to life than a myopic focus on avoiding one specific illness, but the actual impact of that statement and a closer look at the actual risk tradeoffs makes things a bit less obvious, and I'm not convinced that most of the behavior people are exhibiting is myopic.
> The damage caused by our incredibly myopic focus on Covid is far, far greater than the damage actually caused by the virus itself
This is a statement that needs quite a bit of evidence to back it up. I think it's safe to say that no one knew what the 2nd and 3rd order effects of trying to avoid COVID itself would be, and those effects are indeed significant. But neither can we say that we should have gone back and let the first rounds overwhelm and collapse hospital systems, the impact of which is something we can't even begin to understand right now.
But saying that covid isn't causing damage is itself highly myopic.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
None of this is binary. It's not sick or not sick. There is a viral load component, where a persons body can fight off a certain amount of virus.
It's trivially easy to acquire authentic N95s today.
People just won't wear them, so, we all suffer.
Why do people like you have such anger about mask wearing?
I'm reluctantly curious what your thinking is on that.
That said, I think the seasonal wave we're anticipating is a product of when our winter hits and how hard our winter hits - other areas might have very different experiences overall.
Took the bivalent booster about 2 months ago then went on a cruise and directly after to re:invent.
Since then had multiple exposures with people around me getting week long fevers. So far I had something in my system that made me feel "slightly off" - but nothing worse.
Yay antibodies.
I'm a big believer in "more antibodies the better" - but I am also on the side of "COVID amnesty". The pandemic was an immensely scary time for everyone, and got co-opted by politics of all stripes. We need to forgive each other and move on.
I now support everyone's choice - with the standard exceptions (Childhood vaccines, don't go out when sick, respect others).
(Though that signal didn't help me in Trader Joe's the other day, when one of the few employees wearing a mask (only surgical), turned out to have a phlegmy cough. In that case, I imagine the logic might've been, "You're obviously sick and probably spreading something, maybe Covid? We don't pay you to stay home. Strap on the least effective mask you can find, which suddenly we believe in, and get out there and superspread among shoppers!" :( )
> In addition to the pathogens it tests for, WastewaterSCAN measures an extremely common, harmless plant virus that is consumed when people eat. It is called pepper mild mottle virus (or PMMoV). By measuring the concentration of PMMoV genetic markers per dry weight gram of wastewater solids, WastewaterSCAN can account for how much viral material is recovered from each sample and changes to the “fecal strength” of that sample. For example, heavy rain that drains into a wastewater system can dilute the strength of a particular day’s sample.
OK, that's pretty clever and it sounds useful, so I guess I should turn on that toggle. But then I read further and see this:
> Our analysis suggests that both the concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 genes measured as copies per gram of solid waste and those concentrations normalized by PMMoV are proportional to laboratory confirmed COVID-19 incidence rates in the sewersheds.
How can both things be proportional? Do they actually mean positively correlated?
If raw data is already proportional to lab tests, then it doesn't seem like there's any benefit from normalizing.
This is the best part of science: not knowing, but working to discover.
And PCR tests are super sensitive.
I've been using wastewater data to adjust my behavior since official testing and reporting is down and under-reporting cases. Detected COVID goes up, I reduce my exposure and remind my vulnerable loved ones. Detected COVID goes back down, I adjust my behavior accordingly.
I wonder if the more "popular" counties are pay-walled or something?
EDIT: According to the site, "County Selection: Counties associated with each location were provided by our sampling partners, and correspond to the primary county served by each sampling location. In the county-level section we highlight a subset of counties which had at least 21 weeks of data and whose sampling locations represented at least 10,000 individuals, as well as the primary counties of our sampling partners in the Biobot Network."
So I'm curious what other factors are excluding the largest (by population) counties in Washington?
Novato: http://publichealth.verily.com/#Novato,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2
San Rafael: http://publichealth.verily.com/#San%20Rafael,%20CA:SARS-CoV-...
I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.
unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless,
and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors).
Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard...
...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem.
Sigh.
Not sure how helpful this is when huge swathes of the population aren’t represented here
Still, this is tremendously useful where there is coverage, and looks like enough data to make sampling type of conclusions. Hopefully we'll eventually see some kind of network effect.
For example, I'm in the NYC area - and Newark NJ has coverage. There is enough overlap that I expect flu and covid curves (including strains) to be close enough to be interesting.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveil...
https://globalnews.ca/news/9272293/immunity-debt-covid-19-mi...
"In fact, Furness likens the immune system to a collection of photographs. When people take photos and put them away in an album, the photos don’t fade over time just because they aren’t being looked at regularly."
By that logic I must not need my yearly flu shot because my flu "photo" hasn't faded. Clearly if I wasn't exposed to rsv (and it's most recent variants) my immune system can fight it just as strongly because I have that photo from two years ago.
Also, tetanus vaccines every 10 years, that must be bs.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
It's not a "holiday gathering spike". It's literally the same respiratory pathogen pattern we've seen for as long as we've bothered to look: in the winter, as we go inside and the air becomes cool and dry, respiratory infections go up. The viruses evolved to work this way, because it's a great survival strategy when your host is a social animal that doesn't/can't live outside in the cold.
It happens in parts of the world where Christmas and Thanksgiving aren't a thing (see Japan and China and Korea right now). It happens on the opposite schedule in the lower half of the planet (even where Christmas and/or Thanksgiving are a thing).
This impulse to blame/scold people for a natural phenomenon is unnerving.
Yeah, but as far as our governments will share more information on this, this SARS-CoV-2 virus was invented by people in a lab, and it escaped from a lab, due to human error.
This winter is the cause the please explain Japan which had it's biggest spikes in summer
Covid used to be novel. Now it's endemic and mutates multiple times per year. It's looking more and more like Covid will be with us for decades if not forever, just like the flu and the common cold.
In the world of security, you grow up, leave behind the simple binary descriptions, and assess impact of event and threat you're defending against.
This applies to disease safety as well. It's not just 'inevitable' or 'preventable', but there is a difference between getting sick once a year and getting sick every month. Between working in a hospital and working from home. Between being sick by yourself and spreading it to your extended family.
There is a risk assessment to be done, and calculated measures to be taken.
However, once the disease is characterized, you have effective treatments and protocols for the most sick, and you have decent rates of vaccination and recent infection... needs shift.
The critical factor is {max hospital ICU capacity} + 1 more seriously ill person, and when you're dealing with exponential growth rates and a virgin population, that can be hit pretty easily.
The fact that we didn't (in most parts of the world, for most of the time) is a triumph of modern health policy.
I was in a truck fixing heavy equipment at mines, construction sites, oil & gas pads, and the only thing that changed was I could calculate drive time based on mileage because most everyone was at home. I didn't get fake safety gear or a big bonus check for sitting at home.
Not everyone was scared. Mine sites were great because behind the gate everyone was normal. Unlike the OSHA scaremongers, MSHA eventually released guidance which said roughly, "Policies to stay home when sick are always in effect and miners are always safe and keep being safe. And safety."
One mine site had their yearly pig roast with tables under a tent that Spring, and everyone was shoulder to shoulder, no masks, no gloves, no gel stations. It was awesome.
Well, in that case, it's easy. Other people who are concerned can wear a mask, and said water droplets will land on their mask instead of their face. Problem solved, we have no conflict.
As for why we hate it, here's a good reason for me personally. I have to wear glasses, as I have an extreme prescription coupled with astigmatism. It's so bad LASIK is (or at least, was) high-risk. Wearing a mask with glasses is a miserable experience - you can't stop fogging them up without touching your mask every several minutes to adjust it, defeating the point because you're not supposed to touch it. In which case, wearing a mask (for me) is a self-defeating exercise. There are other reasons but that's my personal biggest one.
Cold/dry air: most respiratory viruses we've looked at survive for longer in cold, dry, dark air.
I haven't seen anyone model what this looks like on longer timescales. Does this mean that you're just delaying the inevitable? If so, and the disease is mild and we're not going to overwhelm hospitals with the infected, what's the benefit?
No improvement in comparison to neighboring countries could be demonstrated.
Mostly because it was pure theater and no attempt at proof was even made.
Yet we’ve been hearing since the beginning of 2021 that they’ve been proven to have been much more efficient by the coalition parliament which has come up with this idea.
Also note that while I saw several influenza cases in the icu, I didn't see any covid.
Comparing the absolute magnitude of these spikes is fraught, because they depend on the number of tests being conducted, (which was rapidly increasing over the course of last year), as well as the many other behavioral changes that were happening at the same time.
Land mass or self-perceived importance from within notwithstanding.
The result of Germany’s remarkable interventions is remarkable in its mediocrity.
There are certain places where many people are masked, so I might wear one to be polite.
On the other hand, now that I'm quadruple vaccinated and use an N95 I'm not overly bothered by people not wearing masks around me.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
Whether the droplet/aerosol float through the air has to do with much more than particle size.
"There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed."
I mean that the masks can and do stop some droplets and larger particles, but smaller particles pass through and around them readily. It seems like really small particles might be causing infections with newer variants. But I'm also not sure what we even know for sure about this at the moment. A lot of mask research has been don with modeling or lab setups to spray liquids through them. The narrower set of real world studies cast a lot of doubt on anything but N95s worn properly. So I'm not sure where that leaves us.
"It is important to wear a mask or respirator when you are sick or caring for someone who is sick with COVID-19."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
"Wear a high-quality and well-fitting mask if you must be around others (for example: going to get tested), even in your home."
https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/sick.htm...
Framing masking as protecting the wearer was done to psychologically make people care. People are more likely to care about themselves, than others.
The majority of stores (grocery and otherwise) introduced curbside pickup options early in the pandemic, which at least provides more options for someone who doesn't have access to or can't afford delivery, while removing or minimizing the time they need to spend in-store.
Not a perfect solution, but the options are not "delivery or starve".
It has to do with ventilation too. Taller ceilings probably help. Lower humidity.
Choir is probably a great example of something where closeness isnt the only factor.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
I went to an amusement park. None of the people I was hanging out with had it nor tested positive before or after (they were all testing regularly) so the only other explanations are random people I passed at the park, food that was contaminated, or random covid virus in the air.
Of course my getting it via short contact does not invalidate the idea that most of it is spread via prolonged contact. But, given I just caught it via short contact I'm not going to stop taking prevenative measures in situations with only short contacts.
I agree with you.
> Most could ask friend or family for help
Most but not all. An alternative is asking a stranger (government programs where I am ended almost a year ago), strangers are kinder than people realize. But asking for help is challenging for many people.
How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
Talking about cost without normalizing for probability of prevention is meaningless yet you want to frame the discussion to be purely about (low) cost of wearing masks.
We had a year of a pretty tough lockdown, most people wearing masks, distancing in grocery shops, restaurants and "non-essential" shops and companies closed, no public events, work from home, most people staying at home etc.
And yet people were getting sick with covid, even those wearing masks.
Masks alone won't protect you from covid. Even pretty hard core isolation might not protect you.
We basically have no idea how effective just wearing masks is. It surely reduces the probability but by how much?
Feel free to wear masks and hard hats but don't pretend you know for sure it's a rational choice.
For me the costs aren’t just wearing a mask or getting sick. I also have vulnerable people in my life. My partner, their partners, my elderly parents, friends with unknown connections.
If I walked around the grocery store without a mask I could at any time pick up the virus and even if I don’t get very sick I could give it to friends or loved ones. So then there is a mental load of worrying if I’m feeling fatigue due to poor sleep or onset of the virus (which is how it happened when I actually had it), and wondering if I should cancel social plans when I’m not feeling 100% normal.
If I am always wearing masks in public I can relax about it more when seeing friends. I’m being responsible and while accidents do happen I’m at least not being negligent.
I notice a lot of people not masking are only talking about themselves. It’s like they don’t think about how transmitting the illness affects others.
> How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
But wait, that's a very different question. The original comment was "I'd rather be sick for 2 weeks than wear a mask every day." You're not saying that you'd rather be killed by a falling brick than wear a hardhat every day, surely.
If I learned anything from COVID times, it's that attributing deaths is complex, and roughly up to whoever writes the death certificate
My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.
Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.
Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.
There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
I tried it for a year and it's dehumanizing. Not sure how you'd rate that vs the unknown chance of long covid but I've made my choice.
At the end of the day the goal appears to be to reduce spread and reinfection to minimize the load on the hospital system.
It's not quite free; the bridge of my nose sometimes experiences some irritation, and we've had to deal with more than a hand full of hateful/snarky in person comments, but that's no biggie.
Being from the south, we smile when we pass each other on the street. You can’t do that in a mask. Maybe you folks from NYC and SF don’t miss that—after all you can still glare at people with hostility wearing a mask—but it’s a major loss in quality of life for the rest of us.
Professionals wearing masks in specific contexts is different than advocating for ordinary people to wear masks in public settings.
So you effectively just insulted like 1.5 billion asians who've been wearing masks for years?
I'd call it humanizing. I care for others so I put on the mask.
Or just skip to what you really mean, tell your doctor who is going to operate on your or your child that you do not think they work.
Moron.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Perhaps to some. That feeling is probably largely driven by one's overall outlook.
We started masking before any of the mandates because it just made sense to do so, to us at least.
> It never ever should never have been mandated, only recommended.
That's a hard question in my opinion. I naturally tend toward letting people do what they want unless they're clearly hurting others. Others have argued that masking does unambiguously reduce harm to others, but I don't find it so clear cut.
I'm personally less uncomfortable with mask mandates than the widespread shutdowns. Those shutdowns caused massive harm to people. Masking? Not so much.
Note I'm not quite willing, even now, to fully support mask mandates, now or previously. I see both sides of the issue.
> It’s sad you get downvoted.
Agreed, it is sad that opposing, perhaps uncomfortable viewpoints get pushed down.
Why do you think this? I see someone wearing a mask and I see someone with enough respect for their fellow man that they don't want to get them sick. That's not fear or control, that's compassion. I don't think compassion is uniquely human, but it still is humanizing.
Maybe a little fear would be healthy for some people if it makes them act in a socially integrated manner. Anybody who's had covid probably doesn't want to get it again.
And you don't want to do it because you can't see every X person who caught the virus dropping dead in front of you, since all negative consequences happen out of sight and come back at you with statistics months later you simply can't bring yourself to care, that's all.
I can be sold on the idea that covering one face (by any means) removes a lot of communication and social clues that are inherently human.
But control?
Some of them charge a service fee for pickups under $35, but from what I recall, the bigger chains do not. And with prices these days, you'd be hard pressed to do a grocery run that costs less than $35 unless you need a single item, but if you only need a single item, this is no longer a conversation about starving.
As for free delivery, I believe some of them offer free delivery for orders over a certain size, but I was focused specifically on non-delivery options.
Bottom line: there are many more options than “go in the store or starve”.
Wearing mask is as revolting as sex against one's natural "orientation". If someone thinks this is unreasonable and one should "get help" to "fix" it, I remind them that they may be fighting against strongly held "identity" belief. "Conversion therapy" is being declared evil, for some valid reasons. And I won't even say how I feel about forced, mandatory mask wearing.
> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.
Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.
HIV kills ~650K per year, should everyone take PreP?
Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do. Our brains have huge areas dedicated to recognition of subtle differences in facial features. We're literally wired for facial recognition. More than almost any other feature of our bodies, our faces define us as individuals.
Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong. I honestly can't believe I have to say this out loud.
1) Neither is wearing pants or a shirt. 2) Something being 'natural' doesn't make it right.
>Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong.
It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile. Let's saying masking always under all conditions is too much of an imposition, are there restrictions we can place that make the trade-off better?
For instance: Is masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons with an X drop in disease propagation worth not seeing people's faces in that setting for that time period.
To extrapolate this back to the pants/shirt distinction; human life would end in a generation if we weren't ever able to take off our pants and shirt as we would never have sex again, but the intolerability of that restriction doesn't make it socially accepted for me to rub my bare ass onto a bus seat.
We can't have a discussion about how best to adopt masks, pants, or shirts as a technology if the only way they'll be accepted is if they're always a pure benefit in any situation.
I don't dispute this. You're more than welcome to continue doing whatever you want and make that trade-off for yourself. I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold (assuming that is even achievable, which I don't grant).
But the metaphor of "pants" is absurd. I wear pants because they keep me warm and protect my soft bits and make me look snazzy, not because someone else is making a moral judgment about my choice of clothing being "the correct thing to do".
Btw idk about others but I wear a mask indoors with strangers, like in public transport or shops. I get to see all the faces I want to see and show mine outdoors or when video calling or if they are close friends or cohabitants.
Wearing a mask in public has only one cost for healthy people: a dirty mask can make you sick so you must have a clean mask, and that costs either money or time spent washing (and chance of washing it wrong)
Secondly, your primate brain also wants to look at the genital area, but, again: pants.
Yes that's the point. It's a reductio ab absurdem. The pant metaphor is obviously absurd for the same reason that the initial position you posited is absurd. In order to salvage your initial position, you need to differentiate the logic or premises from the absurd argumentation.
Pants and Shirts aren't symbols of fear and control despite being mandated in most areas of public life, but shackles, prison garb and other elements of clothing certainly would be. Therefore there's an element other than being mandated that makes clothing a symbol of fear and control. This is what the pants metaphor shows.
>I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold. This is also reductive (not the personal choice aspect, but rather how it ties into the original discussion of masks as symbols of fear and control); would you agree with the faces over mask rule during a surgery with patients susceptible to infection? Would you consider hospital rules that OR staff wear masks during such surgeries to be authoritarian overreach?
I think if you're willing to admit that 1) there are public health concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) that there's a trade-off to be made, then "I won't be participating" is a bit too absolutist to flow from the remainder of your beliefs. Certainly you can try refining a condition like "masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons" to be more or less restrictive rather than ignoring the issue altogether.
If we can do that, we can have a more meaningful discussion about where masking could be appropriate, rather than discussing whether or not it should occur at all.
Anyways, this is an old thread so I'll drop off. Have a nice day.