Hacker News Reader

Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

> It just hardly seems like much of an inconvenience.

It's not (for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time) but the benefit is to other people not you and well acting in other peoples self interest seems to be seen as weakness in parts of the world (including sadly mine).

FWIW I always wear either a mask or a bandana over my mouth/nose when I'm out and about these days not because I expect it to protect me but because it might protect someone else.

I expect my opinion is swayed by my best friend having Cystic Fibrosis for which Covid19 is essentially a death sentence and a mother who has chronic health issues.

From my perspective alongside all the other advice wearing a mask seems sensible.

Same reason I wear heavy duty motorcycle gear and a helmet when I ride my motorbike - I don't plan for the crash but as the saying goes, you don't wear it for the ride, you wear it for the slide.

View on HN

It is always a balance with risk management. People should wear heavy duty motorcycle gear and a helmet when riding motorbikes, but with cars the same gear is seen as a bit excessive as there are a 30x difference in risk for the two mode of transportation (per distance traveled) and the small but possible risk of a false sense of security might result in worse driver behavior.

If you are near someone in a risk group it seems very good advice to use or even mandate the usage of masks. Same for being around high risk areas such as using any mass transportation. For low risk areas the benefits are less clear and the potential downsides seems to have about as much evidence as the benefits.

Agreed. People could wear similar gear (motorcycle helmet, motorcycle jacket, motorcycle gloves) when driving a car. It'd be inarguably safer for certain types of crashes. I, for one, have road rash on my arm from a car wreck.

But we don't. Because it'd be inconvenient. Safety is not anyone's highest goal.

I would note that bandanas aren't necessarily the best material for DIY masks. Still better then nothing, but folks may want to take a look at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/best-materials-diy-face-masks...

There's a video on Youtube of some guy blowing vape smoke through various filter types. Pretty much all of them pass it, up to HEPA filter types for vacuums and medical respirators. Some filters I tested will filter particles down to the size of smoke, but Corona-19 is 1/10th of a micron across, which is smaller. It does get filtered by various materials, but those materials need to use static cling to filter. If they don't, the virus will pass through, given the hole size of the material.

If you are hanging around and talking to someone at a fairly close distance, masks simply won't do anything other than visually signal distance is required to others. And, in the unlikely event someone sneezes or coughs, it probably prevents widespread contamination of the surrounding area.

The Seattle choir episode and some studies out of China in restaurant air handling systems seems to indicate the virus is airborne and can be spread to others within a fairly large area, with time and proper airflow. This will happen with or without a mask in place, in my opinion.

I'm super nervous about sharing indoor space with people I don't know, so I don't. The more time we can buy ourselves, the better the outcome.

Masks do a great deal to reduce transmission of Covid-19. (This isn't true of every disease.) Covid-19 is mostly acquired by inhaling droplets of water+virus exhaled by carriers, so masks work quite well. A large amount of evidence for this is collected at https://masks4all.co/facts/

The idea is to stop the respiratory droplets that contain viruses. Droplets measure on the order of micrometers, which is the range that surgical masks are made to be effective.

A Google search result for droplet sizes: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/E2386

A Google search result for effectiveness of various masks related to particle size: https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2009/10/14/n95/

"Corona-19 is 1/10th of a micron across, which is smaller."

People seem to have a huge misunderstanding about how viruses travel through air (which is how you get stupid memes like this[1]). There aren't isolated viruses floating around passing through spaces 1/10th of a micron or larger. They need a medium of which to travel upon (such as saliva droplets) that are much larger than the virus itself[2] (usually 5-10 microns)

1. https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/im-wearing-t...

2. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/03/8256393...

Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering[0]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007800

If the virus spread airborne rather than by droplets then you would see the effective R value much greater than what the coronavirus is.

Example: measles is spread airborne and the R value is > 10. Coronavirus R value is < 3

I don't know why you are downvoted. There is growing evidence that the virus mostly spreads as aerosol and that the amount of particles you inhale dictates how sick you get. The so called super spread events account for over 80% of the transmission.

Bad ventilation and dry air keeps the airosols floating around making it easier for people to inhale them. The spread in meat factories is one example.

But a mask still can prevent a lot of airosols. While also being limited. There was research that shows a lot of air escapes above and below the mask if someone coughs or sneezes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com