Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Is the general consensus that the virus would be eradicated if everyone wore a mask? Is it enough?

If that drops r below 1 long enough it would have to right?

This seems especially hard to do though, since compliance would need to be nearly universal. You could potentially wipe out influenza and the common cold at the same time too though potentially.

Influenza and coronaviruses have native (animal) reservoirs that keep pumping out new / novel variants, which makes extinction highly unlikely.

What about viral reservoirs?

Some individuals may stay infectious forever. E.g. Typhoid Mary[1] was quarantined twice, and the second time she remained isolated until death. (Thypoid fever is a bacterial infection, but I assume something similar can happen with a virus.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

Herpes, HIV...

In addition to the others, there'd be a long tail of few infections before it's actually wiped out, and during that period I expect too many people to just stop caring about masks for it to actually get eradicated.

This probably depends a lot on the quality of the masks and the whether people wear them properly or not. So far I'm not too optimistic about either.

It really doesn’t. Poor quality masks are questionable at an individual level but even if everybody just wore knickers on their head, that would have a gigantic effect on the spread on the virus overall.

That would be great if true, we'd be able to scale down the social distancing, among other things. That said I'm not nearly as confident that the effect will be that great, do you have any references you're basing this on?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com