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Comment by whb07 | Hacker News Reader

And three can nearly triple it!

If you put your head in a plastic bag and tie it off tightly at the neck, you're literally guaranteed to not die from Covid. Which highlights the idea that you really have to consider the costs and downsides of any Covid prevention measure, something that is often not addressed by many people supporting draconian anti-Covid measures.

Masks aren't draconian though, and they're cheap and easy to use. They also cause little issues for the vast majority of adults. They could be the #1 life saver out there, if people only used them.

> something that is often not addressed

I don't know a single person that likes lockdowns, say, yet the majority of people I know support lockdowns.

We are doing the whole spiel, light lockdown - hard lockdown - light lockdown, for a year now, it has become quite obvious how bad lockdowns are. How do you assume otherwise?

Just wait until you've heard my idea for quadrupling the filtering of SARS-CoV2 particles...

If you like that, wait until you see how great 10 work!

this is fluid dynamics we’re talking about here; could just as well be 16 times better.

I've started with 100 on top of each other and will gradually remove each until my test subjects stop suffocating.

That’s nothing. I’ve quadrupled the number of cigarettes I smoke a day. Granted, I can’t climb the stairs any more without having an asthma attack, but I think you’ll agree that reducing my risk of infection from hardly anything to almost impossible is surely worth it.

Based on the corpus of data accumulated from our double-blind, placebo-controlled study of marginalized populations, we can extrapolate that the COVID-19 particle-filtering behavior of face masks has an ex vivo efficacy that can be modeled by the general equation:

f_n = (n) x (f_b), where n is the number of face masks, f_b is the baseline percentage of particles filtered, and f_n is the new percentage of particles filtered.

(/satire)

No. Stop spreading misinformation. Wearing 3 masks is less effective because it makes reduces air flow so much it starts coming out of the side of the mask completely unfiltered.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-false-post-mask...

so 2 masks is better than 1 but 3 is worse than 2... how are we sure 2 is the optimal number? surely, calculus must be done to determine the optimal fractional number of masks between 2 and 3.

(my money's on Euler's number.)

I think would increase by a factor of 3

of if one mask reduces particles by 50%, three would reduce by 1-1/2^3

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