As Americans Shed Their Masks, Asia Largely Stays Covered Up | Hacker News Reader

As Americans Shed Their Masks, Asia Largely Stays Covered Up

wsj.com

14 pointsprostoalex14 comments

My understanding is COVID’s micron size is so small that most masks other than N95 will be mostly useless. If you can smell fumes through your mask, Covid is going through it. Covid can also infect you through your eyes. I don’t know why we are desperately holding on to wearing this when I think plenty of research has shown they don’t do a whole lot.

Also masks were a thing in Asian culture pre-pandemic, they will be wearing them long after this due to that alone.

This is not correct. Masks don’t work like a sieve, where everything that is smaller than the gaps slips through. ie filtering.

At the sizes we’re talking about, it’s not filtering that is the most effective form of keeping out/in particles. What happens instead is that the particles don’t move in a straight line but have a more random motion, and if the particle in that motion happens to hit a mask fiber, it will almost certainly attach itself to it.

In fact, smaller/lighter particles are even more likely to be blocked by masks because their movmeembt is more random and they are more likely to lodge themselves into mask fibers they may hit.

Surgical and N95 masks make this even more likely because their fibers are electrostatically charged. Cloth masks try and make up for the lack of electrostatic charge with more layers and a better fit.

That’s why if you’re unable to wear an N95 or equivalent mask, the next best recommendation was double masking with a cloth mask and surgical mask, where the surgical mask provided the electrostatic charge, while the cloth mask placed over the surgical mask improved the fit.

I‘m wondering what the outcome of this will be by the end of the year. We‘ve essentially gone back to maskless life here in Switzerland, and it seems to work out if you ignore the individual drama of covid related deaths.

Have you ever seen someone talking as the sun hits them in just the right way to get the droplets expelled from their mouth to catch the light and glow? That's what masks are stopping, tiny spit drops with a covid payload. It's not perfect but it helps.

I suspect if masking continues for long enough, societies will lose herd immunity to essentially all viruses. In most cases that would take 5-10 years, though.

What viruses do we have herd immunity to that we will lose if people aren't exposed for 5-10 years due to wearing masks?

Indeed. Who’s to say that viruses might not lose their ability to infect humans if humans don’t carry them for the next 10-15 years?

If everyone strictly followed the teachings of Christ and all humans were monogamous for an entire generation, would we lose herd immunity to STDs or would STDs go extinct?

In exchange for mask immunity, which seems to work better.

Well the argument is masks work better until there’s a mask shortage for any reason, or any large drop in percentage of people wearing a mask. Then you might see an impactfully large pandemic that could have been avoided if we had more frequent sub clinical or non epidemic infections over the preceeding decades.

For example if there were a war and China cut off EU/USA supply for N95’s. In the 1-6 months it might take USA to build domestic capacity there could be a large outbreak of something which cripples our national readiness at a critical time.

If war breaks out with China the current pandemic will be the least of your worries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com