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Comment by AgentOrange1234 | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer: covid averse, lost family member, upset with society for “being done.”)

I’m not sure what to think about this.

A year+ ago, I would have worried that folks would treat a low-risk evaluation as a permission slip to say “the pandemic is over for me,” stop masking/etc, and thus increase the aggregate spread of the virus to folks who are high risk.

But now everyone is already doing that anyway. So yeah, it would be nice to know whether we are high risk or should just let it all go and say whatever.

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Sometimes I think I'm the only low risk person left on the planet wearing a mask and vaccinating. Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too. There's even some performers asking fans to mask up so high risk people can come to their shows. Gives me a tiny glimmer of hope for humanity.

You're still touching things, then touching your face. You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask. Your eyes are exposed to the air. And if you wear the same mask more than once, you are trapping all sorts of bacteria and other nasties in a soup of sweat, oils, and grime on your face. Masks are mostly theater in everything but controlled environments.

> You're still touching things, then touching your face.

> Your eyes are exposed to the air.

I'm not the person you're responding to. Just what I do.

The mask covers the mucus membranes, except around the eyes. And I've got glasses with side-shields for the eyes. And an ASTM-III mask over the N95 mask so that I can touch and manipulate the masks without touching the breathing surface of the N95.

> You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask.

It's a virucidal N95, so besides the filtering also kills much of the virus that it traps. While the filtering is not 100%, the killing on top of the filtering should greatly reduce risk of infection or transmission in the unlikely event I'm infected but don't know it.

> Masks are mostly theater in everything but controlled environments.

I used to get a respiratory infection about yearly. I haven't had a contagious illness that I am aware of since January 2020.

Edit to add: And I take my daily shower after coming home for the day. I have never used a delivery service to grocery shop. I got about one month of work from home before coming back to the job part-time, and was fully back to the job by September or October of 2020.

I wear an N95 when I go out but only my regular glasses. I too haven't been sick since January 2020. I used to get colds pretty much quarterly, and so it's absolutely worth it to me. If it bothers someone else to see me wearing one that's their problem, I'm not asking them to wear one.

Has it bothered anyone?

I get the ocassional weird, sometimes mean look every once in a while, but I can deal with that as long as people don't stop and confront me over it, which thankfully hasn't happened yet, except a single time when some jerk walked past me and baa'd to suggest that I was a sheep back in 2020.

I don't even wear a mask everywhere (not since I got vaccinated). I don't once I sit at a table at a restaurant, or at certain social functions. But somehow I still haven't gotten Covid yet (that I'm aware of at least), even after a few known exposures, so I'm guessing either it's helping at least a little bit or I had an asymptomatic case a while back.

As far as I know, though, I could still have a moderate-to-bad case of it when I get it. My parents just both got it recently, for example, (that was one of my exposures, since they were helping me clean out my flooded basement just before they got symptoms) and it took both of them over a month before they got over it, and we share genes, so in theory I should have a somewhat rough time once I get it as well.

It certainly bothers the person(s) who left 'Mask off!' graffiti all over my neighborhood.

I used to get them more than yearly, usually 3x or more per year, some of them were pretty brutal (Really bad coughs, fevers, night sweats, up to a week of PTO to recover)

I have masked every time I leave the house since COVID started impacting Wuhan (we had Chinese operations, so saw early impact on the business side. If you saw me masking on BART in early 2020, wave) and I haven’t gotten a single illness of any type since then.

It’s glorious.

I am often close to the only person I see all day masking, and it blows my mind why people don’t get this advantage.

> if you saw me masking on BART in early 2020, wave

Which line, what time? :) I only started riding BART in late 2019, so only had a few months of it before stopping. I'm sure I would have been ill more often than yearly if my ridership had continued.

I agree. Additionally the masks will more than pay for themselves when it comes time to cash out my accumulated sick leave when I leave this job.

Orinda to New Montgomery, I used to start commute around 7:30, otherwise you couldn’t get a parking stop at Orinda.

You were about half an hour later than me on the way out, and we only overlapped through Orinda to Rockridge. I usually got the 2:something on the way back, and by then it was crowded enough I'm sure I wouldn't have seen you even if we were in the same car.

> Your eyes are exposed to the air.

Surface area of lungs: 100 m².

Surface area of eyes: 0.0004 m².

Difference: 6 orders of magnitude.

If there's a one in a million chance that my wearing a mask might prevent me from unwittingly getting or transmitting COVID and that spreading to a high risk person, I'll take it. You make your life choices, I'll make mine. Thanks.

Honest question: why are you vaccinating while you also identify as low risk?

> Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too.

I have a hard time believing that after 2 years of messaging about why people should take a vaccine that this is an “honest question”

> I have a hard time believing that after 2 years of messaging about why

You must have forgotten that they have been two years of communicational failures.

I just read this January 2023 article by a person with last name Fauci that claims coronaviruses have never been controlled by vaccines. More communication problems or admission of mistakes?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832587

Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci

'Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines. In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines ...'

> with last name Fauci that claims coronaviruses have never been controlled by vaccines

Actually, the full text is:

"Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns. Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines."

The authors of the paper (not just Fauci) named off a group of different viruses, not just a single one. Taken in the stated context, it should make a lot more sense to anyone who reads this stuff.

Countless studies have shown that SARS-CoV2 can infect systemically and not just the lungs. The SARS-CoV2 virus has been found in virtually every organ and the first autopsy studies in 2020 demonstrated this.

It is horrifying that the person who has lead the response to this virus for the US is a coauthor of this factually incorrect statement 3 years into the pandemic.

> Countless studies

Not that I don't believe you, but source?

> this factually incorrect statement

Exactly which factually incorrect statement?

Humoral vaccines do provide some limited protection when it comes to transmission. Nothing like a mucosal vaccine would. But an additional line of protection for the susceptible we may come in contact with.

For full disclosure I don't vaccinate anymore (waiting until the mucosal vaccines are available). But I understand those who do, especially if they are around other people when maskless more than I am.

I was under the impression that there is no data showing that the covid mrna vaccines reduce transmission. If you are aware of a source that says otherwise I would love to check it out.

I can't find the article I read a month or so ago that indicated a low protection of around 20% compared to vaccinated.

Here's a much older article about the original omicron (quite distinct from the BA.2 descendants we have now): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7109e1.htm

> The ARs among household contacts of index patients who had received a COVID-19 booster dose, of fully vaccinated index patients who completed their COVID-19 primary series within the previous 5 months, and of unvaccinated index patients were 42.7% (47 of 110), 43.6% (17 of 39), and 63.9% (69 of 108), respectively.

I appreciate the response. Hard to draw many conclusions from that study for a number of reasons, but perhaps the greatest in my mind is highlighted near the end: "TCOVID-19 prevention measures (vaccination, isolation, and mask use) are likely highly correlated within households, and the identified risk factors might not be independent predictors of transmission".

Basically this article doesn't show that vaccines prevent transmission. It doesn't show they don't either, although that there wasn't a more dramatic effect is a negative finding in my opinion. I wish the authors had analyzes the AR in vaccinated vs unvaccinated household contacts.

Because vaccines lower the likelihood and severity of infection and do not have any significant negative side effect.

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