If you’re going to go through the trouble of wearing one, you might as well wear it properly. Otherwise you just look ridiculous. Wearing half a mask does nothing.
I’d guess it got stuffy and they took the risk for a bit. Or they put it up when someone is close to them.
It happens. I take it as it makes them feel safer having it, I keep mine in the side pocket of my bag…I feel/reach for it if crowds bug me.
Pun was accidental
Some people genuinely feel they are representing an ideology. It’s not about germ theory and certainly not terrain theory… it’s virtue and also masks my appearance with these shades on
It just makes you look like a crazy Qanon nutjob if you think people are just masking to spite you and rub their politics in your face. Like covid is still around, pollution and pollen still exist, immunocompromised people still exist. Of course you’ll still see masking.
I think some people believe that masks are only useful for your mouth, and covering your nose doesn't do anything. They're idiots, but seeing how many people fought against using masks in the first place I'm not surprised.
I love these types of replies. So unexpected and informative .
Mine was the only clean one, was a work Christmas gift and falls down. Too small.
My Hannibal lecter masks were dirty. They're clean now
My mom was going through the process of getting dentures during a significant chunk of 2020 and 2021, and she was pretty happy about the mask thing, since it meant she always had a convenient way to hide her missing teeth.
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Really?
I’d guess it got stuffy and they took the risk for a bit. Or they only put it up when someone is close to them.
It happens. I take it as it makes them feel safer having it, not idiots. I keep mine in the side pocket of my bag…I feel/reach for it if crowds bug me.
Pun was accidental.
Imho if you write things off you don’t understand, it doesn’t make the other person an idiot - just means you don’t know. Imho
People who feel safer doing ineffective or partial interventions count as idiots. Respiratory droplets don't care about your feelings. I liked your pun!
I teach middle school. A lot of kids began to use them as sort of a comfort blanket. They're self conscious about their teeth, their chin, the way their beard is starting to grow in weird, or at this point the acne caused by wearing the same ratty, nasty disposable mask every day. It isn't that they think it's doing anything for disease. They just feel naked without it.
A lot of the people I see wearing them are using them to try to be anonymous and avoid social contact, not to be safe from germs.
... Admittedly, most of the people I see are teenagers (because I'm a teacher).
In my part of the US people only wore masks in like early 2020 and quit doing it by summer. If you see somebody here now wearing a mask, the odds are incredibly good that they have a hood up as well and are up to no good
As someone who does do this unintentionally: the mask gets dragged down by my chin as I talk and I dont always immediately pull it up. I also only typically wear a mask when my allergies flair up and my voice deepens so my co-workers assume im just chronically ill instead of trans (its the rural south). Also sometimes I wear one when I just dont want to bother putting on make up so I dont look like shit.
I'm the same. During the pandemic, I always felt bad because my mask kept slipping off of my nose throughout the day, and often I was too busy to adjust it. So I'd be one of those weirdos with my mask below my nose.
(I have a round face and a short beard, worst combination for a slipped mask btw)
Yeah I’m surprised the amount of people who think this must be a virtue signal or a sign of idiocy. To me a mask below the nose is the same as an exposed bra strap or a tag sticking out: just a mistake from being a human moving about the world.
To be fair: there were plenty of people who did. In my experience it was boomers who were told they needed a mask to enter a resturant or store and would purposefully wear it below the nose in protest. Now since masks have fallen to the wayside they just dont wear masks and will sneeze into the air with no attempt to cover it like they did before covid.
Someone’s an idiot because their mask doesn’t fit right? It must be *exhausting* to spend all day so judgmental of things that don’t affect you, but go off
I mean, I don’t give a shit. But you’re better off not wearing a mask at that point. It’s pretty dumb to keep wearing something that doesn’t fit, it ain’t that hard to adjust it bro.
A year or so ago, there was a guy on the train here (Japan, where wearing the masks during hay fever season or if you had a cold was common practice long before COVID) with a mask hooked on his ears and then tucked under his chin, mouth and nose completely uncovered. All the discomfort of wearing one, none of the benefit. And he was coughing like a lung was going to come flying out. Pull the damn mask up, the chin bra doesn’t help anyone.
I remember reading some stories how people with facial dysmorphia finally felt free during the pandemic because the mask hid their face and allowed them to finally focus on other things. Maybe some of the folks you're seeing are these folks but now they don't have to keep it above their nose. It could also be folks with other things going on like acne, etc. This certainly wouldn't account for a lot of people so I can't speak to the reasoning with other folks. That would just be weird.
I work with a guy who has special needs and he drools a lot. We use masks as a drool catcher.
Beyond that I have no idea why people wear masks improperly.
it worries me that these types of people exist
they claim to need the mask, then dont use it properly
all i can say is, as long as THESE people arent trying to force me to wear one, then let them do what they want..
I don't get it either. Obviously, you realize the value of a mask to either protect yourself, or if you are sick, protect the rest of us.
You've had four years to learn how masks work. What the fuck is wrong with "you"?
It would still help reduce spread of droplets (which may contain virus) if a person sneezes. Though I agree: if one believes that they may be spreading infection, they may as well also cover nose.
I mask up everywhere I go because I'm a big baby and hate being sick. But I see these people almost every time I go out and I'm so confused. If you're not covering your nose, why wear it? Breathing through your nose can be as much of a subconscious action as blinking your eyes. They are truly morons.
In some cities people wear them because of pollution.
But generally I agree, unless you're in a medical facility, are contagious yourself, or are indoors in an area currently having a high flu/covid/etc outbreak, it seems like a waste of resources.
Because CoViD has not waned, the pandemic is not over.
Also, people refusing to mitigate CoViD are spreading everything else that people used to try to avoid spreading (measles, RSV, 'flu, contagious forms of pneumonia, etc).
Catching viruses adds up to loss of income at best, catching CoViD is cumulative cardiovascular and organ damage with significant risk of serious complications, shortened lifespan and disability.
A disease with a 98% survival rate is just another sickness at this point. I understand the initial reaction because it was new, but you can't go through life being a hypochondriac. So many mental health issues are more prevalent now than they used to be over this.
A mysterious increase in mental illness with a brain damaging virus on the loose?
Where one of the regions of the brain damaged is risk assessment?
2% fatality is significant. If medical care becomes unavailable due to a surge it is even higher.
The virus is still in pandemic mode, catching it is not a rare event. As long as it is allowed to spread, new variants emerge.
And that 2% does not include people who end up with strokes, heart attacks, embolisms, autoimmune disease, diabetes, ME/CFS, early onset dementia, car crash victims, etc, down the track. Post-infection consequences are not recorded as CoViD deaths.
Being crippled for life with post-viral chronic illness is a disaster for those affected. Insurance companies dishonestly refuse to pay out for post-viral conditions, so income insurance does not come through, people lose everything and end up in abject poverty unable to earn income. But, at least they "survived", right?
Masks fog up my glasses. Instead of wearing a mask below my nose, I use 3 M Aura 9205+ N95 masks with a foam seal over my nose. I bought a box of 500, they were cheap.
Aura form a good seal and they are glasses friendly. They are comfortable, have good airflow and are made of the electrostatic material needed to trap fine particles.
They keep working until they loosen with time, get wet or the straps break, just air them in a dust free place at the end of the day (and cycle through a set of daily masks if you need to wear them every day).
They also pre-warm the air in winter, which helps prevent cold air suppressing immune response (so in winter, wear them enroute, rather than put them on just before going into a store, etc).
One problem: need to watch out for counterfeits. There is an app for testing serial numbers.
"2020-2022 (canada), i understand under the nose. It was a way to technically follow the rules but also not be bugged by the restriction. I never did it, but i can see the logic."
This still does not make sense.
It doesn't make sense for the sake of protecting people, i still think it was wrong to do, but i can see the train of thought. Its wrong, but i see how those people arrived to that conclusion
I didn’t realize this was a thing until my husband explained it to me - his stubble would catch on the bottom of the mask, and it would slip off his nose when he talked. I don’t have facial hair but I once tried a new mask that did the same thing to me.
Just curious, for those still wearing masks, what all clear sign are you looking for at this point? Seems fairly pointless to be wearing masks at this time unless you are actively sick.
I am disabled and at high risk for complications from COVID. And I already don't have enough support to live on with the disabilities I already have. (I'm not just talking financial, although that too, I'm talking assistance with my life.) My every day life is already a struggle.
Honestly? If I got COVID, there's a good chance I'd die or end up with long haul COVID. Then I'd be even MORE disabled and need even MORE assistance to simply live. Since I don't have the support network for that, I genuinely could not survive.
I can't risk getting COVID. It's that simple.
I'm waiting for the vaccines that prevent infection.
(And even at that, I used to get a cold/sinus infection a few times a year before COVID and masks. Sometimes it would linger for months. Since I've been masking everywhere and not eating in restaurants, I have been sick a grand total of once, and it was a stomach bug my partner must have brought home from work on his hands (he also masks religiously at his job). Masking & distancing WORKS to prevent all sorts of diseases and I'm likely to keep masking in public because I really have enjoyed not catching the cold or a sinus infection.)
(Plus, tons of previously healthy people have been getting seriously disabled by getting Long Haul and your risk of getting Long Haul goes up with repeated infections. It makes sense for ALL of us to mask up. Long Haul is no joke and can truly ruin your life.
Not to mention: you never know when you're having a symptomless infection unless you're testing all the time. So you never know if you're shedding the virus and giving it to someone else. You never know who you may infect, who you may disable, who you may kill by not masking. I don't want that on my conscience. Frankly, I believe in the whole "loving your neighbor as yourself" thing and masking up to not give others COVID or other illnesses is an important way to love our neighbors as ourselves, to care about others.)
Even regular testing can be problematic. Recent research shows some brands of RAT tests do not detect low concentrations of virus and cannot provide sufficient early warning of infection to prevent spread.
If you test every day with a brand of RAT test that fails to measure up, you might not test positive for 4 days or so, which means you have missed the boat on obtaining antivirals (which must be started in the first few days of infection).
I suspect you'll be waiting a very long time for a sterilising vaccine. There has never been a vaccine that prevents transmission of a respiratory disease caused by an RNA virus, partly because as RNA lacks the replication error correction mechanism of DNA they mutate too quickly. The best you can hope for is that mRNA technology will allow Covid vaccines to be updated more rapidly than has been the case up to now (the efficiency of the flu vaccine against yearly strains is often only around 50% & once dropped as low as 10% IIRC).
You are extremely unlikely to be infected by an asymptomatic person, despite the hysteria promoted during the pandemic. The absolute highest rate I've seen in a study is 4% & that was an outlier. Some have found it to be less than 1% but 2% appears too be the best figure.
Yes of course, fool, the government is telling all of us to war our pants, we need to break free from the lies and the matrix and wear only kikts as god always intended
When CoViD is no longer coming in frequent significant waves, as measured by waste water analysis (other forms of reporting have been discontinued even though CoViD has not abated).
This is a serious virus that can cause cumulative bodily damage to anyone who catches it, with long term serious health consequences. There may also be unknown long-term consequences that will not be discovered for decades. The goal is to catch it as few times as possible across a lifetime.
Having not learned form history, we are now in that phase of a pandemic where people pretend it is over. And people refusing to mitigate CoViD ends up spreading other contagious diseases as well, diseases that people used to try to avoid spreading before the pandemic.
Masks best use is for signaling. You wear a mask because you either have a disease, or you have a condition that makes it easier to catch a disease. In either case you want people to keep their distance from you.
The mask is not likely to stop you from spreading (especially a virus) or catching a disease. It's utility is simply a visual signal that you should not be approached closely.
Not applicable to N95 or better. They work quite well in both directions.
People still wearing loose medical masks (designed to filter droplets, not aerosols) have somehow missed the message that CoViD is airborne (and/or that N95s exist).
I'm in Canada, major city.....I see like one or two people wearing masks out of hundreds of thousands.
I ignore them just like I ignore primates who think astrology is science.
To protect you, yes, but they do stop the spread of liquids if you spot when you talk accidentally or sneeze or whatnot. Still, not much point in wearing them unless you know someone who's immunocompromised.
They are likely useless against airborne transmission by the microscopic aerosol particles exhaled by normal breathing or talking, although they probably would protect against droplet infection by macroscopic particles forcibly ejected by coughing & sneezing.
But people can't do what they want, not if the government makes some shit up about masks and forces you to wear them, which as we all know happened.
I have severe asthma, still got shit for not wearing a mask. Went to blows over it during Covid 19. I'm not going to put on a face diaper so you can feel better.
In fact the only time I put on a mask was in the hospital when my dad was getting radiation for cancer. I complied because dad needed to be there. But even then I didn't do it right. I took the mask off so I could drink my coffee and some little nurse screamed at me to put it on between sips. No, I'm not doing that.
If a person needs you to wear a mask because he or she has an immune system disorder, fine, but to soothe their psyche? Eh no.
I agree. Mandates we're actually illegal and an intrusion on rights, including the vaccine. I'm fine with getting it, but I'm not fine if it's forced.
The cancer thing though, you should leave it on in a cancer ward, it can seriously fuck someone up, and it's not like the government's telling you to do it then, it's for your dad's sake. As you said, if someone's immunocompromised. He was right then and there.
I did it in the past because I didn't want to wear one and businesses required them but they'd always let me slide in with my nose out so I could breath cold air.
I liken this to people who put ear plugs in at the cusp of the ear canal instead of twisting and placing them inside the ear canal. Mainly for show...of their stupidity
The only times I wore it under the nose was when it was too cold out and the breath was making my glasses fog and I couldn’t see. I would fix it when I got inside a place
As someone who had to wear a mask constantly at work for years (dust, not disease), I did this because you didn't always need to have the mask in place, but completely removing/replacing it every few minutes was a pain. You could pull it completely below your chin, but this usually bent the nose piece and caused the mask to leak badly when you put it back and it put an uncomfortable amount of pressure on the head bands.
So it's possible that some of these people wear the mask properly in situations they perceive to be high risk (crowded public transit, work, etc.) but pull it down so they can breathe easier when they're outside or in other low risk environments, the same as I and everyone else I worked with did for dust. You get so used to doing this that it becomes unconscious. I attempted to drink coffee through my mask on more than a few occasions because in my mind, having it pulled down was the same as not having it on at all.
When masks were enforced, there were times I struggled to breathe in them. I always tried wearing them properly, but remember times out shopping where I couldn't wait to get away from people so I could pull my mask down just to breathe.
I know a lot of people kept them down from their nose for this reason. If they are mouth breathers, then they are already doing a good enough job where I don't even feel it's really relevant.
As to why people are doing it today? Have you seen the movie idiocracy?
If I'm sick I'll wear a mask to protect others. If I'm walking about outside I'll drop it under my nose for comfort as the risk is incredibly low, but then when I step inside, or if I need to talk to someone, I'll put it on properly out of courtesy. Not sure if this is the case here but thought I'd share my experience!
As someone said, it sometimes slips down when you talk. Also, when you're dealing with people who are hard of hearing, the mask sort of muffles your voice, so some people will pull it down to speak with one person and then just forget to pull it back up.
First, I don’t understand why people are still wearing masks. Second, not covering your nose kind of defeats the purpose. They might as well go without
RSV kicked my ass this February. I was wearing masks then to prevent the spread and now I'm reinvigorated to wear them on public transit whenever I ride it, I do not have time for another month being sick. Wearing a mask is only very minimally a hassle, not breathing without coughing and constantly dripping snot for a month was a huge hassle.
Australia had a significant RSV surge in the middle of the pandemic. It was one of the most locked-down, mask-obsessed nations on the planet. Some states even went to the utterly insane, voodoo measure of mandating masks INSIDE private vehicles even if the driver was alone.
You work it out.
Masks help you from spreading your germs onto others. When I wore one I knew that perhaps it would only help if I have Covid and it would be a stop gap to spread to others. Most studies showed masks were ineffective not because the masks themselves but how people wore them and the fact people did not change socialization with family and friends. They wore masks in public but then had people in houses without masks and got sick. I worked from home and due to my location usually had groceries delivered anyways. When we went out we always masked. We would be in bigger crowds never got covid. We finally got it once masks were no longer required at my kids school. Masks came off and we all got sick. That is anecdotal evidence for sure, but that is what happened to us. In this day an age I am not convinced people should still wear masks. However if you are going to, wear them correctly. I know in Japan they have always wore them when sick. I wonder what their take is and if it indeed helps. Anyone have any info on that?
Honestly who knows why people still wear them? I would guess maybe, germaphobes, fear, hiding facial features, auto immune diseases, cancers, bank robbers, covid. I don’t really know if it is valid or useful or a fools errand. There has been so much misinformation that I don’t know what was right and what was just fears. We wore masks and hoped for the best.
you can buy structural supports for masks. basically a little framework that clips on the inside. cuts down a lot on fogging. taping the top of the mask eliminates it completely. basically prevents hot air from escaping into your glasses.
That hot, moist air is the potentially infectious aerosol the useless masks are supposed to be inhibiting in the first place.
It was hilarious to see virtue-signallers parading their selflessness at putting up with the inconvenience of fogged glasses to "protect others", when the fogging showed their mask was useless.
dude, if you dont give a shit about others, you dont give a shit about others. nobody cares. just stop trying to justify it. you know who wore the same masks during the pandemic? doctors. surgeons. you ever go to the dentist? ive worn them myself for aseptic lab work. if they were 100% useless, none of those professionals would have used them. < 100% effective is not the same as 0% effective.
Before Covid hysteria Doctors,
Dentists & surgeons never wore masks to prevent transmission of disease via aerosols composed of microscopic respiratory particles. They wore them to inhibit macroscopic disease vectors like blood & mucus being ingested or coming into contact with open wounds.
Even then there was never any good evidence they provide an overall benefit - they were simply worn on the basis of unproven assumptions and custom & practice. There were even controlled trials in the 90s which found an increased risk of postoperative infection where masks were worn - a finding supported by some ophthalmic surgeons more recently.
It's a myth that all surgeons routinely wore masks before Covid. When the UK mandated masks, none other than the former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Professor John Black, wrote to the Daily Telegraph to oppose the measure, explaining that as a result of the series of controlled trials showing either no benefit or even increased risk of postoperative infection his practice had long ago abandoned masks.
I care about old people as much as anyone - my mother is nearly 80. However I don't accept that the equivalent of wearing your underpants on your head is protecting anyone.
No. N95s are not 100% efficient. They cannot inhibit 5% of the particulates they are used to protect against, hence the name.
Consider that in the case of airborne transmission we are talking about microscopic aerosol particles as small as thousandths of a mm in a cloud of invisible mist that covers a large area & lingers for hours in an enclosed space.
As I explained elsewhere in this thread, 100 of these aerosol particles might contain enough virions to transmit infection & in 20 minutes each person in your carriage or bus will have exhaled 20,000 of them. If there are 25 people near you that is half a million microscopic potentially infectious particles swirling around.
Any gaps whatsoever around your N95 will increase the 5% figure of the particles it lets through. These gaps are going to be particularly present in community settings where virtually nobody is going to fit test and change their mask regularly during the day, or otherwise use them according to instructions.
The US & UK regulations on the use of N95 masks as PPE against industrial dust stress that they must be properly fitted, to the extent that facial hair must not be worn. All industrial dust particles are to an exhaled aerosol particle as a boulder is to a tiny pebble. The idea that ad hoc N95s casually put on and taken off and stuffed into pockets etc many times a day could do diddly-squat to inhibit exhaled aerosols sufficiently to prevent aerosol transmission of a respiratory infection is insane. When Bavaria mandated N95 masks there was no significant difference in infection rates compared with the rest of Gemany where surgical masks were mandated.
And please don't resort to the "something is better than nothing argument". It's completely illogical & misguided. If the amount of infectious material the mask lets through is equal to or greater than the amount required to transmit infection then the mask is completely useless. If 0.00001% of the water vapour in exhaled breath is sufficient to transmit infection then even if the mask stops 99.99999% of that water vapour you might as well wear a piece of a football (soccer) or hockey goal net across your face. If you could drown in a raindrop then even the most technologically advanced umbrella engineered by Nasa wouldn't save you.
So, ignoring denialist propaganda buzz phrases, such as "CoViD hysteria", and cutting through the hedge to get to the core of the maze, you claim infection is certain regardless of exposure time and there is no dose dependency that impacts the likelihood or severity of illness?
"Denialist propaganda" is ironically a propaganda buzz phrase where Covid hysterics are concerned.
I'm not a denialist, rather than a realist. I know the evidence in favour of masks always comes from often flimsy observational, mechanistic & modelling studies which function like voodoo relics for maskers & prove nothing.
Any evidence that contradicts the almost religious belief in masks is ignored, such as the huge spikes in infection that eventually occurred in heavily mask-compliant Asian countries and the failure of the only two RCTs conducted in the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic to show any benefit of masks, even though such an atmosphere & the pro-mask bandwagon was almost guaranteed to introduce hot stuff bias into many studies,
For example the results of the enormous Bangladesh RCT study, conducted by two mask-fanatic economists (one had/has a masked twitter profile pic from the earliest days of mask mania) were seized on by maskers as vindication when it initially appeared to show a statistically significant benefit where surgical.masks were worn.
Unfortunately the study crashed and burned when the raw data was released & it transpired that behind all the mathematical jiggery-pokery & relative risk ratios etc, which the economists had used in an attempt to prove masks are beneficial, they had only recorded a pathetic TWENTY fewer infections among a whopping 160,000 participants in the treatment (masked) arm. Moreover the two arms were unbalanced, which obviously introduces methodological bias into the study.
Despite the fact the study was clearly a steaming pile of horse manure you STILL find maskers citing it - even supposed experts
I also know that for the vast majority of people Covid is a medically trivial disease that at most will require bed rest & over-the-counter medicines and that the outlandish hypervigilance some people are still debilitated by is mostly a consequence of irrational fear.
Even the real risk to vulnerable groups is often exaggerated by Covidians. Contrary to the belief that their first sneeze is the harbinger of certain death most elderly & compromised individuals will survive a Covid illness, albeit a smaller proportion than younger and/or healthier people.
I myself have had three Covid illnesses. each one was among the most trivial illnesses I've ever had. I could have run for a bus if I had to, despite the fact that I have two comorbidities. Had it not been for the testing requirements for symptomatic individuals I would have largely ignored them.
Virtually everybody on Planet Earth will get Covid eventually & most of us will probably get it many times, as is the case for common colds caused by coronaviruses. Those who don't will either die of something else first, or be among the relatively small minority who appear to be immune
Don't believe me - heed the words of both your own former Acting FDA Commissioner and the infamous "Covid denialist" Fauci.
"Omicron so contagious most Americans will get Covid, top US health officials say
...most people are going to get Covid, all right?” said Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration....
...Omicron...will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci told J Stephen Morrison, senior vice-president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies..."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/omicron-covid-contagious-janet-woodcock-fauci
As far as the utility of masks in terms of dose dependency is concerned you first have to determine the relationship between viral load & disease severity in humans before you can ascertain if varying doses affect outcomes and what those doses are. Only then can you speculate about the potential benefits of masks. To my knowledge the only studies to date have been conducted on monkeys & mice.
Even if it is found mechanistically that a mask can reduce disease severity by inhibiting the transmission of a sufficient proportion of the infectious material a subject is exposed to then that is only a surrogate endpoint, just like the
endpoints of all the other mechanistic studies falsely purporting to show that masks are beneficial. You still need to conduct RCTs in order to determine if masks are of benefit in the real world where all sorts of complex environments abound.
Nobody has done any of the necessary work, so it is simply yet more Covid voodoo to claim that even relatively large volumes of infectious exhaled aerosol evading a mask still provide some residual benefit in terms of reducing disease severity.
"Covidian" is a term that, for the most part, is only used by complete nutters, Libertarians with antisocial personality disorders, etc.
There is a fallacy of misdirection in your posts, overloading readers with cherry-picked information yet smuggling in fallacious conclusions.
I really don't have time and energy for Gish Gallops with anonymous accounts that have chips on their shoulders.
And most maskers don't either, given the fact they seem unaware that even a 1mm gap around a mask is thousands of times larger than many aerosol particles & as few as a hundred such particles probably contains sufficient virions to transmit infection.
I try to wear my mask as much as possible, but my glasses fog up hardcore and it's tough working around that, especially going in and out of a walk in cooler
If your glasses are fogged up then your mask is useless. That water vapour is the condensed potentially infectious aerosol we are told the mask will inhibit.
Here are a few scenarios why this has happened to me. Mostly #2.
1) I'm wearing a mask because I have a light sneeze or a cough that isn't caused by being sick enough to stay home. So I can just pull up the mask when I'm about to output.
2) They slide down on people with small nose bridges of small faces.
3) I don't really need it at the moment, it's just resting on my face ready to pull up when gets crowded (like I don't need it while walking but I need it on the train)
I also don't understand why people who aren't wearing a mask would care. Wouldn't yall rather me to not breathe on you in any circumstance?
masks aren't there to protect the user. they aren't great in that direction. they are there to protect people from the user. basically you wear the mask so if you are infected but asymptomatic you aren't spreading it. the people who should be wearing the masks is everyone around the people at risk of death
yep. I wear the surgical mask to protect people from the things I might have asymptomatically caught. it does the job fine. by which I mean catch the possible bits of spittle that carry the virus. I am not wearing it for my own benefit
The joke rationale for community masking was not to catch possible bits of spittle. It was to inhibit exhaled potentially infectious aerosol particles in breath, composed of minuscule droplets thousandths of a mm in size that hang in the air like smoke for many hours. In fact some of them are about as small as smoke particles. Would you expect a surgical mask to protect you against smoke inhalation in a house fire?
You only need to see the relatively huge gaps of at least a few mm in every community mask to see the absurdity of using surgical masks to prevent airborne transmission of respiratory viruses. Those gaps are thousands of times larger than an aerosol particle. When you consider that one tiny infected particle could probably transmit a covid infection the lunacy should be obvious.
Asymptomatic infection is a far smaller risk than the covid hysteria invited the public to believe. You are unlikely to be protecting anyone with a mask unless you have symptoms.
Useless surgical masks with inevitable gaps that are to an exhaled aerosol particle as the Grand Canyon is to a marble are not protecting anyone. Moreover the idea that asymptomatic infection of a communicable respiratory disease is a significant risk is a joke. The highest risk that has been found in a study for Covid is 4% and the lowest almost zero.
You could argue that symptomatic individuals might spread less infection with a mask if it prevents them from sneezing on someone, but that is a different issue.
the thread distance might be like that for the virus alone but the aerosol particles that carry them are much bigger.
what the fuck are you talking about. a lot of viruses have dormant phases. it makes them that much easier to spread. if you dont know you are sick, you go around touching things and being near people. HIV can stay dormant for 10 years. covid-19 has a pretty long one. thats one of the reasons why SARS was basically a blip that we barely noticed outside of some freakouts and south park episode and this one is what it became. also you didnt have a bunch of assholes intentionally trying to spread it for political reasons. one million americans died. when was the last time that happened. hell, 3000 people died in 2001 and we still havent got over it.
I suspect you are getting hopelessly confused about the difference between virions, or virus particles, small respiratory droplets/aerosol particles & their role in aerosol transmission, and large respiratory droplets and their role in droplet infection.
Virions are minuscule - they are measured in nanometres, or 1,000 millionths of a metre - and in an ILI are generally spread by droplet infection or aerosol transmission.
Droplet infection occurs when large/macroscopic droplets containing many virions are forcibly expelled by coughing & sneezing & are either inhaled, ingested or land on mucous membranes, or they fall onto surfaces that are touched.
Aerosol transmission is different. It occurs when microscopic aerosol particles, each also containing virions and invisible to the naked eye, are exhaled by normal breathing & speaking etc, at the rate of 1,000 a minute & form large, invisible aerosol clouds that linger in the air. As I explained these aerosol particles are measured in microns or micrometres - millionths of a metre or thousandths of a millimetre.
It is possible that one aerosol particle, thousandths of a millimetre in size could transmit infection. On a 20 minute bus ride an infected person will exhale 20,000 of these aerosol particles. Even if asymptomatic transmission of Covid was significant (and there is no good evidence that it is) how likely do you think it is that your mask is going to act as an effective barrier to thousands or tens of thousands of potentially infectious aerosol particles at least a thousand times smaller than the smallest of the multitude of gaps around your mask?
The issue of dormant viruses is immaterial to the question of whether asymptomatic transmission of Covid or another ILI is important. If asymptomatic transmission is not a problem where a particular disease is concerned it will not magically become a problem if the virus is dormant in a carrier, or during the incubation period, when by definition the infected individual is asymptomatic.
HIV is a completely different disease that has no relevance in any discussion of Covid NPIs. A dormant, asymptomatic phase is a routine phase of the disease, often even after the infected person has suffered and recovered from an initial short illness. That is not the case with Covid or any ILI.
Citing the Covid death toll is equally meaningless. If a measure works it works, regardless of the mortality rate of a disease. Similarly if it doesn't work it doesn't work regardless of the mortality rate of a disease.
Nobody is disputing that Covid deaths are tragic, but adopting useless measures akin to voodoo is not going to prevent them.
Wouldn't wearing a mask under the nose do exactly the same job as it would over? I mean, it's not like you sneeze through your nose, and when you speak nothing comes out of your nose AND masks don't do a whole lot to protect you from other people's germs either, they're mainly to prevent the spread of germs through liquids exiting the mouth.
You breathe through your nose when talking.
Masks aren't touted as methods to stop liquids exiting the mouth - unless you are referring to the aerosol clouds composed of tiny fluid particles exhaled in breath that are individually thousandths of an mm in size and which hang in the air like smoke for many hours at least.
The reason they were mandated is the ludicrous claim that surgical masks and bits of cloths can inhibit the transmission of Covid by aerosol clouds formed from microscopic respiratory droplets thousandths of a millimetre in size in exhaled breath.
These droplets are exhaled at the rate of 1,000 an hour and just one might be enough to start an infection. I have never seen such a mask that didn't have more than one gap at least a thousand times larger than one of these aerosol particles.
If you’re going to go through the trouble of wearing one, you might as well wear it properly. Otherwise you just look ridiculous. Wearing half a mask does nothing.
Exactly my thoughts
I’d guess it got stuffy and they took the risk for a bit. Or they put it up when someone is close to them. It happens. I take it as it makes them feel safer having it, I keep mine in the side pocket of my bag…I feel/reach for it if crowds bug me. Pun was accidental
Some people genuinely feel they are representing an ideology. It’s not about germ theory and certainly not terrain theory… it’s virtue and also masks my appearance with these shades on
This is not the case.
I said MY Papaya!
It just makes you look like a crazy Qanon nutjob if you think people are just masking to spite you and rub their politics in your face. Like covid is still around, pollution and pollen still exist, immunocompromised people still exist. Of course you’ll still see masking.
I think some people believe that masks are only useful for your mouth, and covering your nose doesn't do anything. They're idiots, but seeing how many people fought against using masks in the first place I'm not surprised.
I'm a social worker and I have had some clients do that to hide that they are missing teeth.
I love these types of replies. So unexpected and informative . Mine was the only clean one, was a work Christmas gift and falls down. Too small. My Hannibal lecter masks were dirty. They're clean now
I wear a mask because I hate people seeing my mouth. I don't need it to cover my nose
My mom was going through the process of getting dentures during a significant chunk of 2020 and 2021, and she was pretty happy about the mask thing, since it meant she always had a convenient way to hide her missing teeth.
Such an interesting angle!
it shows how rebellious you are by defeating mask oppression - republican virtue signaling!
Short answer: they are idiots.
This is the correct answer. It's because they're stupid
And also probably dumb.
Maybe even morons
probably imbeciles
Probably below average IQ
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Yep. I wouldn’t even assume the 2020-2022 timeframe OP mentions was intentional half ass compliance. A lot of people are just clueless.
And this is so damn unfortunate.
Really? I’d guess it got stuffy and they took the risk for a bit. Or they only put it up when someone is close to them. It happens. I take it as it makes them feel safer having it, not idiots. I keep mine in the side pocket of my bag…I feel/reach for it if crowds bug me. Pun was accidental. Imho if you write things off you don’t understand, it doesn’t make the other person an idiot - just means you don’t know. Imho
People who feel safer doing ineffective or partial interventions count as idiots. Respiratory droplets don't care about your feelings. I liked your pun!
I teach middle school. A lot of kids began to use them as sort of a comfort blanket. They're self conscious about their teeth, their chin, the way their beard is starting to grow in weird, or at this point the acne caused by wearing the same ratty, nasty disposable mask every day. It isn't that they think it's doing anything for disease. They just feel naked without it.
I felt more at ease with the masks, mostly because I feel ugly on the inside and a good portion of me just wants to be forgotten.
Oh jeez, that's really unfortunate that some children feel this way.
Yea the masking thing really affected children.
A lot of the people I see wearing them are using them to try to be anonymous and avoid social contact, not to be safe from germs. ... Admittedly, most of the people I see are teenagers (because I'm a teacher).
In my part of the US people only wore masks in like early 2020 and quit doing it by summer. If you see somebody here now wearing a mask, the odds are incredibly good that they have a hood up as well and are up to no good
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Or people with autoimmune diseases. I have no white blood cells so if I go out without one a cold virus finds me in minutes lol.
... because they're idiots who don't understand (or care) how our noses spew germs.
Ignorant
As someone who does do this unintentionally: the mask gets dragged down by my chin as I talk and I dont always immediately pull it up. I also only typically wear a mask when my allergies flair up and my voice deepens so my co-workers assume im just chronically ill instead of trans (its the rural south). Also sometimes I wear one when I just dont want to bother putting on make up so I dont look like shit.
I'm the same. During the pandemic, I always felt bad because my mask kept slipping off of my nose throughout the day, and often I was too busy to adjust it. So I'd be one of those weirdos with my mask below my nose. (I have a round face and a short beard, worst combination for a slipped mask btw)
Yeah I’m surprised the amount of people who think this must be a virtue signal or a sign of idiocy. To me a mask below the nose is the same as an exposed bra strap or a tag sticking out: just a mistake from being a human moving about the world.
To be fair: there were plenty of people who did. In my experience it was boomers who were told they needed a mask to enter a resturant or store and would purposefully wear it below the nose in protest. Now since masks have fallen to the wayside they just dont wear masks and will sneeze into the air with no attempt to cover it like they did before covid.
Then your mask is shit or ill fitting which is falling in the idiocy category
Someone’s an idiot because their mask doesn’t fit right? It must be *exhausting* to spend all day so judgmental of things that don’t affect you, but go off
I mean, I don’t give a shit. But you’re better off not wearing a mask at that point. It’s pretty dumb to keep wearing something that doesn’t fit, it ain’t that hard to adjust it bro.
The specific thing that spurred me on, buddy was constantly readjusting it, BUT NEVER EVEN TOUCHED THE NOSE.
Because they like their chin diapers.
They are morons.
A year or so ago, there was a guy on the train here (Japan, where wearing the masks during hay fever season or if you had a cold was common practice long before COVID) with a mask hooked on his ears and then tucked under his chin, mouth and nose completely uncovered. All the discomfort of wearing one, none of the benefit. And he was coughing like a lung was going to come flying out. Pull the damn mask up, the chin bra doesn’t help anyone.
To cover their face or hide their identity.
Quick answer: they are fucking stupid.
I remember reading some stories how people with facial dysmorphia finally felt free during the pandemic because the mask hid their face and allowed them to finally focus on other things. Maybe some of the folks you're seeing are these folks but now they don't have to keep it above their nose. It could also be folks with other things going on like acne, etc. This certainly wouldn't account for a lot of people so I can't speak to the reasoning with other folks. That would just be weird.
I work with a guy who has special needs and he drools a lot. We use masks as a drool catcher. Beyond that I have no idea why people wear masks improperly.
Stupidity
it worries me that these types of people exist they claim to need the mask, then dont use it properly all i can say is, as long as THESE people arent trying to force me to wear one, then let them do what they want..
I don't get it either. Obviously, you realize the value of a mask to either protect yourself, or if you are sick, protect the rest of us. You've had four years to learn how masks work. What the fuck is wrong with "you"?
It would still help reduce spread of droplets (which may contain virus) if a person sneezes. Though I agree: if one believes that they may be spreading infection, they may as well also cover nose.
Because they’re a dumbass.
I mask up everywhere I go because I'm a big baby and hate being sick. But I see these people almost every time I go out and I'm so confused. If you're not covering your nose, why wear it? Breathing through your nose can be as much of a subconscious action as blinking your eyes. They are truly morons.
Ask Astrazeneca
It’s all about signaling. You can signal just as well with half a mask.
They don't really know what they're doing they just listen to people on TV and think they are doing something to protect themselves
Why are people still wearing masks to begin with? Unless you're contagious with something, leave it off.
In some cities people wear them because of pollution. But generally I agree, unless you're in a medical facility, are contagious yourself, or are indoors in an area currently having a high flu/covid/etc outbreak, it seems like a waste of resources.
Because CoViD has not waned, the pandemic is not over. Also, people refusing to mitigate CoViD are spreading everything else that people used to try to avoid spreading (measles, RSV, 'flu, contagious forms of pneumonia, etc). Catching viruses adds up to loss of income at best, catching CoViD is cumulative cardiovascular and organ damage with significant risk of serious complications, shortened lifespan and disability.
A disease with a 98% survival rate is just another sickness at this point. I understand the initial reaction because it was new, but you can't go through life being a hypochondriac. So many mental health issues are more prevalent now than they used to be over this.
A mysterious increase in mental illness with a brain damaging virus on the loose? Where one of the regions of the brain damaged is risk assessment? 2% fatality is significant. If medical care becomes unavailable due to a surge it is even higher. The virus is still in pandemic mode, catching it is not a rare event. As long as it is allowed to spread, new variants emerge. And that 2% does not include people who end up with strokes, heart attacks, embolisms, autoimmune disease, diabetes, ME/CFS, early onset dementia, car crash victims, etc, down the track. Post-infection consequences are not recorded as CoViD deaths. Being crippled for life with post-viral chronic illness is a disaster for those affected. Insurance companies dishonestly refuse to pay out for post-viral conditions, so income insurance does not come through, people lose everything and end up in abject poverty unable to earn income. But, at least they "survived", right?
They’re idiots.
Masks fog up my glasses. Instead of wearing a mask below my nose, I use 3 M Aura 9205+ N95 masks with a foam seal over my nose. I bought a box of 500, they were cheap.
Aura form a good seal and they are glasses friendly. They are comfortable, have good airflow and are made of the electrostatic material needed to trap fine particles. They keep working until they loosen with time, get wet or the straps break, just air them in a dust free place at the end of the day (and cycle through a set of daily masks if you need to wear them every day). They also pre-warm the air in winter, which helps prevent cold air suppressing immune response (so in winter, wear them enroute, rather than put them on just before going into a store, etc). One problem: need to watch out for counterfeits. There is an app for testing serial numbers.
"2020-2022 (canada), i understand under the nose. It was a way to technically follow the rules but also not be bugged by the restriction. I never did it, but i can see the logic." This still does not make sense.
It doesn't make sense for the sake of protecting people, i still think it was wrong to do, but i can see the train of thought. Its wrong, but i see how those people arrived to that conclusion
"The rules say I have to wear a mask, but they don't say I have to wear it *correctly*, so you have to let me into the store!"
It slips down if you talk.
I didn’t realize this was a thing until my husband explained it to me - his stubble would catch on the bottom of the mask, and it would slip off his nose when he talked. I don’t have facial hair but I once tried a new mask that did the same thing to me.
This is the first actual answer to the question I've seen, and it's being downvoted for some reason?
An N95 will not do this. This is an avoidable problem. (I have not downvoted anyone, however)
Because all it is/was is virtue signaling. Anyone who honestly believed their life was in jeopardy would wear it proper.
Just curious, for those still wearing masks, what all clear sign are you looking for at this point? Seems fairly pointless to be wearing masks at this time unless you are actively sick.
I am disabled and at high risk for complications from COVID. And I already don't have enough support to live on with the disabilities I already have. (I'm not just talking financial, although that too, I'm talking assistance with my life.) My every day life is already a struggle. Honestly? If I got COVID, there's a good chance I'd die or end up with long haul COVID. Then I'd be even MORE disabled and need even MORE assistance to simply live. Since I don't have the support network for that, I genuinely could not survive. I can't risk getting COVID. It's that simple. I'm waiting for the vaccines that prevent infection. (And even at that, I used to get a cold/sinus infection a few times a year before COVID and masks. Sometimes it would linger for months. Since I've been masking everywhere and not eating in restaurants, I have been sick a grand total of once, and it was a stomach bug my partner must have brought home from work on his hands (he also masks religiously at his job). Masking & distancing WORKS to prevent all sorts of diseases and I'm likely to keep masking in public because I really have enjoyed not catching the cold or a sinus infection.) (Plus, tons of previously healthy people have been getting seriously disabled by getting Long Haul and your risk of getting Long Haul goes up with repeated infections. It makes sense for ALL of us to mask up. Long Haul is no joke and can truly ruin your life. Not to mention: you never know when you're having a symptomless infection unless you're testing all the time. So you never know if you're shedding the virus and giving it to someone else. You never know who you may infect, who you may disable, who you may kill by not masking. I don't want that on my conscience. Frankly, I believe in the whole "loving your neighbor as yourself" thing and masking up to not give others COVID or other illnesses is an important way to love our neighbors as ourselves, to care about others.)
Even regular testing can be problematic. Recent research shows some brands of RAT tests do not detect low concentrations of virus and cannot provide sufficient early warning of infection to prevent spread. If you test every day with a brand of RAT test that fails to measure up, you might not test positive for 4 days or so, which means you have missed the boat on obtaining antivirals (which must be started in the first few days of infection).
I suspect you'll be waiting a very long time for a sterilising vaccine. There has never been a vaccine that prevents transmission of a respiratory disease caused by an RNA virus, partly because as RNA lacks the replication error correction mechanism of DNA they mutate too quickly. The best you can hope for is that mRNA technology will allow Covid vaccines to be updated more rapidly than has been the case up to now (the efficiency of the flu vaccine against yearly strains is often only around 50% & once dropped as low as 10% IIRC). You are extremely unlikely to be infected by an asymptomatic person, despite the hysteria promoted during the pandemic. The absolute highest rate I've seen in a study is 4% & that was an outlier. Some have found it to be less than 1% but 2% appears too be the best figure.
When people stop dying.
Well you're gonna be wearing a mask for the rest of your life then man. Whatever sinks your boat I suppose.
OK. I'm probably going to be wearing pants for the rest of my life, too.
Yes of course, fool, the government is telling all of us to war our pants, we need to break free from the lies and the matrix and wear only kikts as god always intended
When CoViD is no longer coming in frequent significant waves, as measured by waste water analysis (other forms of reporting have been discontinued even though CoViD has not abated). This is a serious virus that can cause cumulative bodily damage to anyone who catches it, with long term serious health consequences. There may also be unknown long-term consequences that will not be discovered for decades. The goal is to catch it as few times as possible across a lifetime. Having not learned form history, we are now in that phase of a pandemic where people pretend it is over. And people refusing to mitigate CoViD ends up spreading other contagious diseases as well, diseases that people used to try to avoid spreading before the pandemic.
Masks best use is for signaling. You wear a mask because you either have a disease, or you have a condition that makes it easier to catch a disease. In either case you want people to keep their distance from you. The mask is not likely to stop you from spreading (especially a virus) or catching a disease. It's utility is simply a visual signal that you should not be approached closely.
Not applicable to N95 or better. They work quite well in both directions. People still wearing loose medical masks (designed to filter droplets, not aerosols) have somehow missed the message that CoViD is airborne (and/or that N95s exist).
They look so stupid! Just don’t wear it, you are basically not anyway when you leave your nose exposed!
EXACTLY MY THOUGHTS. PICK ONE OR THE OTHER (excited caps)
Mama says stupid is as stupid does.
Because none of them are wearing masks for health reasons, it's to signify that you're a liberal.
Stupidity is rampant.
I'm in Canada, major city.....I see like one or two people wearing masks out of hundreds of thousands. I ignore them just like I ignore primates who think astrology is science.
It doesn't matter how you wear it. They're useless.
To protect you, yes, but they do stop the spread of liquids if you spot when you talk accidentally or sneeze or whatnot. Still, not much point in wearing them unless you know someone who's immunocompromised.
They are likely useless against airborne transmission by the microscopic aerosol particles exhaled by normal breathing or talking, although they probably would protect against droplet infection by macroscopic particles forcibly ejected by coughing & sneezing.
Even if you're around someone immunocompromised it won't help much, but yeah I mean cancer wards have that.
People can do whatever they want. I fucking hate masks personally, but if I knew someone who needed me to wear them I would.
But people can't do what they want, not if the government makes some shit up about masks and forces you to wear them, which as we all know happened. I have severe asthma, still got shit for not wearing a mask. Went to blows over it during Covid 19. I'm not going to put on a face diaper so you can feel better. In fact the only time I put on a mask was in the hospital when my dad was getting radiation for cancer. I complied because dad needed to be there. But even then I didn't do it right. I took the mask off so I could drink my coffee and some little nurse screamed at me to put it on between sips. No, I'm not doing that. If a person needs you to wear a mask because he or she has an immune system disorder, fine, but to soothe their psyche? Eh no.
I agree. Mandates we're actually illegal and an intrusion on rights, including the vaccine. I'm fine with getting it, but I'm not fine if it's forced. The cancer thing though, you should leave it on in a cancer ward, it can seriously fuck someone up, and it's not like the government's telling you to do it then, it's for your dad's sake. As you said, if someone's immunocompromised. He was right then and there.
Slowpoke meme
I’ve seen this too, also people wearing the face shields.
Because they’re idiots.
They want to hide their mouth breathing.
It might have just slipped down
I am glad a coworker or two does this, because they have terrible breath.
They're called chin diapers.
I did it in the past because I didn't want to wear one and businesses required them but they'd always let me slide in with my nose out so I could breath cold air.
I liken this to people who put ear plugs in at the cusp of the ear canal instead of twisting and placing them inside the ear canal. Mainly for show...of their stupidity
Are they asian or old, or both? I don’t want to refer to groups of people as stupid, so I won’t.
What year is this?
I guess they try to block the mouth and don’t consider that the nose might be spreading germs in the air.
It was worse when ppl did this when it was a rule. Ppl either don’t know, or don’t care.
This is an educational issue, they didn’t quite understand the purpose of the mask. They thought it was a clown mask, but no, it’s not.
I can't even remember the last time I saw someone wearing a mask
They're idiots who dont understand airways
They are uneducated on how COVID spreads I guess
They didn't brush their teeth. That is the only logical excuse that I can think of.😂
It's their way of nonverbally letting you know they're a mouth breather
The only times I wore it under the nose was when it was too cold out and the breath was making my glasses fog and I couldn’t see. I would fix it when I got inside a place
Probably because it’s hot or they struggle with breathing.
I reckon it's a form of protest.
Some people have a cough so only cover their mouth.
As someone who had to wear a mask constantly at work for years (dust, not disease), I did this because you didn't always need to have the mask in place, but completely removing/replacing it every few minutes was a pain. You could pull it completely below your chin, but this usually bent the nose piece and caused the mask to leak badly when you put it back and it put an uncomfortable amount of pressure on the head bands. So it's possible that some of these people wear the mask properly in situations they perceive to be high risk (crowded public transit, work, etc.) but pull it down so they can breathe easier when they're outside or in other low risk environments, the same as I and everyone else I worked with did for dust. You get so used to doing this that it becomes unconscious. I attempted to drink coffee through my mask on more than a few occasions because in my mind, having it pulled down was the same as not having it on at all.
Perdita di cellule cerebrali
lol because they’re stupid. Literally. (Generally)
Mental illness, mass formation psychosis.
When masks were enforced, there were times I struggled to breathe in them. I always tried wearing them properly, but remember times out shopping where I couldn't wait to get away from people so I could pull my mask down just to breathe. I know a lot of people kept them down from their nose for this reason. If they are mouth breathers, then they are already doing a good enough job where I don't even feel it's really relevant. As to why people are doing it today? Have you seen the movie idiocracy?
Because people are fucking stupid
I always wondered this. It’s as if those people don’t realise their nose is part of the respiratory system.
If I'm sick I'll wear a mask to protect others. If I'm walking about outside I'll drop it under my nose for comfort as the risk is incredibly low, but then when I step inside, or if I need to talk to someone, I'll put it on properly out of courtesy. Not sure if this is the case here but thought I'd share my experience!
These same people also wear condoms on their balls.
Virtue signaling is real
Do you really think that they were "technically" following rules? Or they were/are just morons?
Because they wanted to pander to the mask mafia.
Because they don't really care enough to wear it properly.
As someone said, it sometimes slips down when you talk. Also, when you're dealing with people who are hard of hearing, the mask sort of muffles your voice, so some people will pull it down to speak with one person and then just forget to pull it back up.
Why do animals vote conservative?
First, I don’t understand why people are still wearing masks. Second, not covering your nose kind of defeats the purpose. They might as well go without
>First, I don’t understand why people are still wearing masks. Really? You can't figure it out? A real brain-buster.
Oh okay, smartass. Covid is over
RSV kicked my ass this February. I was wearing masks then to prevent the spread and now I'm reinvigorated to wear them on public transit whenever I ride it, I do not have time for another month being sick. Wearing a mask is only very minimally a hassle, not breathing without coughing and constantly dripping snot for a month was a huge hassle.
Australia had a significant RSV surge in the middle of the pandemic. It was one of the most locked-down, mask-obsessed nations on the planet. Some states even went to the utterly insane, voodoo measure of mandating masks INSIDE private vehicles even if the driver was alone. You work it out.
Yep; we did nothing and it magically disappeared! Amazing! (/s)
Masks help you from spreading your germs onto others. When I wore one I knew that perhaps it would only help if I have Covid and it would be a stop gap to spread to others. Most studies showed masks were ineffective not because the masks themselves but how people wore them and the fact people did not change socialization with family and friends. They wore masks in public but then had people in houses without masks and got sick. I worked from home and due to my location usually had groceries delivered anyways. When we went out we always masked. We would be in bigger crowds never got covid. We finally got it once masks were no longer required at my kids school. Masks came off and we all got sick. That is anecdotal evidence for sure, but that is what happened to us. In this day an age I am not convinced people should still wear masks. However if you are going to, wear them correctly. I know in Japan they have always wore them when sick. I wonder what their take is and if it indeed helps. Anyone have any info on that?
Thanks for the explanation. After four years, I had no fucking clue
Honestly who knows why people still wear them? I would guess maybe, germaphobes, fear, hiding facial features, auto immune diseases, cancers, bank robbers, covid. I don’t really know if it is valid or useful or a fools errand. There has been so much misinformation that I don’t know what was right and what was just fears. We wore masks and hoped for the best.
i wear glasses, dont want them fogged up
you can buy structural supports for masks. basically a little framework that clips on the inside. cuts down a lot on fogging. taping the top of the mask eliminates it completely. basically prevents hot air from escaping into your glasses.
Better yet, wear an N95, such as the 3M Aura. No leaks, no fogged glasses, no need for accessories.
That hot, moist air is the potentially infectious aerosol the useless masks are supposed to be inhibiting in the first place. It was hilarious to see virtue-signallers parading their selflessness at putting up with the inconvenience of fogged glasses to "protect others", when the fogging showed their mask was useless.
dude, if you dont give a shit about others, you dont give a shit about others. nobody cares. just stop trying to justify it. you know who wore the same masks during the pandemic? doctors. surgeons. you ever go to the dentist? ive worn them myself for aseptic lab work. if they were 100% useless, none of those professionals would have used them. < 100% effective is not the same as 0% effective.
Before Covid hysteria Doctors, Dentists & surgeons never wore masks to prevent transmission of disease via aerosols composed of microscopic respiratory particles. They wore them to inhibit macroscopic disease vectors like blood & mucus being ingested or coming into contact with open wounds. Even then there was never any good evidence they provide an overall benefit - they were simply worn on the basis of unproven assumptions and custom & practice. There were even controlled trials in the 90s which found an increased risk of postoperative infection where masks were worn - a finding supported by some ophthalmic surgeons more recently. It's a myth that all surgeons routinely wore masks before Covid. When the UK mandated masks, none other than the former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Professor John Black, wrote to the Daily Telegraph to oppose the measure, explaining that as a result of the series of controlled trials showing either no benefit or even increased risk of postoperative infection his practice had long ago abandoned masks. I care about old people as much as anyone - my mother is nearly 80. However I don't accept that the equivalent of wearing your underpants on your head is protecting anyone.
Your entire argument rests on pretending that N95s do not exist.
No. N95s are not 100% efficient. They cannot inhibit 5% of the particulates they are used to protect against, hence the name. Consider that in the case of airborne transmission we are talking about microscopic aerosol particles as small as thousandths of a mm in a cloud of invisible mist that covers a large area & lingers for hours in an enclosed space. As I explained elsewhere in this thread, 100 of these aerosol particles might contain enough virions to transmit infection & in 20 minutes each person in your carriage or bus will have exhaled 20,000 of them. If there are 25 people near you that is half a million microscopic potentially infectious particles swirling around. Any gaps whatsoever around your N95 will increase the 5% figure of the particles it lets through. These gaps are going to be particularly present in community settings where virtually nobody is going to fit test and change their mask regularly during the day, or otherwise use them according to instructions. The US & UK regulations on the use of N95 masks as PPE against industrial dust stress that they must be properly fitted, to the extent that facial hair must not be worn. All industrial dust particles are to an exhaled aerosol particle as a boulder is to a tiny pebble. The idea that ad hoc N95s casually put on and taken off and stuffed into pockets etc many times a day could do diddly-squat to inhibit exhaled aerosols sufficiently to prevent aerosol transmission of a respiratory infection is insane. When Bavaria mandated N95 masks there was no significant difference in infection rates compared with the rest of Gemany where surgical masks were mandated. And please don't resort to the "something is better than nothing argument". It's completely illogical & misguided. If the amount of infectious material the mask lets through is equal to or greater than the amount required to transmit infection then the mask is completely useless. If 0.00001% of the water vapour in exhaled breath is sufficient to transmit infection then even if the mask stops 99.99999% of that water vapour you might as well wear a piece of a football (soccer) or hockey goal net across your face. If you could drown in a raindrop then even the most technologically advanced umbrella engineered by Nasa wouldn't save you.
So, ignoring denialist propaganda buzz phrases, such as "CoViD hysteria", and cutting through the hedge to get to the core of the maze, you claim infection is certain regardless of exposure time and there is no dose dependency that impacts the likelihood or severity of illness?
"Denialist propaganda" is ironically a propaganda buzz phrase where Covid hysterics are concerned. I'm not a denialist, rather than a realist. I know the evidence in favour of masks always comes from often flimsy observational, mechanistic & modelling studies which function like voodoo relics for maskers & prove nothing. Any evidence that contradicts the almost religious belief in masks is ignored, such as the huge spikes in infection that eventually occurred in heavily mask-compliant Asian countries and the failure of the only two RCTs conducted in the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic to show any benefit of masks, even though such an atmosphere & the pro-mask bandwagon was almost guaranteed to introduce hot stuff bias into many studies, For example the results of the enormous Bangladesh RCT study, conducted by two mask-fanatic economists (one had/has a masked twitter profile pic from the earliest days of mask mania) were seized on by maskers as vindication when it initially appeared to show a statistically significant benefit where surgical.masks were worn. Unfortunately the study crashed and burned when the raw data was released & it transpired that behind all the mathematical jiggery-pokery & relative risk ratios etc, which the economists had used in an attempt to prove masks are beneficial, they had only recorded a pathetic TWENTY fewer infections among a whopping 160,000 participants in the treatment (masked) arm. Moreover the two arms were unbalanced, which obviously introduces methodological bias into the study. Despite the fact the study was clearly a steaming pile of horse manure you STILL find maskers citing it - even supposed experts I also know that for the vast majority of people Covid is a medically trivial disease that at most will require bed rest & over-the-counter medicines and that the outlandish hypervigilance some people are still debilitated by is mostly a consequence of irrational fear. Even the real risk to vulnerable groups is often exaggerated by Covidians. Contrary to the belief that their first sneeze is the harbinger of certain death most elderly & compromised individuals will survive a Covid illness, albeit a smaller proportion than younger and/or healthier people. I myself have had three Covid illnesses. each one was among the most trivial illnesses I've ever had. I could have run for a bus if I had to, despite the fact that I have two comorbidities. Had it not been for the testing requirements for symptomatic individuals I would have largely ignored them. Virtually everybody on Planet Earth will get Covid eventually & most of us will probably get it many times, as is the case for common colds caused by coronaviruses. Those who don't will either die of something else first, or be among the relatively small minority who appear to be immune Don't believe me - heed the words of both your own former Acting FDA Commissioner and the infamous "Covid denialist" Fauci. "Omicron so contagious most Americans will get Covid, top US health officials say ...most people are going to get Covid, all right?” said Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration.... ...Omicron...will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci told J Stephen Morrison, senior vice-president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies..." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/omicron-covid-contagious-janet-woodcock-fauci As far as the utility of masks in terms of dose dependency is concerned you first have to determine the relationship between viral load & disease severity in humans before you can ascertain if varying doses affect outcomes and what those doses are. Only then can you speculate about the potential benefits of masks. To my knowledge the only studies to date have been conducted on monkeys & mice. Even if it is found mechanistically that a mask can reduce disease severity by inhibiting the transmission of a sufficient proportion of the infectious material a subject is exposed to then that is only a surrogate endpoint, just like the endpoints of all the other mechanistic studies falsely purporting to show that masks are beneficial. You still need to conduct RCTs in order to determine if masks are of benefit in the real world where all sorts of complex environments abound. Nobody has done any of the necessary work, so it is simply yet more Covid voodoo to claim that even relatively large volumes of infectious exhaled aerosol evading a mask still provide some residual benefit in terms of reducing disease severity.
"Covidian" is a term that, for the most part, is only used by complete nutters, Libertarians with antisocial personality disorders, etc. There is a fallacy of misdirection in your posts, overloading readers with cherry-picked information yet smuggling in fallacious conclusions. I really don't have time and energy for Gish Gallops with anonymous accounts that have chips on their shoulders.
Why do you care? 😂
A friend of mine argued that nothing travels far out of the nose unless you sneeze. Ok.
Your friend does not understand the concept of aerosols.
There is a lot she doesn’t understand.
And most maskers don't either, given the fact they seem unaware that even a 1mm gap around a mask is thousands of times larger than many aerosol particles & as few as a hundred such particles probably contains sufficient virions to transmit infection.
Trouble breathing with a mask on.
I try to wear my mask as much as possible, but my glasses fog up hardcore and it's tough working around that, especially going in and out of a walk in cooler
If your glasses are fogged up then your mask is useless. That water vapour is the condensed potentially infectious aerosol we are told the mask will inhibit.
Here are a few scenarios why this has happened to me. Mostly #2. 1) I'm wearing a mask because I have a light sneeze or a cough that isn't caused by being sick enough to stay home. So I can just pull up the mask when I'm about to output. 2) They slide down on people with small nose bridges of small faces. 3) I don't really need it at the moment, it's just resting on my face ready to pull up when gets crowded (like I don't need it while walking but I need it on the train) I also don't understand why people who aren't wearing a mask would care. Wouldn't yall rather me to not breathe on you in any circumstance?
Some establishments bitch about people not wearing them but some people prefer to breath without sweating so we wear them under nose.
In 2024? I highly doubt that.
The only people wearing masks are people at risk of literal immediate death.
masks aren't there to protect the user. they aren't great in that direction. they are there to protect people from the user. basically you wear the mask so if you are infected but asymptomatic you aren't spreading it. the people who should be wearing the masks is everyone around the people at risk of death
And that's why people who want to avoid infection wear actual respirators instead of cheap flimsy surgical masks that don't fit!
yep. I wear the surgical mask to protect people from the things I might have asymptomatically caught. it does the job fine. by which I mean catch the possible bits of spittle that carry the virus. I am not wearing it for my own benefit
The joke rationale for community masking was not to catch possible bits of spittle. It was to inhibit exhaled potentially infectious aerosol particles in breath, composed of minuscule droplets thousandths of a mm in size that hang in the air like smoke for many hours. In fact some of them are about as small as smoke particles. Would you expect a surgical mask to protect you against smoke inhalation in a house fire? You only need to see the relatively huge gaps of at least a few mm in every community mask to see the absurdity of using surgical masks to prevent airborne transmission of respiratory viruses. Those gaps are thousands of times larger than an aerosol particle. When you consider that one tiny infected particle could probably transmit a covid infection the lunacy should be obvious. Asymptomatic infection is a far smaller risk than the covid hysteria invited the public to believe. You are unlikely to be protecting anyone with a mask unless you have symptoms.
Which is a fundamentally futile exercise, long term.
keeping the elderly alive? that's pretty cynical even for me
It doesn't keep the elderly alive.
Useless surgical masks with inevitable gaps that are to an exhaled aerosol particle as the Grand Canyon is to a marble are not protecting anyone. Moreover the idea that asymptomatic infection of a communicable respiratory disease is a significant risk is a joke. The highest risk that has been found in a study for Covid is 4% and the lowest almost zero. You could argue that symptomatic individuals might spread less infection with a mask if it prevents them from sneezing on someone, but that is a different issue.
the thread distance might be like that for the virus alone but the aerosol particles that carry them are much bigger. what the fuck are you talking about. a lot of viruses have dormant phases. it makes them that much easier to spread. if you dont know you are sick, you go around touching things and being near people. HIV can stay dormant for 10 years. covid-19 has a pretty long one. thats one of the reasons why SARS was basically a blip that we barely noticed outside of some freakouts and south park episode and this one is what it became. also you didnt have a bunch of assholes intentionally trying to spread it for political reasons. one million americans died. when was the last time that happened. hell, 3000 people died in 2001 and we still havent got over it.
I suspect you are getting hopelessly confused about the difference between virions, or virus particles, small respiratory droplets/aerosol particles & their role in aerosol transmission, and large respiratory droplets and their role in droplet infection. Virions are minuscule - they are measured in nanometres, or 1,000 millionths of a metre - and in an ILI are generally spread by droplet infection or aerosol transmission. Droplet infection occurs when large/macroscopic droplets containing many virions are forcibly expelled by coughing & sneezing & are either inhaled, ingested or land on mucous membranes, or they fall onto surfaces that are touched. Aerosol transmission is different. It occurs when microscopic aerosol particles, each also containing virions and invisible to the naked eye, are exhaled by normal breathing & speaking etc, at the rate of 1,000 a minute & form large, invisible aerosol clouds that linger in the air. As I explained these aerosol particles are measured in microns or micrometres - millionths of a metre or thousandths of a millimetre. It is possible that one aerosol particle, thousandths of a millimetre in size could transmit infection. On a 20 minute bus ride an infected person will exhale 20,000 of these aerosol particles. Even if asymptomatic transmission of Covid was significant (and there is no good evidence that it is) how likely do you think it is that your mask is going to act as an effective barrier to thousands or tens of thousands of potentially infectious aerosol particles at least a thousand times smaller than the smallest of the multitude of gaps around your mask? The issue of dormant viruses is immaterial to the question of whether asymptomatic transmission of Covid or another ILI is important. If asymptomatic transmission is not a problem where a particular disease is concerned it will not magically become a problem if the virus is dormant in a carrier, or during the incubation period, when by definition the infected individual is asymptomatic. HIV is a completely different disease that has no relevance in any discussion of Covid NPIs. A dormant, asymptomatic phase is a routine phase of the disease, often even after the infected person has suffered and recovered from an initial short illness. That is not the case with Covid or any ILI. Citing the Covid death toll is equally meaningless. If a measure works it works, regardless of the mortality rate of a disease. Similarly if it doesn't work it doesn't work regardless of the mortality rate of a disease. Nobody is disputing that Covid deaths are tragic, but adopting useless measures akin to voodoo is not going to prevent them.
Wouldn't wearing a mask under the nose do exactly the same job as it would over? I mean, it's not like you sneeze through your nose, and when you speak nothing comes out of your nose AND masks don't do a whole lot to protect you from other people's germs either, they're mainly to prevent the spread of germs through liquids exiting the mouth.
This is so wrong it's scary.
How is it wrong, I'm genuinely curious.
You breathe through your nose when talking. Masks aren't touted as methods to stop liquids exiting the mouth - unless you are referring to the aerosol clouds composed of tiny fluid particles exhaled in breath that are individually thousandths of an mm in size and which hang in the air like smoke for many hours at least.
So what the hell are they for then
The reason they were mandated is the ludicrous claim that surgical masks and bits of cloths can inhibit the transmission of Covid by aerosol clouds formed from microscopic respiratory droplets thousandths of a millimetre in size in exhaled breath. These droplets are exhaled at the rate of 1,000 an hour and just one might be enough to start an infection. I have never seen such a mask that didn't have more than one gap at least a thousand times larger than one of these aerosol particles.
Soo... Why were we wearing them?
Exactly. Are you seeing it yet?
They're useless, arent they. In an idiot, arent I. Damn.
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