Gaiters I have seen are an open weave, such that they seem to me to be more for theater than effectiveness. I wear one because my employer says I must wear a mask when onsite, not because I feel I need to wear one. Once the mask requirements are gone, I’ll be back to just a beard net. Food safety rules and all that.
Yes, I’ve also seen masks with too-open weave, but I find masks that are better than that.
I’d guess that even your gaiter still has some effectiveness - more so than not wearing anything.
You say you don’t feel a need to wear one, but you do because it’s an employer rule. Are you positive you’ll never be an asymptomatic carrier? How? Have you scored a vaccine? I’m pretty sure I’m not a spreader, but I have a 74-year-old boss to worry about infecting, so I don’t mind wearing a mask if we’re both onsite (normally I only go in if I’m the only one onsite).
Don’t really care if I am or not. I do not associate closely or repeatedly with anyone in any of the higher risk categories. I so far have been exposed a few times by my dad, my wife, and several co-workers. My last antibody test showed negative. Not that I feel immune but I think the risk is overstated.
I have declined it. I am not positive on the long term effects since the current vaccines development methods have no track record. When the Novavax and Sanofi vaccines clear the regulatory and testing hurdles I will reconsider my stand as I feel more confident in their methods.
We don’t know yet whether even being fully vaccinated prevents one from being or becoming an asymptomatic carrier.
But you may give it to someone who does so associate.
520,000 and counting people would disagree with you, if they could.
This.
Police say an explosion at a Dutch Covid test center was deliberate.
Well, in fairness, people struggling to breathe don’t state much, dead people even less.
Gaiters were stated to be of limited to no effectiveness when they checked different types of masks. They’re just too thin and too open weave. Remember, a proper cloth mask must have at least three layers.
That was one particular gaiter in one test, not to be extrapolated to all gaiters. Or did you think every gaiter is made out of the same material and thickness? You realize they’re all different, right?
I remember one experiment, which was not meant to establish mask effectiveness, but rather, was a proof of concept for a method of testing mask effectiveness, which was widely reported as saying neck gaiters were worse than no mask at all, speculating that they might break up larger droplets into more smaller ones. (I’m pretty sure I posted about it when it came out, too.)
Have you seen anything other than that?
Here’s a quote from an article following up on that proof of concept experiment and how it was reported. Some actual research on neck gaiters has been conducted.
https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/08/neck-gaiters
Yes, it was. The whole point was to test the various types of masks, to see which kind were the best. Gaiters in general scored poorly. You seemed to be unaware of this fact.
Plus, we know that the gaiter being discussed is one where his beard hairs poke through. It should be pretty obvious that anything with holes big enough for human hairs to go through would not protect anyone.
If, since that report, there have been gaiters that were made of cotton and 3 ply thick, then maybe those are good. But the usual gaiter is one that you can still sorta see through, and is only one layer, and is some stretchy material.
Yes, it is now possible to buy multi-layer gaiters with built in filtering. The gaiters available at the start of the pandemic weren’t really designed to do much more than filter dust.
You do realize there are risks beyond death, including permanent disability. COVID-19 isn’t just a bad cold; it’s a disease that causes inflammation of the brain and it can absolutely wreck vessels – perhaps permanently. Try holding down a job when you can’t remember shit you said five minutes ago and can’t walk five minutes without needing to lay on a couch. Try living with yourself knowing you were an asymptomatic carrier that inflicted such damage upon others.
Vaccines should not be viewed as long-term protection at this time; they’re a short-term layer of protection - a very important one - that can reduce the spread and hospitalizations, giving us more time to come up with better vaccines and more research to better protect ourselves.
This is also very much true.
I agree. The authors even admitted that their method was not very quantitative. They counted particles visualized by shining a laser on droplets coming out of someone’s mouth. It was more to demonstrate a method people could do at home.
Yes, this can occur in a minority of people. But statistically, this isn’t something the majority of people need to worry about.
A majority is slightly more than 50%; what kind of majority we talking about here? We know from the data that a majority of patients aren’t hospitalized but anywhere from 70-90% (somewhere in that range) who do end up being admitted have persistent noticeable symptoms more than six months after discharge. That’s a lot of people who don’t necessarily die but have major problems afterward.
Cite?
I’ll try to dig up the cite, but IIRC I’ve seen a study finding something like 98% of people report no symptoms after a few months. Anecdotally, given that something like 20%-30% of the US population has likely been infected with COVID wouldn’t we see lot more cases of impaired people walking around if a huge number of people were being severely adversely affected?
I suspect that, like COVID mortality, the non-lethal effects of the disease are extremely different based on age. The rate of hospitalization and death grows exponentially with age. I don’t doubt that when looking at the population of people likely to be hospitalized with COVID, a high percentage of them are also likely to suffer lasting symptoms. At the same time, it can also be true that the overwhelming majority (much closer to 100% than 50%) of younger people are not statistically likely to suffer long term effects.
We probably shouldn’t hijack the breaking news thread here…
Here’s one cite; the research is ongoing.
Here’s one article for non-hospitalized patients.
Again, the research is ongoing. Obviously we’re not talking half of patients being wheelchair bound or coming down with dementia, but there are enough people with serious long-term symptoms to take this illness very seriously. You could end up with impacts that are well-short of death but leaving you with some form of long-term impairment.