What's a good metric for when to stop masking?

The Quarantine Zone
101

For social reasons I haven’t masked for about a year and a half. Or done any social distancing in same time. Yes, I find it suboptimal. That’s a year and a half of our lives. Attendance at my church went up significantly post mask. Many people find it decreases their enjoyment of life. Just had a class reunion, wouldn’t have even gone if masked, why bother.

Leaper seems to operate under some “single drop” metric of Covid, where since we won’t ever stomp it out, we need to wear masks forever regardless of any other metrics. I couldn’t disagree more. For most people, mask mandates and social distancing have a life and psychological cost to them. There’s also the political cost in implementing them. I’d rather save that for something more impactful like climate change than the rapidly receding issue of Covid. Time has done a lot more to take away Covid than masks ever could.

102

And your last point there is the big, big problem. You would either have to be clear on when it would end or be prepared to use your tyrant powers.

Saying to people, right now, “you will keep doing this potentially forever” is not a viable strategy. You’d have to make them with force of law and doing so now would ultimately harm your chances of getting public buy-in to voluntary mask wearing in some potential future scenario where mask utility may be far more important.

103

Regarding the original question, my state tests everybody who comes into the emergency room and reports that stat as a percentage. Seems like a pretty good randomish sample, currently at 0.71%. Not as good a sample as the wastewater, but much easier to understand.

So, a bit under 1% of the people you randomly meet will have it. Is that enough to mask? The proper threshold will depend on how vulnerable you are, I certainly don’t know a way to pick a number.

104

Are people who come into the emergency room more likely to have covid than people who don’t? and if so, by how much?

105

My gut level guess is that maybe slightly more likely than those who don’t (people going to the emergency room because they are having trouble breathing for example). But it wouldn’t be a large effect so probably close to a random sample of the population.

106

At a societal level I care more about hospitalizations than raw case counts. Clearly the impact of Covid on the overall population has not remained the same since February 2020. So I wouldn’t use some flat metric of cases. The less it’s impacting the population and hospitalizations, the less I care.

107

I like wearing a mask outdoors when it’s cold. I never liked face masks as a kid, because they cuddled up against my nose and got gross. But the modern kf94 and n95 masks I’ve been buying don’t do that. They stay off my nose and lips. And breathing warm moist air is a lot nicer than breathing cold dry air.

I don’t like wearing a mask when it’s hot, and they get waterlogged when it’s raining. But if it’s not too hot out, and not actively precipitating, i put on my mask when i leave the car and wear it outdoors if i intend to wear it when i get someplace.

108

I’m one of them, but I masked while things were bad and didn’t relax until I was fully inoculated.

I’m a woodworker and have been bad about wearing dustmasks even. COVID actually made be better at this part at least.

109

I’ve been to lots of big social events wearing a mask. Some of them had mask mandates, some had lots of people who chose to wear masks, and some i was the weird masked outlier. I go to a class reunion to hang out with people, catch up with them, etc. Mask, no mask, barely matters except for stuff with food. And I’m not at a reunion for the food.

I observe that many people feel the way you do, but i honestly don’t get it.

110

Even though I discarded mask wearing once mandates went away, I wouldn’t say that masking bothered me personally that much.

But I work from home. I really didn’t have to mask for an entire work day ever. Unlike my kids. After a too long period of remote school, they then had to mask in school for the whole school day.

The burdens of masking were and are massively unequal.

111

I’m a bit hearing impaired and wear hearing aids. Most people most time I can hear adequately unless it’s a real noisy environment.

Someone wearing a mask is nearly unintelligible. I don’t know whether they breath more lightly, talk more quietly, or somehow the mask makes them fail to move their jaws and enunciate, but the difference is huge. it’s not a matter of me watching their face becasue I don’t really do that. Back when the large plexiglas shields separateing the e.g. cashier from teh public were common those about doubled the problem. The worker was simply inaudible above the noise in my head and the noise of the HVAC, and crowd bustle in teh store, the muzak, etc.

Doubtless PROJECTING A COMMAND VOICE all day to get through your mask, your plexi-shield, and into the ears of your customers would get real old.

I wore one when I had to, which was all day every day at work for several months. And indoors everywhere also for several months, while avoiding indoorsness as much as work and life permitted.

But anyone thinking the world will wear masks indefinitely for general public health is nuts. Next time we have a killer pandemic, sure. I bet most folks will do what they need to do when it becomes necessary. COVID now? No chance.

112

I work from home, too. But i recently went to a square dance convention that required masks in the dance hall. I basically wore a mask all day, including the evening, with breaks for meals. And i was exercising. I swapped out masks that got too wet.

I basically stop noticing after a while.

(I have invested in good, breathable masks.)

113

Same here. And no one can understand me either. :frowning:

In addition, I’m one of those who find wearing a mask a real burden. I don’t mind for a short trip to the grocery store, but anything more than that is very unpleasant. Like most of us, I wore one without complaint when required or advised. But I’m with LSLGuy on this:

114

I basically agree with this. Hospitalizations measure the social impact much more actually and appropriately than case counts. Who cares if a kid is home a day from school? (That’s actually a large cost, but it’s one we bear for lots of other stuff ) That being said, hospitalizations is a trailing indicator, and i feel like public health decisions will be better if they rely on wastewater numbers to project hospitalizations.

Either way, i don’t see a case for public mask mandates at the moment. Maybe for a month or two during the winter peak, or maybe not, depending on how bad the winter peak is.

115

Do you wear glasses?

I find it hard to keep a mask perfectly in place while active; and if it shifts at all, in cold weather my glasses fog so I can’t see anything. Bear in mind that “active” doesn’t just mean walking or jogging; I’m lifting things, putting them down, using various tools with various motions, bending in various directions, climbing on and off things, for some purposes getting down on the ground and back up again.

My hair doesn’t stay in place, either; and of course that affects the mask position also. (Ear loops drive me crazy; my glasses already stress the back of my ears, they don’t need strings pulling at the skin also. I use the kind with the straps behind the head; when I couldn’t get those, I made such a strap by tying earloops together with a long twistie.)

For me, also if it’s hot; because I’m sweating both inside the mask, and on my face above the mask so that sweat runs down onto it.

Ditto. I figured the mask might be bad to awful but a hospital respirator would be a lot worse.

And most of the time I’m working alone at home. So the longest I had to be in one at a stretch was a market day; and the market’s outside. Even at the height, when we had a slow spell and nobody was within ten feet or considerably more, I’d pull the mask off for a bit and get a breather.

But the chances of winding up intubated by going without a mask have gone way down. (As have the chances of inflicting that on somebody else.)

But if a high percentage of people are now having milder cases which don’t need hospitalization, then such projections would need adjustment for that factor.

And I agree – the issue is mostly people who get severely sick; and those who get long covid badly enough to not be able to return to most normal activities within a couple of weeks. People get mildly sick all the time from all sorts of causes; unless we’re going to drastically reduce both population numbers and frequency of travel, or make people live in near-isolation all of their lives (and reduce frequency of travel), there probably isn’t all that much we can do about that.

116

Yes, I wear glasses. In fact, I wear glass glasses, which are more prone to fogging up than plastic glasses. I’ve also worn masks for many years, and I think there’s an element of learning how to wear them. I’ve also invested in high quality masks that fit my face well. It makes a big difference. For short-term wear, especially if I want to be able to remove the mask easily, I wear “boat style” KF94 masks I purchased from behealthyusa, which imports them from Korea. I tried a few models to select some that fit my face well. Note that this style isn’t great for people with beards, but I don’t have a beard. The ones I use are adjustable, and can be fitted very snugly. For long-term wear, I use 3M “Aura” n95 respirators. It’s a similar style, but it has foam at the nose to give it a snugger fit, and it has straps running behind my head, so my ears don’t get tired. I have used both the 9205 and the 9210 models, which mostly differ in the material of the head strap. 9210 is better, but maybe not enough better to make up for the higher cost.

Both provide good breathability and very little leakage up from my nose.

I’m an actuary. I make projections for a living. ALL projections need to be adjusted over time for changing circumstances.

117

I couldn’t and can’t afford to keep buying more and more masks in an attempt to get something that fits and stays fitted while I’m active. I did eventually, towards the end of common masking, trip over an N95 that fit better than anything I’d tried before; they were being given away, for a while, by a local pharmacy. When the pharmacy ran out of their stock I was able to identify the model and get more of them.

But I still feel like I can’t get any fresh air; and they still stay in place best when I’m not doing anything very active.

– at one point a relative gave me a very expensive mask that he said was an extremely good fit. Very likely it was on him; but it fit me quite poorly. You really can’t go by anybody else’s recommendations for fit; you have to just buy samples and try them; a process which can get expensive.

118

Yes.

Covid killed my aunt, but it brutally destroyed my uncle and my mother. I’m frightened of it, and i can afford to buy a lot of masks to get ones i like.

119

…you can do two things at the same time, you know. And the thing is: nobody is taking climate change seriously anyway. So it’s not as if “stopping caring about one” has mean that we are suddenly caring about the other. We’ve just stopped caring about two things.

at a societal level in the United States, you’ve stopped properly reporting both. Its optional for hospitals to report

And what little data there is now is being reported weekly, which doesn’t do a lot for surveillance purposes.

in New Zealand, with a population of 5.1 million, reported 4 covid deaths yesterday attributed to covid. 31 deaths last week.

Do you know how many covid attributable deaths there were in the United States (population 331 million) yesterday?

Seven.

1 death in Massachusetts. 2 in Delaware. 3 in Puerto Rico. And one reported by veteran affairs.

Nobody in New York. Nobody in Arizona. Nobody in Texas. Nobody in California.

You are flying blind.

Puerto Rico, bless them, seem to still be recording and reporting covid properly. They reported over 900 cases yesterday, the most in the US. Out of those that reported. Puerto Rico have 25,000 active cases, the second-largest number in the country, with California being first with just shy of 30,000. This isn’t, of course, reflective of the actual number of active cases. Just of those that report.

If take our numbers here in NZ and extrapolate them, or even the numbers from Puerto Rico, I would estimate that the actual deaths in the US would be at least 1000 per week. But here in NZ we are still masking in hospitals, we have a high rate of vaccination, free testing and free rapid tests, and still require people to isolate for seven days if they test positive. So I suspect that the true number of deaths each week in America could be double my estimate.

But there isn’t anyway we will know for sure any more. You could get a surge in hospitalizations, a surge in cases, a surge in deaths, and nobody would ever know. Wastewater is really the only neutral metric the US has now. And since the start of July, that has started to trend upwards.

So I really think we should stop pretending that we actually know how Covid is impacting the population and hospitalizations, especially in places like the US.

Because there is no longer are any good metrics. Its all based on vibes. Everybody has to decide for themselves not based on hospitalizations, or cases, or deaths, because that data literally doesn’t exist any more.

So if Leaper wants to operate under some “single drop” metric of Covid…then just let them do that. Its no skin off your nose. It isn’t going to hurt you.

But it might just keep Leaper safe. It might stop Leaper from getting sick…from dying.

You’ve won the battle. At the societal level? Covid is “over”. People have to determine their own level of risk they are willing to tolerate, and the very least you can do is just let them do that without berating them.

120

In the past two months I’ve seen a grand total of 3 people wearing masks. Either New Hampshire is some remarkable bastion where nearly no one is immunocompromised, which seems unlikely, or the immunocompromised have also almost universally given up masks here too.