Info Value of Masks and other factors to lower Covid-19 Risk while Traveling

[Boarderguy]

Look it the other way: saving on medical care and may be a life or two.
The recent huge surge in infection in HK caused a enormous strain to our health system. I have never seen hospitals in HK have to put patients on open air in the beginning of the outbreak.
Anything to reduce the risk of infection is worthwhile.

Didn't the recent HK surge come as lockdown restrictions were eased? It wasn't a matter of ventilation, rather it was the masses now being exposed at once rather than a slow crawl through it.

 

[Centrals]

Didn't the recent HK surge come as lockdown restrictions were eased? It wasn't a matter of ventilation, rather it was the masses now being exposed at once rather than a slow crawl through it.

We have one of the toughest restriction before the recent outbreak. The stupid hksar gov thought they have done a good job but lo and behold they were wrong. BIG TIME. Over 75,000 cases on 03 Mar.
We are living in pretty crowded place and ventilation/air circulation even in open space can be pretty bad.
The restriction was eased slightly because the infected has dropped significantly.

Hong Kong: FEHD Implements Mandatory Air Ventilation Regulations at Dine-In Restaurants - Sea Point

Hong Kong – 31 March 2021| Hong Kong: Restaurant air ventilation rate must achieve 6 times per hour circulation to fulfill mandatory FEHD regulation as of May 1, 2021 or include a certified HEPA filter or UV-C disinfection device. Sea Point can help to ensure your restaurant is equipped with an...

www.seapointcorp.com

Only applied to restaurants and bars. How about shopping mall, shop etc etc.

 

[Boarderguy]

We have one of the toughest restriction before the recent outbreak. The stupid hksar gov thought they have done a good job but lo and behold they were wrong. BIG TIME. Over 75,000 cases on 03 Mar.
We are living in pretty crowded place and ventilation/air circulation even in open space can be pretty bad.
The restriction was eased slightly because the infected has dropped significantly.

Hong Kong: FEHD Implements Mandatory Air Ventilation Regulations at Dine-In Restaurants - Sea Point

Hong Kong – 31 March 2021| Hong Kong: Restaurant air ventilation rate must achieve 6 times per hour circulation to fulfill mandatory FEHD regulation as of May 1, 2021 or include a certified HEPA filter or UV-C disinfection device. Sea Point can help to ensure your restaurant is equipped with an...

www.seapointcorp.com

Only applied to restaurants and bars. How about shopping mall, shop etc etc.

Unfortunately that is the reality of communist rule. Add onto that one of the highest population densities in the world and it is just waiting for something bad to happen. Better ventilation would be great, better airborne pollution control would be best.

 

[tursiops]

No I am not, forecasting is made with mathematical models, this is step one created transmission rate risk which they then use with more modeling of behavior to create forecasts. So far the forecasts created off of the models haven't lived up to reality. Is it because of the infection rate data is incorrect or is it because of the behavior data? We don't know, so personally I trust most of the COVID models about as far as I can throw them, until I see forecasts that match up with reality.

And I am sure that if this were any other subject, like say if I come up with a new decompression model you would be saying the same thing.

Now I have other questions that are probably answered by digging through the studies that they used to build the model, like what type of masks, how they define well ventilated, etc. Which also changes about how well it can get applied to the context you bring it up in travel.

Personally I don't have any answers, but I think that unless there is an extreme risk we should default toward letting people make their own risk assessments, and government should stick to their normal rule making methods. The time for knee jerk emergency rules is over.

This still conflates modeling with forecasting. Not all forecasts are done with models, and not all models are used for forecasting. Think of the paper linked in the OP as being a curve fitted to data. Does that help?

You should like the OP and the paper and its conclusions; it says that masks are not the most important thing.

If your new decompression model fits the data, and is based on any physiology/physics at all, I'll not denigrate it. If you say however it is based on nothing more than supposition and hope, then I'll say show me that it fits the data.

 

[Bert van den Berg]

I see colored boxes. Read the report and it is based on a mathematical model, not actual data.

Seems obvious that you are less likely to get infected by an airborne virus if outside in a well ventilated space not near anyone else. It also makes sense that you are more likely to get infected inside a small room packed with other people.

This does not mean that a mask is going to help you.

 

[tursiops]

I see colored boxes. Read the report and it is based on a mathematical model, not actual data.

Read the links in the report. The colored boxes I showed were simplified (by another publication) to help you understand the results. Apparently, it did not help. The model is based on actual data...think of it as curve fitting.

Seems obvious that you are less likely to get infected by an airborne virus if outside in a well ventilated space not near anyone else. It also makes sense that you are more likely to get infected inside a small room packed with other people.

So why do you find the paper's results so disrupting? All it does is try to quantify the changing risk in each of those situations.

This does not mean that a mask is going to help you.

A more complicated set of colored boxes is at Greenhalgh et al: Rules for mitigating transmission.docx. There you see that the risk of infection is decreased by a factor or 3 to 8 if you wear a mask, depending on the other parameters, like indoors/outdoors, etc.

 

[Boarderguy]

Or just live your life and treat it like the flu. If you need to be more cautious because of personal extenuating circumstances then that is your decision to make. We can't keep all bad and scary things locked away in a closet hoping they'll go away in time. Living in fear of something you have 0 control over is a terrible way to exist. Wear a mask if you like or don't. Get the shot or don't (I'm personally waiting on long term data to be presented for its safety). Get covid just like my generation did with chicken pox and get on with your life (I've recently had covid and it was a joke). My point is that we as a society need to make our own personal risk assessment and move forward. I hope if/when you get covid that it is mild at best. Live and let live.

 

[tursiops]

Or just live your life and treat it like the flu. If you need to be more cautious because of personal extenuating circumstances then that is your decision to make. We can't keep all bad and scary things locked away in a closet hoping they'll go away in time. Living in fear of something you have 0 control over is a terrible way to exist. Wear a mask if you like or don't. Get the shot or don't (I'm personally waiting on long term data to be presented for its safety). Get covid just like my generation did with chicken pox and get on with your life (I've recently had covid and it was a joke). My point is that we as a society need to make our own personal risk assessment and move forward. I hope if/when you get covid that it is mild at best. Live and let live.

Thanks for the input. The purpose of presenting the risk assessments is so someone can make an informed judgement about how to behave.
An uninformed judgment works too, and it is easier.

 

[Jcp2]

It’s of note that the areas of my body my choice with regards to masks tend to take the opposite view when my body my choice is extended into women’s health.

 

[drrich2]

tend to take the opposite view when my body my choice is extended into women’s health.

That's usually about the abortion debate, which gets into the thorny issue of when human life begins, what's a human being, what civil rights it has (if any) when, how those (if any) are weighed against the woman's liberty, and what duties (if any) someone has to provide temporarily for a person (if one thinks it such) in a dependent position as a result of actions by the woman and her partner (which can then shift into discussions of whether and how claims of rape and incest change the ethical/moral situation). People don't share value systems (e.g.: belief in a soul, morality ordained by God vs. a social construct of human society), so eventually coming to a mutually agreeable conclusion borders on impossible. It seems permanent culture war on the basis of mutually exclusive worldviews is the inevitable result.

Earlier in the pandemic, there was an analogous comparison in that one person's 'choice' to not wear a mask was seen as putting the lives and health of others at risk. Vaccines and prior infection have changed that assessment a lot (though not 100%).