Have you looked into risks improper mask wearing poses? Things like moist dirty masks and associated increased chance of bacterial infections and aggravation of acne. Children wearing masks in school are especially at risk of wearing masks improperly.
Those don’t seem to be worth worrying about, so far as I can tell. It seems like they are rare (or maybe nonexistent) (insofar as I haven’t heard of any such issues through friends or family or the news), and they also sound like not that big a deal even if they do happen. You can tell me if I’m missing something.
Rare compared to what? I haven’t seen actual studies but my anecdotal observations show about one person in ten wearing visibly moist and soiled mask. This maybe area dependent, so your observations may be different, and they are what matters. But kids are generally not as fastidious as adults. The main worry for young kids is how much more likely is the bacterial throat infection if the mask they are wearing is dirty. Here is a relevant article (https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-a-sore-throat-from-wearing-a-dirty-mask/)
Acne aggravation from mask wearing is well-documented, but your kids are too young for that problem.
Sorry, I meant “negative consequences of mask-wearing are rare”, not “wearing moist and soiled masks is rare”. I’ve worn moist and soiled masks from time to time, and nothing bad has happened to me so far, except perhaps looking a bit unprofessional :-)
And I meant “rare compared to 100%”. Like, if even 1% of mask-wearers got a throat bacterial infection, that would be millions of throat bacterial infections in my country, 50,000 in my state, hundreds in my town, and probably at least one or two among my friends and family and acquaintances. So if that’s actually a thing that’s happening at a 1% rate, I think I would have heard something about it by now. Unless those infections were really not a big deal, such that they don’t rise to the level of even being worth mentioning to your friends.
(How many people do you personally know who have gotten a bacterial throat infection from mask wearing? How bad was it? Were they hospitalized? How many days of work did they miss?)
So I figure that bacterial throat infections from mask wearing is either <<1% likely to happen, or it’s really not a big deal when it does happen, or (most likely) both.
But it is a bigger deal for children. Children can get complications from throat infections.
You were looking at problems with one in ten thousand odds, but you don’t have ten thousand acquaintances of acquaintances, so it is unlikely that you would get second hand reports of problems with these odds.
You have even less acquaintances with children, perhaps no more than a few hundred, so even problems with odds of one in a thousand are unlikely to reach you via second hand reports.
What are the complications? Death? Weeks in the hospital? Lifelong complications?
I suspect that if there was even 1-in-100,000 chance of that kind of consequence from regularly wearing masks, I would have heard about it by now. But if you have a reference to actual incidents (not just speculation that it’s possible, but actual people who had these kinds of very very serious problems), I’d be interested to see that.
I want to consider possible impacts of my decisions that are either (1) common, (2) rare but catastrophic. MIS-C is not super catastrophic, but it’s fatal if you’re not promptly hospitalized, and occasionally fatal even if you are, if I understand correctly. So it enters into consideration, despite being rare. And even so I wound up declaring that MIS-C risk is too low to be decision relevant. I have a hard time imagining that wearing a mask will lead to consequences anywhere remotely as serious as MIS-C. So it wouldn’t enter into my consideration unless it was very common, like >1%.
The linked article is low quality. It proposes a mechanism but gives no evidence for its frequency or severity or even if it actually happens at all. It is clearly not doing cost/benefit calculations.
Overall you seem to be putting the burden on Steven to prove that there isn’t a risk to masks, rather than doing anything to demonstrate that there is. I agree with considering the costs as well as benefits of masks and would love to see real data on the costs of masks, but this is an unfair burden to put on Steven in particular as a reward for a pretty useful write-up.
Nobody seems to be doing any cost/benefit calculations on masks. Particularly when it comes to fully vaccinated people wearing them. Why are we not doing it, especially the cost part? The benefits at least are tractable. But the costs are not easy to calculate. Obviously they are bigger than the cost of masks themselves, time it takes to properly take care of them one way or the other, and the cost of their disposal.
Hmm, I think for me the dominant cost of masks is that they’re mildly annoying. That’s a much bigger cost for me than the monetary price or the time spent laundering them or whatever.
I endorse not wearing masks when they provide zero or infinitesimal benefit. Like, where I live, there’s a rule that people walking alone outside need to wear a mask. That’s a really dumb and annoying rule.
I expect to be doing more stuff without masks, and more stuff period, when I’m fully vaccinated, and so are my friends, and when the prevailing COVID rates in the community are much lower than they are now. Can’t wait, and I think it won’t be much longer, in my community anyway. :)
My kids really don’t mind wearing masks. They really just don’t care, they don’t even think about it. Sometimes we’ll get home and they’ll just forget to take their masks off! Like, for a really long time! They just got used to wearing masks when going out, pretty quickly into the pandemic. Young kids are adaptable. :)
I’m not really sure what your question is getting at. There’s no sense in directly comparing my need for a mask to my kids’ need for a mask. It’s not like we only own one mask and need to fight over it…
For what it’s worth, it wasn’t my decision, but I am very happy that everyone in their school has to wear masks indoors. The benefit of reducing in-school COVID spread seems to me to overwhelmingly outweigh the (trivial) costs of making kids and teachers wear masks. I think that the prevailing COVID rates in the community would need to be very low indeed—maybe 10× or 100× lower than today—before I would endorse having kids in school stop wearing masks, at least until there’s a vaccine available for kids.
Have you looked into risks improper mask wearing poses? Things like moist dirty masks and associated increased chance of bacterial infections and aggravation of acne. Children wearing masks in school are especially at risk of wearing masks improperly.
Those don’t seem to be worth worrying about, so far as I can tell. It seems like they are rare (or maybe nonexistent) (insofar as I haven’t heard of any such issues through friends or family or the news), and they also sound like not that big a deal even if they do happen. You can tell me if I’m missing something.
Rare compared to what? I haven’t seen actual studies but my anecdotal observations show about one person in ten wearing visibly moist and soiled mask. This maybe area dependent, so your observations may be different, and they are what matters. But kids are generally not as fastidious as adults. The main worry for young kids is how much more likely is the bacterial throat infection if the mask they are wearing is dirty. Here is a relevant article (https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-a-sore-throat-from-wearing-a-dirty-mask/)
Acne aggravation from mask wearing is well-documented, but your kids are too young for that problem.
Sorry, I meant “negative consequences of mask-wearing are rare”, not “wearing moist and soiled masks is rare”. I’ve worn moist and soiled masks from time to time, and nothing bad has happened to me so far, except perhaps looking a bit unprofessional :-)
And I meant “rare compared to 100%”. Like, if even 1% of mask-wearers got a throat bacterial infection, that would be millions of throat bacterial infections in my country, 50,000 in my state, hundreds in my town, and probably at least one or two among my friends and family and acquaintances. So if that’s actually a thing that’s happening at a 1% rate, I think I would have heard something about it by now. Unless those infections were really not a big deal, such that they don’t rise to the level of even being worth mentioning to your friends.
(How many people do you personally know who have gotten a bacterial throat infection from mask wearing? How bad was it? Were they hospitalized? How many days of work did they miss?)
So I figure that bacterial throat infections from mask wearing is either <<1% likely to happen, or it’s really not a big deal when it does happen, or (most likely) both.
But it is a bigger deal for children. Children can get complications from throat infections.
You were looking at problems with one in ten thousand odds, but you don’t have ten thousand acquaintances of acquaintances, so it is unlikely that you would get second hand reports of problems with these odds.
You have even less acquaintances with children, perhaps no more than a few hundred, so even problems with odds of one in a thousand are unlikely to reach you via second hand reports.
What are the complications? Death? Weeks in the hospital? Lifelong complications?
I suspect that if there was even 1-in-100,000 chance of that kind of consequence from regularly wearing masks, I would have heard about it by now. But if you have a reference to actual incidents (not just speculation that it’s possible, but actual people who had these kinds of very very serious problems), I’d be interested to see that.
I want to consider possible impacts of my decisions that are either (1) common, (2) rare but catastrophic. MIS-C is not super catastrophic, but it’s fatal if you’re not promptly hospitalized, and occasionally fatal even if you are, if I understand correctly. So it enters into consideration, despite being rare. And even so I wound up declaring that MIS-C risk is too low to be decision relevant. I have a hard time imagining that wearing a mask will lead to consequences anywhere remotely as serious as MIS-C. So it wouldn’t enter into my consideration unless it was very common, like >1%.
The linked article is low quality. It proposes a mechanism but gives no evidence for its frequency or severity or even if it actually happens at all. It is clearly not doing cost/benefit calculations.
Overall you seem to be putting the burden on Steven to prove that there isn’t a risk to masks, rather than doing anything to demonstrate that there is. I agree with considering the costs as well as benefits of masks and would love to see real data on the costs of masks, but this is an unfair burden to put on Steven in particular as a reward for a pretty useful write-up.
Nobody seems to be doing any cost/benefit calculations on masks. Particularly when it comes to fully vaccinated people wearing them. Why are we not doing it, especially the cost part? The benefits at least are tractable. But the costs are not easy to calculate. Obviously they are bigger than the cost of masks themselves, time it takes to properly take care of them one way or the other, and the cost of their disposal.
Hmm, I think for me the dominant cost of masks is that they’re mildly annoying. That’s a much bigger cost for me than the monetary price or the time spent laundering them or whatever.
I endorse not wearing masks when they provide zero or infinitesimal benefit. Like, where I live, there’s a rule that people walking alone outside need to wear a mask. That’s a really dumb and annoying rule.
I expect to be doing more stuff without masks, and more stuff period, when I’m fully vaccinated, and so are my friends, and when the prevailing COVID rates in the community are much lower than they are now. Can’t wait, and I think it won’t be much longer, in my community anyway. :)
Have you considered the cost and benefit of masks worn by your six years old child?
Is he getting bigger benefit than you?
Are his costs smaller than yours?
My kids really don’t mind wearing masks. They really just don’t care, they don’t even think about it. Sometimes we’ll get home and they’ll just forget to take their masks off! Like, for a really long time! They just got used to wearing masks when going out, pretty quickly into the pandemic. Young kids are adaptable. :)
I’m not really sure what your question is getting at. There’s no sense in directly comparing my need for a mask to my kids’ need for a mask. It’s not like we only own one mask and need to fight over it…
For what it’s worth, it wasn’t my decision, but I am very happy that everyone in their school has to wear masks indoors. The benefit of reducing in-school COVID spread seems to me to overwhelmingly outweigh the (trivial) costs of making kids and teachers wear masks. I think that the prevailing COVID rates in the community would need to be very low indeed—maybe 10× or 100× lower than today—before I would endorse having kids in school stop wearing masks, at least until there’s a vaccine available for kids.
How many cases of COVID were detected in your child’s school in one year?