A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

@freemo @biologgia

Fair!

I was going to leave well enough alone here, but upon reflection I'm actually quite curious about something and I hope you'll humor me.

You say that wearing a mask is not appropriate and in fact dangerous as it may cause far more harm than good.

Do you believe I damaged my immune system while protecting myself from nuclear radiation and other particles for those years?

Is there a point at which a job in which a mask is required becomes hazardous to your health, not because of whatever you are protecting yourself from, but from the mask itself? Should those jobs have special government/academic governing body protection?

It just strikes me that if you believe that, let's say, wearing a mask 5 hours a day, or 8 hours a day is in fact hazardous to your health *in itself* that there's a whole other issue that you believe we should be discussing as scientists.

Am I reading you correctly? Not trying to put words in your mouth, just attempting to follow your logic to wrap my head around it.

@marianabat

First off, welcome! That was an interesting read.

I have yet to see data that correlates districts that had e-schools and virtual schools long before COVID to the discussion of "learning loss" during COVID years.

I know our local school district had an e-school for many years prior to 2020 and while the number of data points isn't large, the data still isn't being analyzed anywhere that I've seen.

Some states, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina for instance, have had virtual schools prior(often long prior) to 2020 of varying sizes. It seems like these students would be an interesting and important comparison, would it not?

@freemo @biologgia I'm certainly not going to tell you what's going on in Israel, but I do keep tabs on mask mandates and a quick news search leads me to a Reuters article that says there was a mask mandate in indoor spaces in Israel in April, and masks are still required in healthcare settings, etc. so we're not exactly talking apples to apples compared to my location in the world where a mask hasn't been seen, even in hospitals outside of surgical rooms, since March of 2020.

I'd like to push back on the hygiene hypothesis a bit, too, with two points.

I'm not a growing child with an immune system that needs some immune stimulation.

I've never seen any reputable science indicating that constant virus exposure is a good thing. Bacteria? Sure! But I assume the fact that, personally, I have a mask on for maybe 1% of my daily life on a weekly average doesn't affect my bacterial exposure significantly, particularly with a diet rich in probiotics.

@TeaPain I've been wondering exactly this. There's really two possibilities in my mind(assuming the health of future elections/Democracy):

1 - Republicans turn the next two years into a circus of wild "investigations" and base stoking and the average American gets so turned off that they actually turn out to vote against them.

2 - Everyone's so siloed into their camps already that it doesn't matter what happens in Washington DC at all anymore.

@idropyou Nice work! If you check my header in my profile, we are in the midst of moving there. I hope to learn a lot about woodworking over the coming years.

@withaveeay

It's endlessly interesting to me to see how people in other parts of the world do off grid living, so thanks for sharing!

In our situation, and I'm in the midst of getting setup in a new location, we are not so far north, so I don't anticipate as steep of a winter drop off. However, we are on the edge of a national forest and part of the year their giant trees cut our solar hours down just due to the angles involved.

Not a solution for everyone, but, I've found that the wind just doesn't cut it as you mentioned, so we've scoped out a length of creek on our property and are hoping to pull an average of 12 kWh a day from it given the flow and vertical drop in the winter. Fingers crossed, at least. Got some engineering to do before we're set up, but I'm hoping 2023 is the year.

@freemo @biologgia I want to add that I sincerely hope you're healthy and happy going forward @freemo. I'm not going to dismiss the idea of having COVID 6 times and self-reporting no issues as not being a valid data point. I just think that, in general, there's a lot you wouldn't really know yet in terms of longterm outcomes and I don't want to see anything bad happen to you because you seem like a pretty cool dude.

@freemo @biologgia I'm going to wade in here because I have some thoughts. Generally speaking I don't bother, so take it for what it is @freemo, a chance at an academic discussion free of politics and whatnot.

One, I come from a personal standpoint where I used to work in a nuclear laboratory and I wore a full hazmat daily for a couple of years. Hazmat has a connotation that if it's not what you're intending, it comes off hyperbolic. I can understand your technical term, but, an N95 is not considered "hazmat" to the casual reader.

From that standpoint, and I admit that's not everyone's standpoint, an N95 is super easy. I've thrown one on every time I've gone out since I was horribly ill in December of 2019 and into January of 2020, and *irregardless of COVID* I've thoroughly enjoyed not having so much as minor sniffles in going on 3 years now and intend to keep it up. I can tell I'm healthier in my day to day life. This has led me to a lot of different decisions that I didn't anticipate, but that's a discussion for another day.

Two, my own personal experience tells me that people's immune systems are haywire right now. I don't keep a particularly large circle of friends and acquaintances, but almost every single one of them who has chosen to go on with life unimpeded has health issues right now ranging from sudden auto-immune issues to constant infections of other pathogens. The few of us who chose to be COVID cautious are 100% healthy.

This led me to do my own research as a non-medical or biologically inclined person. Thankfully my wife has a degree in neuroscience and is able to explain things to me I read in journals. What I found isn't exactly encouraging on the longterm health front, whether that's from acute issues(no, not a large percent of people die while actively sick with COVID, but multiply that times the number of infections and it's clearly an issue), post-acute issues(the raise in everything from inflammation to heart attacks to strokes to blood clots, etc. in the months after an infection), the outcomes of the people who had SARS-COV-1 or just constant reinfections.

It's not good to get a cold or the flu multiple times a year, so why would we, as scientists, fully abandon the precautionary principle here?

Sorry for the novel. I even pared it down a lot. I'm wordy...

@ZingerLearns We make fresh cranberry sauce every Thanksgiving and have for a while now as well. We also always turn cooking into science lessons for the kids pretty frequently. They love it when the cranberries start popping!

@IAmErik While I've never been good at sticking with it, I do subscribe to Headspace and have managed to convince my kids to meditate semi-regularly.

@barefootstache

There was a point some time ago that I really thought the US might starve itself, literally, in the pursuit of more ethanol. Capitalism is a strange beast sometimes.

@Chamisa22

Bread and cats. Sounds good to me :)

@rhtunstall

I definitely hear you, but, given the way that everyone is going to count this differently(here in the US each state is welcome to do what they please in that regard, and even locally medical examiners make different decisions within that) I think the best metric is excess deaths. That'll cover the heart attacks, blood clots, strokes, etc. that will invariably increase as well. Assuming, of course, that those get counted honestly.

@melhathnofury I've been happy with MetaText so far, just FYI.

@0CynicalBastard

This is all spot on, but it's also so hard to remind friends and family that it's not mild when everyone else is telling them that it is. Most people I know believe I'm nuts and that's fine with me, but the average person finds it hard to be "the crazy one" amongst the group.

@chamberlainnl You're almost famous! Hopefully the chairs will remember you after they go big time. 😂

@bertgold I'm logged into my MacBook Pro and iPad and use them both. The only thing I noticed is that when I signed up on my MacBook it saved my username and you need to replace it with e-mail to log in elsewhere. Hopefully that helps!

@gvegayon Beautiful family!

@DrJLCatlett Awww what a cutie!

@sgt_easton Hope you can watch it and don't have to immediately go and dig yourself out!