Will Paxlovid actually ever be available to non-at-risk groups? Seems unlikely anyone young-ish and healthy will be able to get it, since supply is so limited and might continue to be for a few years at least.
This supply is shared with many countries, not just the US.
Also there might be hesitancy to recommend it to young healthy people because antivirals usually have more side-effects than vaccines? This is just my vague impression.
Because testing allows for life to actually continue and people to stay sane, for the sick to be properly treated especially once Paxlovid is available, and for us to know what's going on at all. The price is so damn low.
Italy is already overwhelmed with testing. 1 milion test today and 78000 positives. Hours of queuing in front of testing points. Already running out of reagents for testing. They can not keep up. Especially when school will start.
Sorry, not sure I follow. Testing is so that people with covid will find out they have it and be treated before their symptoms kick in and save their lives? Or so that people with symptomless covid will learn they have it and avoid spreading it? It sounds like you're saying the former.
Can you elaborate on 21 - I've been reading your recent posts and a bunch of other sources I like (trvrb, stat, wallace-wells) , feel should be not too far from the frontier in terms of information set, yet not sure I understand this inevitability.
My current stance (not well thought out but not appearing implausible) is that it should be relatively straightforward to 1 sit out the high tide for a few weeks, 2 then with much lower cases level live through another couple months with a few precautions and 3 then get the omicron booster.
Which of the 1-2-3 do you think is likely to go bad? Do you think omicron booster deliveries starting March-April are plausible?
I live alone, have no friends and let's assume can work from home at least thru 1. I have some concerns about pure "action on the distance" transmission a la that quarantine neighbors case - either from my neighbors doorway or just hvac, but for now have no reason to expect it to be more than marginal risk. But beyond that, if I stay inside, get food delivered, spend a bit of time outside in not very crowded places, doesn't seem like there is much risk? Even grocery shopping in person with cloth mask not sure is that dangerous - my feeling is that it takes some deeper exposure like norwegian wedding to actually get a significant fraction of the congregation in trouble, if being present in the store with an infectious gal somewhere for half hour was enough we'd see much faster blowup in cases than we do; but, thinking of n95 or delivery.
I think we're talking 2 months of reasonably hard lockdowns on a personal level if you're actually trying. As I said, I think it would work (especially if you go to P100+) but I'm saying I think for most people it doesn't make sense to do that. But yeah, I do think your chances are good if you actually go for it.
can you elaborate on the assumptions behind 2 months.
if I naively use south korea 1.6 R0 to arrive at 1-1/1.6 = 40% population infected target that doesn't on the face of it sound 2 months away, given claims like 10% of londoners have omicron floating around (with nyc presumably not that far behind).
curious what's your best bet on actual vs reported case numbers (for say NYC rn) .
any good ideas on why SA peaked so low - seems like 10x vs where UK was yesterday and who knows how far it has to go. just actual vs reported ratio differences (guess would make sense given 5x+ differential in chr earlier)? "immunological dark matter" like prior beta wave legacy which if I remember correctly had most of the mutations relevant for immune evasion?
current UK population adjusted -> 1.5mil cases/day per US? will the bosses and/or population freak out at that point and do something stupid? anecdotally London kinda did, but they were going through it at a much higher uncertainty point, plus they are not americans.
guess q is how wave period scales. naive guess would be linearly with doubling time, so, a third faster than delta? if societal R dampening feedbacks fail to keep pace (or could we even finally see the breakdown of the "converge to R=1" law (way before herd immunity that is) - given it's late and we're tired and this is mild etc) might be even faster. given seems typical waves took 1.5-2months post peak, third of that is not too great.. but error bars on that korea numbers are too big, need more data.
another perspective: eyeballing bunch of states/countries daily covid cases graphs, seems mostly waves are pretty symmetric?
so, things to watch are, 1) how long can SA current rapid pace of decline continue, 2) is london really peaking/what is it gonna do next.
not super clear to me what's the range of situations in locked down life where even N95 is materially helpful. stay at home, walk outside without talking to people - sound safe regardless. grocery shopping - maybe. that's about it for locked down life.
socialize outside where you do talk at each other - maybe.
guess with good masks can extend the scope of relatively safe activities, and say use planes and public transit, go to museum, stuff like that where it's possible to keep proper mask protocol.
socializing indoors with good mask always on? - no idea.
The way I figure it, if 90% of the population is going to get omicron, then by taking better precautions than 90% of the population you can probably lower your personal chance of getting it to circa 50%. If you don't have any particular work etc obligations in the great wide world then it should be reasonably easy to beat 90% of the population.
If you want to lower your chance of getting it to 10% then you'll have to beat maybe 99% of the population (totally made-up number) which will be a lot harder. And if you want to lower your chance to 1% then maybe you'll need to beat 99.9% of the population.
My plan: take reasonable precautions but don't be too surprised if I get it anyway. Try to put it off until I can get a booster in late January.
How much Zinc and Vitamin D are you talking about?
Unrelated, and not at all Evidence Based (because who would study the most impactful health intervention known wrt a pandemic) but there's no time like today to work on your cardiovascular capacity. 15 minutes of HIIT a few times a week for the sedate-but-healthy is all it takes to have appreciable improvements. I still haven't seen any "Is being well trained protective against severe COVID" but lets say its not. All you've done is channeled your anxiety into an intervention that will reduce *other* respiratory illness severity (flu is well studied IIRC), will probably help your mental health (typical outcomes are better than SSRIs for depression and anxiety), and it requires 0 equipment.
I take 5k IUs Vitamin D per day, and when I was sick I megadosed extra to be sure (~50k more). Zinc I was taking regular Zinc supplements, my understanding it's more of a 'don't be really short' type of situation.
HIIT like that when I've tried it has been absolutely brutal to do at all, let alone for 15 minutes, but I definitely should be doing better exercise. I am open to suggestions though cause there's nothing I'm happy about, keeping in mind I have bad knees. Of course, the gyms are a bad idea now. Working my way up slowly from my pandemic non-shape.
Thanks for the info about supplements. I already get those from diet and supplements other than megadosing, so that's cool.
The nice thing about HIIT is that its got some parameters to twiddle so you can dial in the intensity that works best for you. You can make it brutal, but unless you are already in great shape there's no reason to do so. Turn the parameters down. For sendinary folks, you can set the paramters very low and still see results. The article I linked to has participants doing 3 bouts per week. Each bout was:
3 minute warm up
3x (20 seconds hard work, 2 minutes of very low intensity work)
2 minutes cool down.
So either 3 minutes of work a week, or 36 minutes of exercise, depending on how you want to look at it. But if you look at it as 36 minutes, 33 were at probably less effort than a brisk walk.
My interpretation is that its not about keep your heart rate elevated for a long time, just get it elevated and let it cool all the way down. Each challenge like that should produce some small adaptation.
The study particpants are doing erg bikes, but there's no reason to think it can't work for whatever exercise you are capable of doing and enjoy (and can push yourself for 20 seconds, so walking is out).
I have bad knees too, and I much prefer slinging around external weights compared to internal weight like jumping jacks or burpies. A duffle bag full of sandbags or books gives you a lot of options. My favorite is just X seconds of picking it up and tossing it over my shoulder follewed by ~2x or 3x seconds of just pacing around the room. Bent over rows are a good one too.
Click on the Back, Chest, and Waist links here, and look at the bodyweight exercises. Pick something that looks fun and that you think you can do for 20 seconds to get out of breath (you'll probably never do bicept curls for 20 seconds and get out of breath for example). No jumping or knee stress required. If you make a sandbag or book bag, most things listed under barbell can be done with the bag too.
(And the exercise comment wasn't addressed to you Zvi in particular, but to anyone reading.)
Thanks for that succinct description. I had tried older versions of HIT, and had the same experience as Zvi…brutal!
This time, I just set my phone timer for 20 seconds, and did as many burpees as I could. Seemed to be enough to get my breathing and heart rate up, but short enough to avoid triggering that out of breath, “I hate exercise” feeling that I loathe.
Three reps went quickly and painlessly…this feels like it might be a sustainable daily routine for me.
What’s the best way to ramp up effort as fitness improves?
Awesome! The first workout is usally the hardest to get under your belt, and you'll feel the worst after it. As you get in better shape, even when you are pushing hard it won't be as uncomfortable. At least that's my experience.
Here are some progression options:
1) Twiddle the paramaters. Bump up the working time by a couple seconds. Do another working sets. Shorten rep times. Whatever feels right.
2) Push harder. Make the exercise harder or go faster. Burpies are pretty close to as hard as it gets, but if you were doing jumping jacks I'd tell you you can move to burpies.
3) Add an untimed "finisher" to each working set. Drop and do a pair of situps, or climb a flight of stairs, or do 3 jumping jacks.
The most important thing to look for is *intrinsic* motivation. Your extrinsinc motivation is what you get out of it like improved endurance. The intrinsic motivation is actually enjoying it. Maybe its an enjoyable exercise that makes you feel powerful, maybe its a new way to get some time in with your teenage kid who is otherwise too surly and cool to spend time with Dad or Mom. Maybe you're just a huge nerd who loves numbers and spreadsheets and you realized you can log all this in a spreadsheet. Those are my intrinsic motivators, anyway.
Zvi, my GF has bad knees, and can’t walk more than half a km these days. But she can ride her bike for 20 km or so, on reasonably flat ground (e.g. Rails To Trails)
Though I think you live in NYC, which is a pretty scary place to cycle…I lived on Long Island for many years, and didn’t even want to ride there, let alone in the city. Central Park, maybe?
Stationary bike would work, I suppose, but my experience with treadmills is they are horribly boring. Maybe Pelaton type setups, or streaming video while exercising would help.
Yeah, some people like biking here, I am very much not one of them. I've got gyms I could join around here, but that's gotta wait for Omicron to pass (or for me to already have had it). Central Park is too far, unfortunately - good for a slow nice walk, but if I have to go there to workout, I won't do it often enough. Gotta be something within a few blocks, I know myself.
Thank you for these posts, they really are a great synthesis of the best information publicly available.
I had a question about 51 -- I'm not sure what you meant by "If there is sufficient overshoot on immunity things might collapse further." I'm guessing that I'm just missing some epidemiological context that would help me understand this, but would you mind expanding some more on this?
By default, you infect enough people to balance out remaining risk at R0=1. But if you infect people fast enough, you end up infecting more than that, and then case levels go to almost zero.
Meanwhile in Germany, the Minister of Health in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's largest state, stated that "the new thing about Omicron is that it also spreads by air", shifting my model of what exactly is going wrong away from questionable policy choices and towards sheer incompetence.
+ Expect that you will be exposed. Sarscov2 is airborne and widespread.
+ If young and male research aspiration as part of injection technique. Data is Denmark vs Norway. 2.4x reduction in risk of myocarditis in Denmark where aspiration is standard practice.
Can you clarify how people are supposed to get fluvoxamine? And also, if someone is already on fluvoxamine should they be concerned about a supply crunch?
(Not medical advice reminder, etc) A supply crunch doesn't seem impossible, if you can I'd get an extra few months of refill now to be sure if you're on it as an SSRI. You get it by prescription (officially, anyway) and many doctors will give it to you if you test positive, but far from all. As with many drugs, there are also... other sources out there.
We now think that touching objects (Fomites) is not worth worrying about for Covid. One question I have is whether this is specific to Covid or if this also applies to Colds and Flu. Are those also 99% airborne viruses that people falsely think are transmitted by touch? Is there something special about Covid that makes it hard to transmit by touch?
Could you link me to some sources substantiating that p100 is really necessary above a well-fitted n95? Or is it more just based on first principles: more infectious with less viral load means a more serious mask is in order?
A sufficiently strong filter literally stops the virus. No one did the actual study that I know of because no one did any studies, but it's physically impossible that this is wrong. The full air filtration systems that cost $2k and make you look like you're going through a superfund site? Yeah, that's gonna work if you're willing to look like that.
Totally agree. This study (done before Delta and omicron) seems to suggest N95s are adequate. Granted, limitations include brief experimental conditions and ideally fitted masks in addition to lower viral load on average pre-delta.
Will Paxlovid actually ever be available to non-at-risk groups? Seems unlikely anyone young-ish and healthy will be able to get it, since supply is so limited and might continue to be for a few years at least.
Why would it continue to be supply limited for so long? Do you see a constraint that would be too expensive to remove?
Seems like Pfizer can only produce 80 million courses in 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/21/paxlovid-anti-covid-pill-why-not-available
This supply is shared with many countries, not just the US.
Also there might be hesitancy to recommend it to young healthy people because antivirals usually have more side-effects than vaccines? This is just my vague impression.
Why do you think we should be spending vastly more on testing if you also think almost everyone will get omicron?
(I agree with every other recommendation of yours btw! Great post)
Because testing allows for life to actually continue and people to stay sane, for the sick to be properly treated especially once Paxlovid is available, and for us to know what's going on at all. The price is so damn low.
Italy is already overwhelmed with testing. 1 milion test today and 78000 positives. Hours of queuing in front of testing points. Already running out of reagents for testing. They can not keep up. Especially when school will start.
Sorry, not sure I follow. Testing is so that people with covid will find out they have it and be treated before their symptoms kick in and save their lives? Or so that people with symptomless covid will learn they have it and avoid spreading it? It sounds like you're saying the former.
It allows people doing the right thing to not worry they're killing grandma when visiting.
minor correction on point 9 ---- 3 feet is quadruple the risk.
Can you elaborate on 21 - I've been reading your recent posts and a bunch of other sources I like (trvrb, stat, wallace-wells) , feel should be not too far from the frontier in terms of information set, yet not sure I understand this inevitability.
My current stance (not well thought out but not appearing implausible) is that it should be relatively straightforward to 1 sit out the high tide for a few weeks, 2 then with much lower cases level live through another couple months with a few precautions and 3 then get the omicron booster.
Which of the 1-2-3 do you think is likely to go bad? Do you think omicron booster deliveries starting March-April are plausible?
I live alone, have no friends and let's assume can work from home at least thru 1. I have some concerns about pure "action on the distance" transmission a la that quarantine neighbors case - either from my neighbors doorway or just hvac, but for now have no reason to expect it to be more than marginal risk. But beyond that, if I stay inside, get food delivered, spend a bit of time outside in not very crowded places, doesn't seem like there is much risk? Even grocery shopping in person with cloth mask not sure is that dangerous - my feeling is that it takes some deeper exposure like norwegian wedding to actually get a significant fraction of the congregation in trouble, if being present in the store with an infectious gal somewhere for half hour was enough we'd see much faster blowup in cases than we do; but, thinking of n95 or delivery.
I think we're talking 2 months of reasonably hard lockdowns on a personal level if you're actually trying. As I said, I think it would work (especially if you go to P100+) but I'm saying I think for most people it doesn't make sense to do that. But yeah, I do think your chances are good if you actually go for it.
I wish P100 respirators didn't make me look like the salt vampire from Star Trek.
No, of course not, they make you look like a Batman villain.
is that a bug or a feature
Depends on the crowd, I reckon.
can you elaborate on the assumptions behind 2 months.
if I naively use south korea 1.6 R0 to arrive at 1-1/1.6 = 40% population infected target that doesn't on the face of it sound 2 months away, given claims like 10% of londoners have omicron floating around (with nyc presumably not that far behind).
curious what's your best bet on actual vs reported case numbers (for say NYC rn) .
any good ideas on why SA peaked so low - seems like 10x vs where UK was yesterday and who knows how far it has to go. just actual vs reported ratio differences (guess would make sense given 5x+ differential in chr earlier)? "immunological dark matter" like prior beta wave legacy which if I remember correctly had most of the mutations relevant for immune evasion?
would be fun too see how high it can climb.
current UK population adjusted -> 1.5mil cases/day per US? will the bosses and/or population freak out at that point and do something stupid? anecdotally London kinda did, but they were going through it at a much higher uncertainty point, plus they are not americans.
You have to wait out the decline, not only the climb, basically. Things don't decline that quickly unless you 'blow past' immunity by quite a bit.
SA I think didn't peak as low as all that, they simply didn't do that many tests, but even then I agree I don't understand it.
guess q is how wave period scales. naive guess would be linearly with doubling time, so, a third faster than delta? if societal R dampening feedbacks fail to keep pace (or could we even finally see the breakdown of the "converge to R=1" law (way before herd immunity that is) - given it's late and we're tired and this is mild etc) might be even faster. given seems typical waves took 1.5-2months post peak, third of that is not too great.. but error bars on that korea numbers are too big, need more data.
another perspective: eyeballing bunch of states/countries daily covid cases graphs, seems mostly waves are pretty symmetric?
so, things to watch are, 1) how long can SA current rapid pace of decline continue, 2) is london really peaking/what is it gonna do next.
>especially if you go to P100+
not super clear to me what's the range of situations in locked down life where even N95 is materially helpful. stay at home, walk outside without talking to people - sound safe regardless. grocery shopping - maybe. that's about it for locked down life.
socialize outside where you do talk at each other - maybe.
guess with good masks can extend the scope of relatively safe activities, and say use planes and public transit, go to museum, stuff like that where it's possible to keep proper mask protocol.
socializing indoors with good mask always on? - no idea.
The way I figure it, if 90% of the population is going to get omicron, then by taking better precautions than 90% of the population you can probably lower your personal chance of getting it to circa 50%. If you don't have any particular work etc obligations in the great wide world then it should be reasonably easy to beat 90% of the population.
If you want to lower your chance of getting it to 10% then you'll have to beat maybe 99% of the population (totally made-up number) which will be a lot harder. And if you want to lower your chance to 1% then maybe you'll need to beat 99.9% of the population.
My plan: take reasonable precautions but don't be too surprised if I get it anyway. Try to put it off until I can get a booster in late January.
I love this post. I just want to say how much I have enjoyed and been informed thanks to reading your posts for several months now. Thank you!
Yeah, I mean, I really don't have the words. I really wish there were a better way to say "thank you" for the hard work and clear communication.
How much Zinc and Vitamin D are you talking about?
Unrelated, and not at all Evidence Based (because who would study the most impactful health intervention known wrt a pandemic) but there's no time like today to work on your cardiovascular capacity. 15 minutes of HIIT a few times a week for the sedate-but-healthy is all it takes to have appreciable improvements. I still haven't seen any "Is being well trained protective against severe COVID" but lets say its not. All you've done is channeled your anxiety into an intervention that will reduce *other* respiratory illness severity (flu is well studied IIRC), will probably help your mental health (typical outcomes are better than SSRIs for depression and anxiety), and it requires 0 equipment.
You don't need to go Full Tabata and copy his brutal protocols. Like seriously, it doesn't take much: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111489
I take 5k IUs Vitamin D per day, and when I was sick I megadosed extra to be sure (~50k more). Zinc I was taking regular Zinc supplements, my understanding it's more of a 'don't be really short' type of situation.
HIIT like that when I've tried it has been absolutely brutal to do at all, let alone for 15 minutes, but I definitely should be doing better exercise. I am open to suggestions though cause there's nothing I'm happy about, keeping in mind I have bad knees. Of course, the gyms are a bad idea now. Working my way up slowly from my pandemic non-shape.
Thanks for the info about supplements. I already get those from diet and supplements other than megadosing, so that's cool.
The nice thing about HIIT is that its got some parameters to twiddle so you can dial in the intensity that works best for you. You can make it brutal, but unless you are already in great shape there's no reason to do so. Turn the parameters down. For sendinary folks, you can set the paramters very low and still see results. The article I linked to has participants doing 3 bouts per week. Each bout was:
3 minute warm up
3x (20 seconds hard work, 2 minutes of very low intensity work)
2 minutes cool down.
So either 3 minutes of work a week, or 36 minutes of exercise, depending on how you want to look at it. But if you look at it as 36 minutes, 33 were at probably less effort than a brisk walk.
My interpretation is that its not about keep your heart rate elevated for a long time, just get it elevated and let it cool all the way down. Each challenge like that should produce some small adaptation.
The study particpants are doing erg bikes, but there's no reason to think it can't work for whatever exercise you are capable of doing and enjoy (and can push yourself for 20 seconds, so walking is out).
I have bad knees too, and I much prefer slinging around external weights compared to internal weight like jumping jacks or burpies. A duffle bag full of sandbags or books gives you a lot of options. My favorite is just X seconds of picking it up and tossing it over my shoulder follewed by ~2x or 3x seconds of just pacing around the room. Bent over rows are a good one too.
https://exrx.net/Lists/Directory
Click on the Back, Chest, and Waist links here, and look at the bodyweight exercises. Pick something that looks fun and that you think you can do for 20 seconds to get out of breath (you'll probably never do bicept curls for 20 seconds and get out of breath for example). No jumping or knee stress required. If you make a sandbag or book bag, most things listed under barbell can be done with the bag too.
(And the exercise comment wasn't addressed to you Zvi in particular, but to anyone reading.)
Thanks for that succinct description. I had tried older versions of HIT, and had the same experience as Zvi…brutal!
This time, I just set my phone timer for 20 seconds, and did as many burpees as I could. Seemed to be enough to get my breathing and heart rate up, but short enough to avoid triggering that out of breath, “I hate exercise” feeling that I loathe.
Three reps went quickly and painlessly…this feels like it might be a sustainable daily routine for me.
What’s the best way to ramp up effort as fitness improves?
Awesome! The first workout is usally the hardest to get under your belt, and you'll feel the worst after it. As you get in better shape, even when you are pushing hard it won't be as uncomfortable. At least that's my experience.
Here are some progression options:
1) Twiddle the paramaters. Bump up the working time by a couple seconds. Do another working sets. Shorten rep times. Whatever feels right.
2) Push harder. Make the exercise harder or go faster. Burpies are pretty close to as hard as it gets, but if you were doing jumping jacks I'd tell you you can move to burpies.
3) Add an untimed "finisher" to each working set. Drop and do a pair of situps, or climb a flight of stairs, or do 3 jumping jacks.
The most important thing to look for is *intrinsic* motivation. Your extrinsinc motivation is what you get out of it like improved endurance. The intrinsic motivation is actually enjoying it. Maybe its an enjoyable exercise that makes you feel powerful, maybe its a new way to get some time in with your teenage kid who is otherwise too surly and cool to spend time with Dad or Mom. Maybe you're just a huge nerd who loves numbers and spreadsheets and you realized you can log all this in a spreadsheet. Those are my intrinsic motivators, anyway.
Zvi, my GF has bad knees, and can’t walk more than half a km these days. But she can ride her bike for 20 km or so, on reasonably flat ground (e.g. Rails To Trails)
Though I think you live in NYC, which is a pretty scary place to cycle…I lived on Long Island for many years, and didn’t even want to ride there, let alone in the city. Central Park, maybe?
Stationary bike would work, I suppose, but my experience with treadmills is they are horribly boring. Maybe Pelaton type setups, or streaming video while exercising would help.
Yeah, some people like biking here, I am very much not one of them. I've got gyms I could join around here, but that's gotta wait for Omicron to pass (or for me to already have had it). Central Park is too far, unfortunately - good for a slow nice walk, but if I have to go there to workout, I won't do it often enough. Gotta be something within a few blocks, I know myself.
Thank you for these posts, they really are a great synthesis of the best information publicly available.
I had a question about 51 -- I'm not sure what you meant by "If there is sufficient overshoot on immunity things might collapse further." I'm guessing that I'm just missing some epidemiological context that would help me understand this, but would you mind expanding some more on this?
By default, you infect enough people to balance out remaining risk at R0=1. But if you infect people fast enough, you end up infecting more than that, and then case levels go to almost zero.
Meanwhile in Germany, the Minister of Health in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's largest state, stated that "the new thing about Omicron is that it also spreads by air", shifting my model of what exactly is going wrong away from questionable policy choices and towards sheer incompetence.
+ Expect that you will be exposed. Sarscov2 is airborne and widespread.
+ If young and male research aspiration as part of injection technique. Data is Denmark vs Norway. 2.4x reduction in risk of myocarditis in Denmark where aspiration is standard practice.
Can you clarify how people are supposed to get fluvoxamine? And also, if someone is already on fluvoxamine should they be concerned about a supply crunch?
(Not medical advice reminder, etc) A supply crunch doesn't seem impossible, if you can I'd get an extra few months of refill now to be sure if you're on it as an SSRI. You get it by prescription (officially, anyway) and many doctors will give it to you if you test positive, but far from all. As with many drugs, there are also... other sources out there.
Thanks for your kind, thoughtful response.
What about taking more than 3 doses of vaccines?
My guess is that a 4th dose won't change things much but we don't have any data on it.
We now think that touching objects (Fomites) is not worth worrying about for Covid. One question I have is whether this is specific to Covid or if this also applies to Colds and Flu. Are those also 99% airborne viruses that people falsely think are transmitted by touch? Is there something special about Covid that makes it hard to transmit by touch?
I've seen some people suggest the opposite of trying to wait out the January wave. (I'm being vague because I don't want to give ideas.)
It strikes me as nuts and antisocial, but what are the other arguments against it?
Could you link me to some sources substantiating that p100 is really necessary above a well-fitted n95? Or is it more just based on first principles: more infectious with less viral load means a more serious mask is in order?
I tried to find some but couldn't. Thanks!
A sufficiently strong filter literally stops the virus. No one did the actual study that I know of because no one did any studies, but it's physically impossible that this is wrong. The full air filtration systems that cost $2k and make you look like you're going through a superfund site? Yeah, that's gonna work if you're willing to look like that.
Totally agree. This study (done before Delta and omicron) seems to suggest N95s are adequate. Granted, limitations include brief experimental conditions and ideally fitted masks in addition to lower viral load on average pre-delta.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32845196/