last night in Toronto, and mask madness
Man I hate ice on the ground. Even with a lot of penguin waddling, my foot slipped once in an hour walk -- not much, but definitely moving in an unintended way. But after hiding at home yesterday, I did make that walk, going to PAT, a Korean store, to pick up yet more KF94s maybe.
Omicron did not obviously slow down dine-in, I saw on my way.
The store itself was super-aggressive about capacity limits. Felt like one customer per aisle was being let in. I didn't think to pay attention to mask types, though one employee was wearing surgical.
The store did have masks. Got a box of 10 Nawell, and one each of two masks with Korean writing on them
Going back (slip), I seemed to note a line outside a clearly uncrowded LCBO store, though it's possible it was for the adjacent cocktail bar, I didn't go back to check.
So about all those masks. I'm flying to Vancouver tomorrow, about which I have trepidations, mostly because of the unknown long covid risk. I've been looking for good masks, but too late. Some Canadian N99s look promising, but were out of stock. Too late and wrong country to get authorized 3M re-sold quickly, so I went to Amazon, and now have 70 alleged 1870+ Auras. They look right, they fit well(the design is like a stiffer KF94), but I don't really know if bootleg reseller (buy a box of 400, break it up for individuals) or Chinese counterfeit with poor filtration, and I'm inclined to try to return them to regain my money. (It's not a nutty idea: they come sealed in authentic-looking individual plastic envelopes, so it's not like I've contaminated them, apart from the few I opened.)
I did get some 3M 8511s being sold directly by Amazon, in a proper box, so probably authentic; they're valved, but could be covered up.
Also ordered some cord extenders (a band with two hooks, to connect your earloops; doesn't seem that tight, even on my giant head) and cord locks (little rubber cylinders, you thread the earloop through with a hairpin, then can use them to tighten the mask, seems to work well.) And got some medical tape, I may just tape to my face whatever I wear on the plane. I haven't trusted the seal or self-check on anything I've gotten, even the elastomeric P100; nothing stops my glasses from fogging. There is a study that taping works well, not quite as well as putting pantyhose over an N95 but more comfortable, at least until you take the tape off.
Is all this worth it? A study did find that FFP3 masks worked quite well at protecting health care workers in a covid ward. As a friend said, "get the right mask and you can stride through the Valley of Death". But FFP3 is like N99; N95s are FFP2 equivalent. Though I think most health care workers have been using N95? But they also have supervisors who can actually check their fit properly.
There's also the debate of "try to avoid omicron indefinitely, or court exposure while I'm at peak antibody in the hope of picking up new antbodies?" OTOH it's not clear that even the right antibodies protect you from infection long term: this guy suggests that the 95% trial effectiveness against infection was because the trials were only 3 months old and all the antibody levels were high. As I posted earlier, protecting yourself from upper respiratory infection via antibodies alone may be impossible. In which case maybe avoid *now*, and wait for more data; if omicron doesn't cause long covid then I could relax later, after it had displaced delta.
See the
DW comments at https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/590278.html#comments
Omicron did not obviously slow down dine-in, I saw on my way.
The store itself was super-aggressive about capacity limits. Felt like one customer per aisle was being let in. I didn't think to pay attention to mask types, though one employee was wearing surgical.
The store did have masks. Got a box of 10 Nawell, and one each of two masks with Korean writing on them
Going back (slip), I seemed to note a line outside a clearly uncrowded LCBO store, though it's possible it was for the adjacent cocktail bar, I didn't go back to check.
So about all those masks. I'm flying to Vancouver tomorrow, about which I have trepidations, mostly because of the unknown long covid risk. I've been looking for good masks, but too late. Some Canadian N99s look promising, but were out of stock. Too late and wrong country to get authorized 3M re-sold quickly, so I went to Amazon, and now have 70 alleged 1870+ Auras. They look right, they fit well(the design is like a stiffer KF94), but I don't really know if bootleg reseller (buy a box of 400, break it up for individuals) or Chinese counterfeit with poor filtration, and I'm inclined to try to return them to regain my money. (It's not a nutty idea: they come sealed in authentic-looking individual plastic envelopes, so it's not like I've contaminated them, apart from the few I opened.)
I did get some 3M 8511s being sold directly by Amazon, in a proper box, so probably authentic; they're valved, but could be covered up.
Also ordered some cord extenders (a band with two hooks, to connect your earloops; doesn't seem that tight, even on my giant head) and cord locks (little rubber cylinders, you thread the earloop through with a hairpin, then can use them to tighten the mask, seems to work well.) And got some medical tape, I may just tape to my face whatever I wear on the plane. I haven't trusted the seal or self-check on anything I've gotten, even the elastomeric P100; nothing stops my glasses from fogging. There is a study that taping works well, not quite as well as putting pantyhose over an N95 but more comfortable, at least until you take the tape off.
Is all this worth it? A study did find that FFP3 masks worked quite well at protecting health care workers in a covid ward. As a friend said, "get the right mask and you can stride through the Valley of Death". But FFP3 is like N99; N95s are FFP2 equivalent. Though I think most health care workers have been using N95? But they also have supervisors who can actually check their fit properly.
There's also the debate of "try to avoid omicron indefinitely, or court exposure while I'm at peak antibody in the hope of picking up new antbodies?" OTOH it's not clear that even the right antibodies protect you from infection long term: this guy suggests that the 95% trial effectiveness against infection was because the trials were only 3 months old and all the antibody levels were high. As I posted earlier, protecting yourself from upper respiratory infection via antibodies alone may be impossible. In which case maybe avoid *now*, and wait for more data; if omicron doesn't cause long covid then I could relax later, after it had displaced delta.
See the
DW comments at https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/590278.html#comments