To Mask or not to two - Mask Megathread cont.

Looks to be the requirement. Your gym didn't follow the below?

"Organised indoor group activities like sport and fitness activities can take place, with certain protective measures in place, with the following limits:

• Classes can take place with limits of 100 people if all attendees are fully vaccinated, have recovered from COVID-19 in the past six months, or are an accompanied minor (under 18)
• Classes where not all attendees are fully vaccinated, pods of up to six people will be allowed. Number of pods allowed will depend on the size of the venue."

Calm down. If you read the link it's referring to sports indoors, which can include gyms. A quick look online shows gyms are still respecting mask and social distancing rules within reason

https://www.westpark.ie/coronavirus-safety/

And yeah I recognise your username from Covid denial and conspiracy threads, trying to "catch out" the rules. The pub I went past yesterday was jammed with people, they didn't have to wear masks, but down the road, in shops, masks are still mandatory. All of this is done on a national level, or by sectors, which doesn't mean everything is going to be perfectly aligned. Despite vaccination, Covid is still around, so technically the more masks the better, but we have to return to normal life, so we're also trying to remove them and other measures as much as is possible/feasible.

You chose to go the gym as did the others. Can you think of any other reasons why people engaged in high intensity exercise and wearing of masks might not be ideal?

Shops and public transport are essential services where there is mixing of different cohorts of varying vulnerability.

Well a lot of them werent wearing masks but behind perspex screens and visors.

And most likely to catch is not the same as volume of cases.

Also in wave 1 you couldnt even get tested for a time unless you were vulnerable or a HCW. So the figures are not like for like - masks arent the only thing that changed.

In wave 1 most cases were HCW because they werent wearing masks routinely and had the highest exposure.

As a result precautions such as wearing masks and better ventilation in public spaces were tragically delayed, says a new report.

The 2,000-year-old airborne disease theory that blinded Covid experts

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/every-medical-authority-failed-realise-covid-airborne-late

Article reads very well but for those that want to go straight to the report.

Echoes Through Time: The Historical Origins of the Droplet Dogma and its Role in the Misidentification of Airborne Respiratory Infection Transmission

Abstract

The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted by droplets or aerosols has been very controversial. We sought to explain this controversy through a historical analysis of transmission research in other diseases. For most of human history, many diseases were thought to transmit through the air, often over long distances and in a phantasmagorical way, and often in error (e.g. malaria, cholera). Building on the germ theory of disease developed in the mid 19th century and on the demise of miasma theory, prominent public health official Charles Chapin in 1910 urged the public health community to focus on contact and droplet infection. However, he introduced a major error in the process: that ease of infection in close proximity is associated exclusively with large “sprayborne” droplets that fall to the ground quickly, and he deemed airborne transmission as very unlikely. This new paradigm became dominant, leading to systematic errors in the interpretation of research evidence on transmission. For the next five decades, no disease was accepted by the general medical and infection control communities as airborne, until tuberculosis (which had been misclassified as droplet) in 1962. Chapin’s paradigm remained dominant and only a few diseases were widely accepted as transmitted by aerosols before COVID-19: those that were clearly transmitted over long distances or time scales. Resistance to the idea of airborne spread of a respiratory infection is not new. In fact, it has occurred repeatedly over much of the last century and greatly hampered understanding of how diseases transmit.

Okay, but masks are still used, e.g. the gym a friend goes to has social distancing, spaced out the machines, the staff wear masks and people wear masks coming in and going out. It was more a response to one of the previous posters playing the usual "they wear masks in this situation, but not in that situation, can't explain that" anti-mask whataboutery.

My "whataboutary" is completely factual. No mask mandate in gyms but there is in shops. You can continue to dance around that issue all you want but I won't be engaging with you anymore.

Masks were never mandatory in gyms in Ireland. What are you talking about are policies of individual gyms. There were restrictions and bans on group activities, such as different types of classes but even there there were no mask mandates.

Have these absolute cretins nothing better to be at?

Jesus **** wept.

It's always "the people", as if it gives their opinion more credibility. I don't remember voting for a bunch of cretins to represent me (except in the last elections, of course).

You'd wonder what kind of people get off of that. Seriously.

You'd wonder what kind of people "get off" on not protecting children. The risk takers prehaps?

Yours Seriously.

Also without the "possibly" too.

And yet we've managed to get through without them for small kids. Does that make us risk takers? One thing that has emerged in this is just how extreme hardline zealots are prepared to be to defend their position, whatever that position may be.

They do not end up in ICU. And for the one statistical outlier that you may 'protect' you're doing untold psychological damage to hundreds of thousands of them. I think your 'risk' perception is way off.