(02-19-2022, 02:23 AM)kalianna Wrote: I think itʻs time to let people make their own decisions..
That’s why I decided to get a better fitting and filtering mask. I'm now using..
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/v000152049/
And, surprisingly, even though they're bulky they are light, reusable, comfortable, and provide 99.97% protection..
I was happy to believe in a cloth mask, the best multi layers and all that, as long as everyone else was at least trying to comply with the distancing and masking and in general being respectful to other’s concerns. But since last summer that’s been slipping, and since the holidays I think it has begun to break down entirely. So yeah, if you don’t want to breathe another’s breath.. it’s on you.
I think our restrictive measures were breaking down before Omicron, and the two, it’s arrival and society’s lessoning of its restraints, converged to blow us out of the water. But even without Omicron society was losing its patience and has been organically moving towards 'living with’ rather than 'fighting against' for awhile. So, yep, if you don’t want it, it’s on you to keep from getting it. Which, from my perspective, doesn’t bode well for us if there’s a variant that escapes the boundaries of whatever immunity we might have..
For instance, this is the first published study of the latest variant.. which begins..
Soon after the emergence and global spread of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Omicron lineage, BA.1 (ref1,2), another Omicron lineage, BA.2, has initiated outcompeting BA.1. Statistical analysis shows that the effective reproduction number of BA.2 is 1.4-fold higher than that of BA.1. Neutralisation experiments show that the vaccine-induced humoral immunity fails to function against BA.2 like BA.1, and notably, the antigenicity of BA.2 is different from BA.1. Cell culture experiments show that BA.2 is more replicative in human nasal epithelial cells and more fusogenic than BA.1. Furthermore, infection experiments using hamsters show that BA.2 is more pathogenic than BA.1. Our multiscale investigations suggest that the risk of BA.2 for global health is potentially higher than that of BA.1.
The entire study (.pdf) is here.. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...1.full.pdf
And if that’s too much gobbledygook.. it means we could have a spring surge as big and bad and maybe even worse than the last one..