[gjsman-1000]

Also, imagine if said hard hat caused unknown long-term effects by itself. We know, for a fact, that some plastic fibers from masks end up in the lungs permanently. What happens when they go there? Nobody knows. How many of them are there in the average person? Nobody knows. What are the long term effects? Nobody knows. How does it affect lung development in both short-term and long-term, particularly in young people? Nobody knows. We just hope it's fine.

[Diederich]

How would you compare these cited risks associated with mask wear with the risks associated with more likely C19 infections, and perhaps more important with the emergent recognition of risks associated with long covid?

My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.

Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.

Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.

There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

[gjsman-1000]

In which case, get vaccinated, and wear a mask yourself, if that concerns you. For those of us who have had COVID and recovered quickly (like myself, in ~2 days), you need to convince me that my mask-wearing protects anyone else, when they can wear masks themselves if they are so inclined. Even then, with 58% of COVID hospitalizations being vaccinated, and over 82% of the nation having had COVID at some point (according to IMHE), mask wearing and vaccination appears to be a deferment on the inevitable.

> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.

Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.

[Diederich]

Thanks for the link, I'm looking forward to reading through it.

[jltsiren]

Disposable masks have been routinely used in healthcare since at least the 1960s. I would be extremely surprised if there are no studies of the long-term health effects of mask use. Especially since the people who could do such research are the ones who would suffer most from any adverse effects.

[gjsman-1000]

There are some, even from this pandemic. They aren't great.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/

[Erikun]

I've never heard of that, if that is a fact it would be nice to include a reference.