HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

Is masking indoors like buying insurance for your brain?


Even if the risk of brain damage from a viral infection is low generally, it might not be low for you personally.

And so it seems logical to mask indoors as a form of insurance to protect your brain.

  👤 pavel_lishin Accepted Answer ✓
Sure, if you think that wearing a seatbelt is like buying insurance for your body.

It's all risk mitigation.

👤 mrpound
Posts from 2020
👤 anovikov
I think someone who wears mask indoors outside of major pandemics is already kind of late insuring their brain.

At best it makes an "i am a radical leftist" statement.

👤 duxup
Everything is a risk to hassle / inconvenience tradeoff.

I'm not sure what the math is here but wearing a mask is a fairly high on my personal inconvenience scale. As far as daily non pandemic life, I'm not sure how much benefit there is.

I've got kids in school and so on, I'm going to be exposed to some extent. Is a lower level of potential exposure going to do me any good?

👤 dlcarrier
According to a recent study, the asnwer is no: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01956...

Hospitals that stopped requiring facemasks earlier didn't have higher rates of disease spread than those that continued to require them.