Masks

I double mask or wear a KN95 since late summer.

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Since buying a stack of KF94 masks i wear them everywhere.

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We have a bunch of regular disposable masks but I don’t like the way they gap, so I wear a cloth mask over. We also have KN95 inserts to go with cloth masks. One of the above is my usual masking approach but sometimes I wear a standalone KN95.

I just head out in scuba gear these days, can’t be too safe with omicron floating around.

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nope, they lifted the mask mandate in may or june for vaccinated people only. then they decided unnvaccinated people are forbidden from indoor dining, gyms, and entertainment venues.

now with the new mask mandate, the exception are places that have a vaccine requirement, so indoor dining, gyms and entertainment venues still won’t require masks.

they fog up my glasses and make me blind. without a mandate, i don’t wear them. my apartment building re-instituted a mandate a while ago and i said fuck it to that. i kinda want to infect some of my neighbors who are making noise.

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Get lazik surgery. That’s what I did. No more foggy glasses.

oh god no. there is no way i’m messing with my eyes with surgery until i absolutely have to because i’m elderly and blind.

i don’t mind glasses. they are fashionable these days, way more than in the past. i just hate the fogging with masks.

20 yrs ago one of my first projects was med mal w a bunch of ophthalmology claims. Lasik was just sort of coming of age and I asked the consultant about it - they said the client advised to give it a few years to sort itself out. I suspect the ensuing 20 yrs has allowed that to happen.

Related - old office had a gym for free to all people in that bldg. But you couldn’t run on treadmill between 9 and 5. The bouncing messed up the eye surgery center one floor above it. That was crazy.

I also bought some KF94 masks a while back. The shape of them fits my face way better than the KN95 masks

Someone’s salty…

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I just ordered the ones you linked earlier in the thread.

I feel the same way. I don’t mind glasses, and something about eye surgery gives me the willies. I am not squeamish in general, but I am about my eyes.

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This probably isn’t the right thread for this story, but the story is about virus particles in incredibly small droplets, so I’ll claim it’s kind of tangentially related. Mostly, just cool science.

Researchers build a model of a coronavirus with 300 million atoms. Then put it into a tiny droplet of lung fluid with (apparently) 1 billion atoms. The droplet is so small it only contains one virus particle. The lung fluid isn’t just water, it has other molecules from the lungs.

Putting their model in the world’s second largest supercomputer, they bring it to life, modeling both kinetic and electrical forces. They track atoms in time intervals of “four millionths of a billionth of a second”.

The one takeaway in the article is that certain of the lung molecules are long chains with negative electrical charges. The spikes on the coronavirus have positive charges. So the lung molecules cluster around the spikes, maybe keeping the coronavirus from actually bumping into the outer wall of the droplet. They speculate that hitting the wall leads to deterioration of the the virus, so this electrical charge thing helps the virus survive longer in extremely small droplets.

The intriguing thing is that the spikes on the delta variant have more positive charge than the spikes on the earlier variants. And, the spikes on the omicron variant are more positive than the delta.

Neat video in the article, too.

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I looked into Lasik. My corrected vision is very good, with little distortion, and I was told the odds were I would lose that. So no, I’m not going to do any eye surgery until I need it, for cataracts or something.

i’m not following. you were told that your vision would get worse with lasik? :confused:

i’ve heard that there are some side effect, such as nighttime vision being worse and there is the rare nightmare case where it destroys your eyes entirely. it is so not worth the risk to me when glasses are just fine. if i’m going to do something to improve my life, lasik is pretty low on the list.

Yeah, if/when I need cataract surgery I would get it. I wouldn’t like it though.

My corrected vision is excellent, and even without glasses my vision in one eye isn’t too bad.

yeah, my left eye without glasses is pretty bad, but my right eye is usable.

I think she means the result of lasik without glasses may not be better than her current vision with glasses.

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I would be a lot less nearsighted, so I wouldn’t need glasses. But my corrected vision would likely be worse, yes. Lasik often leads to minor irregularities that can lead to blurring of fine details or even starbursts around a light source.

A friend who is a professional typesetter was told not to do lasik because it might interfere with his job, which requires excellent corrected vision.