Something you don't hear enough about. Viral load reduction due to face masks.
Even if you get the virus, if you get a smaller load you probably won't get that sick. I will hear doctors talk about how important it is to reduce viral load and they will suggest masks do this but I haven't seen too many articles touching on it like this one does.
Snip:
One and Two : Missing the Compounding Effect, Missing the Nonlinearity of the Risk of Infection
Taleb argues that mask-wearing doesn’t just reduce the risk of transmission by a fixed percentage. There are non-linearities at play, so a reduction in probability of transmission of x% actually reduces transmissions by another, larger percentage — perhaps as large as 95%.
For me, this jibes with the idea of looking at viral transmission not as a threshold event (“Get exposed to virus, get the virus”) but as a cumulative exposure based on your total viral load, with some inflection point (likely personal) where you become infected if a particular exposure value is exceeded.
This fits with Taleb’s other work. Everything is dose dependent — poisons can be beneficial at small doses, but fatal at higher ones. Covid-19 is probably not beneficial at any dose. But it’s also likely that infection (and perhaps the severity of infection) is dependent on total viral load (also likely in a non-linear fashion). That explains why workers, like front line medical staff, that receive higher viral loads get sick more and die more from the virus.
Masks, in reducing the wearer’s total viral load (both by protecting them partially from virus in the environment and protecting others from spreading the virus if infected) reduce the viral load substantially. They might even reduce it past an inflection point at which infection occurs in all but the most susceptible parties.
If that’s the case, then masks may be both necessary and (shockingly) sufficient to control environmental exposure and infections from Covid-19.
More: https://medium.com/gado-images-insights/face-masks-may-be-necessary-and-sufficient-to-stop-covid-19-f4f5a295deb
