Tool to decide if I should wear a mask that week?

January 25, 2023 3:50 PM

I want a website where I can look up my Seattle-area ZIP code, see one number, and use that number to decide if I should wear a mask that week when I'm out in public. Any suggestions for what that number should be, and where to find it?

I don't want to have to look at these rates and those rates etc, I just want a nice big traffic light saying MASK or NO MASK.

posted by The corpse in the library to Health & Fitness (26 answers total)

What's your threshold of risk for "Mask vs. no-mask" currently? There's the CDC Community Level for an easy "Low, medium, high"; but if you're looking at that and going "Yeah, but it's said low all through this wave, so why should I trust a stat that's based on hospital occupancy" it's not going to be much help.

Wastewater detection rate would be what I'd think to pick; though I'm not sure what the threshold should be there.
posted by CrystalDave at 4:04 PM on January 25, 2023

After a lot of pointless searching, this NYT by county search tool is as good as I found for you. What you want does not exist these days.

"The community level of Covid-19 in King County is low based on cases and hospitalizations, according to the most recent update from the C.D.C. on Jan. 19. Read more about the C.D.C.’s recommendations here.
The number of hospitalized Covid patients has fallen in the King County area. Deaths have increased.
The test positivity rate in King County is very high.
An average of 194 cases per day were reported in King County, a 31 percent decrease from the average two weeks ago.

Frankly, I can't tell. It's "low" by (redefined) standards of "community level" and "very high" by actual testing. I don't even know what any of that means.

I don't think anywhere is going to give you an easy-peasy MASK OR NO MASK sign these days. Everything is upon your own judgment, head and health, and good luck to you. Frankly, if you have any concern about getting it at all, you should be wearing one indoors every day, every time, but nobody's going to listen to me on that one, so.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:08 PM on January 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

Check your pulse, if it is above zero, wear a mask.

Seriously, the relevant stats lag so far behind the current risk, a day by day analysis is really not helpful.
posted by hworth at 4:10 PM on January 25, 2023 [38 favorites]

If you really don't want covid, then I would wear a mask all of the time outdoors. Even if you could find a good metric, catching covid will still be a non-zero chance.
posted by buffy12 at 4:12 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: > "Yeah, but it's said low all through this wave, so why should I trust a stat that's based on hospital occupancy"

Yup, I don't care (I mean, I do care, but you know what I mean) about hospital occupancy for this.

> What's your threshold of risk for "Mask vs. no-mask" currently?

I don't know. Nobody in my house is at unusually high risk of complications, but I am afraid of long COVID. I've been wearing masks (and working with the public) this whole pandemic, and am trying to figure out what my risk tolerance is these days.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:27 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bob Wachter is more lax than me but I find his “state of COVID” threads (about his own risk calculus given numbers) to be good. You’ll have to find the numbers elsewhere, and they’ll be Seattle metro, and lagging. Here’s his most recent. He talks about long COVID a lot but I think there’s a good chance his numbers on that are low.

Day and zip code resolution is not feasible for lots of reasons.
posted by supercres at 4:29 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think this exists, due to known data lags. Kings County, WA .gov specific info:
Due to reporting delays, the following are considered incomplete and are excluded from our reports:
Cases: 3 most recent days
Hospitalizations: 4 most recent days
Deaths: 5 most recent days
PCR test counts and percent positivity: 7 most recent days
Data on testing volume and percent positivity have a larger reporting delay because some laboratories report results using processes that are not fully automated. There is also substantial underreporting of antigen and point-of-care test results, such as rapid tests for diagnosing COVID-19 conducted by facilities other than laboratories.
& just today:
Wednesday, January 25, 2023: "Recent declines in testing and reported cases may be due to closures for the holiday weekend and should be interpreted with caution."
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:29 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

This isn't possible, for multiple reasons.

We don't know in real time how many people are infected.

We don't know exactly how contagious each infected person is.

We don't know how much masking reduces the chance of infection.

But even if we knew all that, we don't agree as a society about what level of risk is acceptable.

Some people would refuse to wear a mask even if they were walking through a Covid ward. Others will wear a mask if they are walking alone at dusk through an urban park with no one else in sight.

The simplest metric is to always wear a mask indoors in public. That's what I mostly do. I carry a mask in my pocket, and I put it on when I go into a store. I'm more strict about this when I notice headlines about upticks, and less strict when I notice headlines about declines in infection rates. I keep myself boosted. That's not a number, but it's about as good as you're going to get, given the state of the science, of our public health infrastructure, and of our society.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:41 PM on January 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

For most of the pandemic my household's one number was case rates per 100,000 people and our threshold number happened to work out to about half of Bob Wachter's threshold number for doing things like eating indoors. (This was all rather notional as local cases rates have never yet gotten that low, but it was helpful to have pre-decided that number would be our call to stop and reevaluate our risk mitigation and until then we'll stick to the course we've chosen.)

I'd like to make my decisions based on wastewater data moving forward as I think at this point that's the only really reliable data. But I haven't figured out yet what the right number is for that. That's where I'd suggest you focus, though.
posted by Stacey at 4:41 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

You should probably reasonably assume that if you are going around other humans without a mask, you may very well get covid and possibly long covid. Remember how for like, 2 weeks once in a great while they'd be all "you can take masks off, rates are low" and then rates immediately went up to high without them? And how this happened every single time? And how rates are never really very low unless you live in the middle of nowhere?

But even if we knew all that, we don't agree as a society about what level of risk is acceptable.

Yeah, this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:59 PM on January 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've never stopped masking and I still caught COVID from, as far as I can tell, eating in a hotel room with some also-very-careful out-of-town friends a couple days before New Years'. And I just got a chest X-ray because my heart rate is doing things heart rates shouldn't. There isn't a good number right now - different variants have different transmissability/vaccine escape rates, our reporting on this is absolutely abysmal, and asymptomatic spread has never stopped being a thing.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:09 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wastewater data is delayed and "incomplete" too, unfortunately: "About 40% of people with Covid-19 shed the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their feces". The graph, a "7-day rolling average for the SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations adjusted for population size and dilution." (kingcounty.gov's Department of Health, Covid-19 Data Dashboard for Wastewater) At the site's Technical Notes: "DOH updates the COVID-19 dashboard on Wednesdays only"; "Time delays occur in our reporting of laboratory testing data".
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:10 PM on January 25, 2023

Response by poster: While I appreciate the comments, it's getting a bit chatfiltery in here. I'm looking for numbers, please, or explanations of why numbers aren't going to be useful.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:12 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I go with wastewater counts because, so far as I can tell, that's the number that's least susceptible to bias from things like unreported test results or test centers being closed on Sundays and stuff like that. I picked 750 RNA copies/ml as my "be extra cautious" number, for basically arbitrary reasons: 1) that's about what the levels were when I got COVID (at a risky, unmasked event) and 2) it goes under 750 often enough that I don't have to be uber-cautious 100% of the time. This is in eastern Massachusetts; the Seattle numbers could be wildly different. 750 may well be overly or insufficiently cautious; I just kind of accepted that I was going to have accept uncertainty and arbitrariness.
posted by mskyle at 6:44 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I use the infection rate, under Transmission rates, on my county's page on https://covidactnow.org/ . If that number is well above 1 it means COVID is increasing at an exponential rate and I'm extra careful till that number drops.

Frankly, though, I always wear a mask indoors when I'm not at home. It's just easier. I experimented with masks to find N95s that fit well and are comfortable.
posted by abucci at 6:46 PM on January 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

If it helps, I look at this a different way. I keep a mask in my pocket and use it based on crowd size and air exchange, rather than community cases.

Here are some of my personal masking rules:

- if there are more than about 5 people within a couple meters of me

- of there are a lot of people who are all strangers to each other (I consider one family of 5 who live together, or a group of kids all in the same class, to be much less risky than 5 strangers on a bus because the strangers' network of exposure is broader)

- anywhere that the air is obviously full of aerosols (people are talking, singing, panting)

- anywhere that the air has had aerosols all day (so, I would mask even in a relatively empty room if I knew it had been full of people an hour ago)

- in any metal tube with strangers (taxi, bus, train, plane)

- anywhere sick people go (hospital, pharmacy)

- if I'm around anyone who I know is immunocompromised

- when I'm with anyone who is also masked (to be considerate of their concern level)

- I also mask when there's no benefit to being unmasked. If I have a job interview, there's a genuine social benefit to being able to smile and speak clearly, so I might take the risk and do it unmasked, because building that relationship is so important. But if I'm just wandering through a big box store? Even though the risk may be small, it's definitely not "worth" the risk, so I'd mask.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:09 PM on January 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

Modeler Trevor Bedford estimated that we may only be catching 1 in every 38 cases in our official test statistics. Because of this, I don’t even think the CDC’s old community transmission map based on rates per 100k per 7 days is necessarily a good guide, never mind their community levels map based on hospitalization. If I try to work off those numbers anyway and multiply my moderate known local transmission by 38 I get a very high number — over 2600 per 100k per 7 days, equivalent to a regional prevalence of 2-4%, depending on how long we think a case lasts. This is well above any threshold I think is reasonable, and I don’t have good reason to expect it to improve, so the most sensible heuristic remains “mask indoors.”
posted by eirias at 7:15 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

For me the relevant number is the temperature- while covid isn't "seasonal" so much, it does get worse in the winter time (along with other nasty respiratory diseases) as people congregate in indoor spaces and are less likely to have windows open.
posted by freethefeet at 7:25 PM on January 25, 2023

I have remained pretty vigilant about wearing a mask indoors when I’m around any sort of large amounts of people. I still haven’t had Covid yet. Not gonna lie, I’ve done some larger gatherings where I didn’t were a mask for a bit and kind of feel like I’m lucky I didn’t get sick. But it’s tough. The more that time goes by the less people I see wearing masks. So in some ways mask wearers are starting to become outcasts. I agree that there’s no good way to get an accurate metric right now. It’s too hard to get numbers when the reporting isn’t consistent. If you have even the slightest concern I say just wear a mask. Don’t let the pressure of feeling like an outcast sway you.
posted by ljs30 at 9:22 PM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I still use MicroCovid for this. I have the scenarios and risk settings saved in my browser so I only have to change them if I am doing something different.
posted by Gable Oak at 4:38 AM on January 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

One in four adults in the US is disabled, so if you're around four or more people you don't know, there's a good chance that one of them is disabled. Disabled people are at higher risk of infection and severe illness from COVID because of their underlying medical condition in because of systemic health and social inequities. Mask up when you're in social settings.
posted by twelve cent archie at 6:39 AM on January 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

Oh, chiming in one more time for an alternate approach. Last year around this time I was surprised to see some experts recommending the very low-tech "if several people in your network are coming down with it, that's when you tighten your behavior" (which might include masks, choosing social gatherings carefully, etc). At first I was really skeptical because nobody's social network is a representative sample, but then I realized that those sampling considerations really only come into play when you're trying to set broad policy -- when all decisionmaking is devolved to the individual, the math checks out, at least as of last winter (I wish I could find a link to the study, but the author is escaping me). The challenge here is that with decreased testing, it's possible people in your network will not know that they have COVID and will pass off mild symptoms as something else, so this datasource is somewhat compromised too. But you could certainly mask up when your contacts have symptoms of anything and that would probably improve your chances of avoiding a nasty cold in general.
posted by eirias at 6:53 AM on January 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

One resource I use to keep up generally on this stuff is Your Local Epidemiologist. She doesn't have hard numbers re: masking - as everyone's saying, no one does - but I find it very helpful to get an epidemiologist's-eye view of the current state of reporting, vaccines, waves, etc.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:15 AM on January 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

My take is very similar to nouvelle-personae's. I find community transmission numbers so unreliable and confusing these days that I stick with personal comfort level. If I did things like dining indoors at restaurants I might stress about the math more, but I fortunately live in a temperate climate and have maybe done it a handful of times at most since 2020. So far my family hasn't gotten Covid that I know of but I have a child in school so that's partly dumb luck.
posted by Threeve at 11:42 AM on January 26, 2023

I can’t get long Covid if I don’t get Covid, so I wear a mask and take other measures to avoid Covid because I can’t be sure I’ll be around others who all care about taking precautions if I go into public.

I know several people who’ve tested positive for the first time recently, so that’s a good enough reason for me to continue masking.
posted by SillyShepherd at 6:25 PM on January 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

MicroCovid.org was great but they've run into capacity issues that make their model less reliable. Still a helpful gutcheck. Run a few scenarios and see how the risk budget changes. Even if you can't rely on the exact numbers, you can see the relative impact of your actions. It makes "mask" / "no mask" clear once you decide your risk tolerance.

CovidActNow.org offers red/yellow/green lights and transmission data to get past the not very helpful community spread data.

Other than that I rely on infection rate (above or below 1), comparative transmissibility and severity of the variant, timing of holidays, and the direction of the trend in cases the past few weeks.
posted by rockyraccoon at 7:12 AM on January 27, 2023 [2 favorites]