Wanted: a small, finite number of RSS feeds I can follow to make sure I don't miss new concert announcements in #seattle. So far, The Stranger's / EverOut's feed has been quite good, but there's still a lot of stuff at Nectar, Neumos, et al. that doesn't get listed there.
I see very very few shows due to the severe COVID risk of attending them even fully masked, so it's all the more important to me that I actually know about the ones I really care about.
@xgranade ever considered an MSA 900? I wear it everywhere (even and especially to e.g. high risk mandatory attendance corporate events) and I consider the increase in risk ~negligible, especially if I don't take it off to eat indoors (which I sometimes do, depending on my comfort level and who else I'd be exposing)
Our 3M-brand P100s aren't nearly as nice as that, but they were good enough to keep us safe at FFXIV Fan Fest, so I'm a firm believer in respirators, to be sure.
@xgranade yeah, it's mainly about convenicene--wearing the MSA 900 for 10 hours a day does eventually get a bit tiring but only a bit, and incomparably to actually getting covid yourself, much less infecting someone you care about
I think a hallmark of its effectiveness is that we only got a cold once in several years now (closing on 1.5 years of MSA 900) and it was virtually certainly around someone we did not wear a respirator around
@whitequark That's really impressive, yeah. I frankly have no idea how many colds or not I've gotten, as my persistent and neverending allergies have pretty much perfect overlap with cold symptoms, but it sure seems to be reduced?
@xgranade (I don't take it off in trains, which I consider orders of magnitude higher risk than even being stuck with the same 10 guys in a hotel conference room, for obvious reasons)
I haven't had evidence of catching covid since starting wearing it despite being out and around fairly extensively, including on a lot of transit, although it is possible we've had a extremely mild asymptomatic case that we missed
@whitequark I've generally stuck to N95s for casual, and the P100 for high-exposure. And yeah, that strategy hasn't been perfect... I did catch it once and it's kind of fucked everything up now.
@xgranade I felt like I didn't want the additional overhead of figuring out what grade of protection I want if I can have a highest one at all times
that said, since covid severity seems to be viral load dependent, I do take that into account--taking the respi off for a minute very much != taking it off for a hour in the same environment
@xgranade (we caught it once, almost 2.5 years ago, in a clinic which conducted extensive and harsh RTPCR testing. it was so mild we only found out cause my headmate was doing a survery of S-protein antibody levels)
@whitequark@xgranade Counter-intuitively, a P100 isn’t even necessarily more protective than an N95 — the filter material is better, but the difference between a mask that fits perfectly and a mask that doesn’t (anecdotally, the range of “you cannot notice a leak just by feel” can include ~10% leakage) is larger than the diff in filter material, so it’s more about how specific masks fit your face.
The proper solution is fit-testing, but we’re being failed by lack of public infrastructure.
@lazerwalker@xgranade yes. also, in cases where you really want a well-fitting mask, you probably want to use one of those gels or waxes they use to seal the edge when you're working with particularly toxic substances (sorry, I don't know the proper industry name for them, just their existence)
for me, blocking the filters with my hands and blowing into the MSA 900 is enough mitigation for that risk (and it did help me catch a poor fit a few times!), so I'm stopping there
Oh that’s amazing! Whenever I’m in mass transit with my partner, wearing the 3M basically means we can’t hold a conversation.
Not like we enjoy lengthy conversations while in transit anyway; but the option to would be nice. I’m going to try and get one I think. Thanks for the info!
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