We’re a clinically vulnerable family and we take infection control very seriously. My first-author paper was accepted as a spotlight (top 23 out of 801) at the ICML 2026 Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop. We thought long and hard and decided that me travelling from the UK to Seoul is worth the risk. Below I describe the trip and the precautions we took to minimise the risk of me catching the conf flu and bringing it back home. A well-fitting mask probably did most of the work, but we used many other layers of protection.
4 weeks before the workshop
Spotlight notification, I jokingly tell my wife that maybe I should consider going, esp since covid numbers are at a 5-year low. We ask her parents if they’d be willing to quarantine for a week and then drive to us for 24h to help her with childcare while I’m away. They happily agree.[1] I start looking into the feasibility of it all, checking the biggest risks, how long I’d be there, etc. Chatty is very helpful.
3 weeks before
Uni approves funding for my trip, including higher expenses for risk reduction: driving+parking and taxis instead public transportation, and a hotel in Gangnam walking distance away from the conference location. I guess I’m going!
Wife’s parents arrive, we Pluslife test them,[3] all negative, party time! I start sleeping alone to get some better sleep before the trip. It sort of works, but not perfectly. I get the SIP valves, fit them on two 3M Aura 9330+ masks. Here I should’ve done a quick qualitative fit-test on the valved masks, esp with a straw in, but I didn’t. Oops.
2 days before - travel day
I drive for 2h to Heathrow, park, wait in the car until ~2h before the flight. I eat a large meal my wife has prepared the night before, put on my SIP-valved mask, get my hand sanitiser locked and loaded, go to the terminal and straight through security (no check-in bags). Find a quiet spot, chill. Call to the gate, unmask for about two seconds for an ID check,[4] go into the plane.
It’s a 12.5h direct flight. I booked a window seat beforehand and got lucky to have no one sit next to me. I make the two overhead fans blow wind at my face, that air is HEPA filtered on nearly all commercial planes nowadays. I don’t use my portable battery powered air filter. I don’t talk with my neighbour in the aisle seat. I see maybe six other masked people on the plane.
When food time comes, I decline hot food, take bottled/canned drinks for the flight and sealed snacks for later. After everyone finishes eating, I quickly drink a huel I brought, a coke and some water through the SIP valve without taking off my mask.
It gets to roughly my usual UK sleep time, there are 4 hours of the flight left, I try to sleep.[5] I get 1-2h of sleep before food time comes again. A bit later we land, I wait under the HEPA filtered air fans until most people leave, so that I can just get up, grab my luggage and leave. I say 감사합니다 to the crew.[6]
1 day before - Incheon airport terminal
Here comes my cultural shock. Maybe 30% of airport staff are masked with pretty well-fitting masks, including my immigration officer. Mask off for 2 seconds for ID check. I get out to land-side and notice that all staff at both food places I saw are wearing masks and gloves. I decide getting a warm takeaway meal is worth the risk and a justified reward, instead of eating one of the 20+ protein bars I brought. I take it outside, find an empty spot, unmask after about 16h of wearing one, eat.[7] You should not eat food spicy enough to give you a runny nose if you plan to wear a mask afterwards, just saying… Oops.
5,000 ppm CO2 taxi drive
I look for a taxi driver without a beard for a better mask fit, find one, but don’t notice the glasses, which generally make mask fit worse. I estimate the size of their face[8] and ask them to wear one of the masks I brought: good material, ear-loop, nose bridge foam.[9] The driver offers to wear their own mask, but I ask that they wear mine. With hindsight, this was likely a mistake, as the masks they have fit very well, and the one I gave didn’t. I don’t know about the material of their masks, but fit is often much more important than the material.
We started driving. I noticed that the CO2 started climbing over 2k ppm. I couldn’t open the window, because it was raining like crazy. I asked via google translate to turn on the ventilation. The driver turned on the AC, which probably turned off external air getting into the car. The CO2 reached 3k ppm. The rain was still going strong. I should’ve turned on my portable air filter, but I forgot about that. Oops. CO2 at 4k, the driver starts coughing. I write a message and google translate it saying that the air is very stuffy and asking to open the windows a tiny bit. CO2 nearly hits 5k ppm. I think they get scared that I’ll barf all over inside the shiny Lexus and open the window quite a lot, letting the rain in on the car seats and me. CO2 goes to ~1k ppm, we arrive at the hotel in Seoul, Gangnam area a bit after that.
Hotel
I ask the reception to not have room service or anyone else entering my room. I press the “Do not disturb” button inside the room and keep it on the whole time. The CO2 monitor was showing 700+ ppm, meaning someone was likely inside recently. After opening the windows I turn on the portable air filter. 1h later I unmask, shower, take a 90min nap.
After waking up (about 18:00 local time), unpacking and eating I go out for a walk, randomly meet a labmate, look inside another 10 food places, count 8 with all staff wearing masks, not bad! About 10% of people on the street are also wearing masks.
This feels very different from the UK, where people often react weirdly to masking. For example, my GP is quite aggressive about my masking, questions it in a mocking way and tells me that masks don’t work. He then agrees to my request for a reasonable accommodation[10] and wears the mask I provide. Upside down. With the nose bridge foam on his chin. Maybe that’s why they don’t work for you, mate! Another example is our homebirth experience. We had a superhero main midwife looking after us, who was doing things for us without us even asking, like sending emails around to make sure that no one who can’t wear a mask for medical reasons attends the birth and such. Labour starts, the first midwife arrives on scene, I politely ask her if she could mask, “of course not, why would I do that?” … Rant over, got carried away a bit, sorry! Back to the trip. Back at the hotel at 22:00 (14:00 UK time), I try to sleep, get a good 4h in, then spend a lot of the time just resting in bed with eyes closed.
Workshop day
I get up, shower, eat, go to the conference, find out I need my student ID to get my discounted conference badge. Oops. Wife is sleeping, doesn’t answer the phone. I manage to find it on my home PC through remote connection. I go to hang my poster at a spot in the corner of the room with no other poster board on one side. I asked the organisers for a quieter spot in advance, and they assigned a new one for me, this was great, thank you![11]
I take the lift to the open car park on the roof to eat some protein bars. In the lift, I see these signs. Civilisation has moved ahead in some places when it comes to infection control.
I prepare my 2min spotlight talk, rehearse it, give a demo to my labmate, he approves, I sit down in front to wait for my turn to present. I present:
Poster sessions
I put on my stoggles, because people will be talking directly to my face, tape the CO2 monitor to the poster board and do this:
For about 3 hours instead of the allotted 1 hour. People kept coming and were genuinely interested and fascinated by the work. A person from one of the big labs said something along the lines of “if what you’re saying is true, does that mean we’re screwed?”. I also met a past collaborator for the first time in person. The poster session and the old and new people I met there was the highlight of the trip and made it all worth it.
I take my poster off, go outside, shove a couple of protein bars at my face, mask and go back inside for the other poster session where I’ll be checking the posters of others. I prepared a bit in advance and knew which spots the people I wanted to chat with were at. This helped me dive in to the crowd and go straight for the target. After chatting for a while with the first person, I notice someone else I wanted to talk to walk by. I say bye and catch up with the new person. We chat on their way to the main workshop room,[12] sit at a table, meet someone else who is also very interesting, talk about babies, a little known Tom Lehrer song, Minecraft speedrunning, all sorts of good stuff.
After the lightning talks started we couldn’t chat anymore, and I can watch the talks online later, so I leave to grab some food before the mechinterp social at 17:30, sorry! I scout for an empty spot outside I could unmask and eat at, go to grab some takeaway, get some Gong Cha pearl tea[13] and go back to the spot outside. I eat as I contemplate why I chose spicy food again… Oops. I wrap up and go to the mechinterp social.
Mechinterp social
Lots of people inside. Stoggles back on and I go upstairs to find the loo. I notice the upstairs room is nearly empty, great! I come out from the loo, the upstairs room is now full, windows closed. Oh well, I go back out. There are enough people outside to chat with. Lots of fun chats about pleasant nonsense, about research, about life. At some point I go to the loo again, notice the upstairs room is pretty empty, but the CO2 monitor shows 1,900 ppm, no thanks! Back outside, more chats, people start leaving. Downstairs room is relatively empty now, one full wall is open to outside, CO2 showing 700 ppm inside, so I go in to chat with the same past collaborator I met at the poster session before. I leave after that, call my labmate, we have a bit of a walk around the area, then back to the hotel, shower and sleep at 23:00.
1 day after - travel back
My body is still in UK time, so I get like 2h of sleep and lots of resting with my eyes closed. This sucks because I will need to drive back home late evening UK time. I do have an option of spending the night at a hotel in Heathrow and drive home in the morning, but I’d rather not. I get up at around 5:00, shower, eat, pack my bags, go meet the taxi I booked for 7:00. The driver has no beard, but a very large face and glasses, so I ask them to wear their own mask, it fits very very nicely, including going perfectly under the glasses. I ask to turn outside ventilation on. The taxi is a large van, the CO2 stays around 1,000 for the whole drive to the airport without even opening windows.
At the airport I find an empty outside spot to wait for the flight without my mask. 2h before the flight I grab takeaway at the same place, go to my spot, mask off, eat the food. Not spicy this time. Four dragonflies are hugging the window right next to me.
Put on my other SIP valved mask, go in. Here, as expected, I lose my Huels at security - Incheon still does the “100ml max per container, clear containers, etc” thing. I spend some time finding the highest kcal/ml drinks I can - 3 bottles of some sweet milky stuff at 200kcal/240ml. This was surprisingly difficult - there was no proper food store anywhere near my terminal gate. I go to the gate, meet several of the cool people I met at the workshop, yay! I had to unmask twice this time before boarding.
Flight
14.5h this time. I booked the same window seat (I chose the sides to have less sun on my side both ways). The seat next to me stayed empty until the very last passenger to enter the plane took it. They were from ICML, but I chose not to talk to them, didn’t want the extra exposure so up close and for so long. During food time I mentioned to the flight attendant that I can’t eat the proper food, so they gave me some extra liquid calories!
Sleep. Now I have to balance the risk of infection from a broken fit on the mask while sleeping vs driving sleep deprived vs having to stay at the hotel. I decide to try to get as much sleep as I can. Between 1-2h sleeps I get up for a walk/loo, go for a chat with the people from the workshop, try to move around.
Drive
Same as before, wait for people to leave, etc. I didn’t have to unmask at all when entering the UK with a British passport! Get some food, eat in the car, start driving back. Google Maps says “Stay on M25 (M4?) for 42 miles” uh oh… sounds boring. I wasn’t sleepy, but my mind kept wandering and I had a bit of trouble with lane-keeping. After that it was a much more varied drive, not sleepy at all, I arrived back home safely at 21:30 or so.
Home. But wait, there’s more!
I enter the house and go straight into quarantine upstairs. We’re lucky to live in a house that allows a comfortable separation into two parts with separate bathrooms and showers. I do my Pluslife covid test, shower, go to sleep. Another test in the morning, food brought to the door, air filter running. Meeting the family in the garden with me masked.
It is currently day 5 of quarantine with tests every morning. Ideally we’d do 7 days, but this time we’ll do 6. That’s because my wife is flying to Lithuania to visit friends and family using all the same precautions tomorrow. Me and my father-in-law are staying on childcare duty. I know, it sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy film… 5.3 on IMDB type. Wish us luck!
P.S. I think you can probably get a large fraction of infection control we achieve just by wearing a well-fitting N95 or better mask in high risk situations. However, I have a hunch, that the Pareto frontier of infection control effort vs actual infections per year is quite sharp. I.e. if you want to go to basically 0 airborne infections, you need to be pretty extreme on the precautions. It is nice to never get sick though! Perhaps a silly example, but if you have kids going to a nursery, you probably shouldn’t drive 2h to a dentist that’s absolutely amazing on infection control. It’s not gonna change anything since you’re catching all the bugs like they’re pokemon from the kids anyway. We, on the other hand, love the Tangmere dentists and their full PPE, “VIRUS KILLER” air filters in every room, and other gear. They even proactively help us reduce risk by suggesting we wait in the car before the appointment, pay when we’re back home and such.[15]
P.P.S. At least for the first days after the trip, it felt very different masking in the UK compared to before the trip. I was walking on the beach with people around, wearing my mask, being all:
Not the first time they travel to us like that. We’re very lucky to have some supportive family members. Other family members keep telling us to go to a psychiatrist instead and that children need more infections to build their immune systems. I heard that last one from a health visitor too.
I ordered the SIP valves a bit too late. Despite the SIP staff trying very hard to expedite the delivery, they arrived from California about 2h after my flight departed. Thankfully, a kind stranger from one of the clinically vulnerable families groups in the UK sent me a couple. Thank you kind stranger and thank you Chatty for the idea to ask around!
Ideally I’d want them to wear a 3M Aura 9330+ with head straps instead of ear loops, which is what I wear, but I found that people find them hard to put on properly. Also, while N95 certification requires head straps, I found that turning a 3M Aura into an ear loop mask by cutting the head straps and tying them into ear loops still passes the qualitative fit test. Ear loop masks can be good enough. We use such modified 3M Auras when we want to be able to put the masks on and off quickly in lower risk situations.
At the actual poster time more people were standing there and saying that it’s their assigned spot. Something went wrong somewhere, but we sort it out peacefully.
There are plenty of others, just search around. These communities also do social Zoom gatherings. Join in if you want to hear horror stories from NHS doctors fighting for their right to wear a mask while seeing patients, cancer patients who have nurses forcibly remove their masks and such.
This proactive thinking is very rare and we treasure it. One of our nurses recently did something like that and now we try to make appointments with them if we can.
Summary
We’re a clinically vulnerable family and we take infection control very seriously. My first-author paper was accepted as a spotlight (top 23 out of 801) at the ICML 2026 Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop. We thought long and hard and decided that me travelling from the UK to Seoul is worth the risk. Below I describe the trip and the precautions we took to minimise the risk of me catching the conf flu and bringing it back home. A well-fitting mask probably did most of the work, but we used many other layers of protection.
4 weeks before the workshop
Spotlight notification, I jokingly tell my wife that maybe I should consider going, esp since covid numbers are at a 5-year low. We ask her parents if they’d be willing to quarantine for a week and then drive to us for 24h to help her with childcare while I’m away. They happily agree.[1] I start looking into the feasibility of it all, checking the biggest risks, how long I’d be there, etc. Chatty is very helpful.
3 weeks before
Uni approves funding for my trip, including higher expenses for risk reduction: driving+parking and taxis instead public transportation, and a hotel in Gangnam walking distance away from the conference location. I guess I’m going!
I start ordering things like extra masks, SIP valves[2], stoggles, extra Pluslife covid tests.
1-2 weeks before
We get covid vaccines.
5 days before
Wife’s parents arrive, we Pluslife test them,[3] all negative, party time! I start sleeping alone to get some better sleep before the trip. It sort of works, but not perfectly. I get the SIP valves, fit them on two 3M Aura 9330+ masks. Here I should’ve done a quick qualitative fit-test on the valved masks, esp with a straw in, but I didn’t. Oops.
2 days before - travel day
I drive for 2h to Heathrow, park, wait in the car until ~2h before the flight. I eat a large meal my wife has prepared the night before, put on my SIP-valved mask, get my hand sanitiser locked and loaded, go to the terminal and straight through security (no check-in bags). Find a quiet spot, chill. Call to the gate, unmask for about two seconds for an ID check,[4] go into the plane.
It’s a 12.5h direct flight. I booked a window seat beforehand and got lucky to have no one sit next to me. I make the two overhead fans blow wind at my face, that air is HEPA filtered on nearly all commercial planes nowadays. I don’t use my portable battery powered air filter. I don’t talk with my neighbour in the aisle seat. I see maybe six other masked people on the plane.
When food time comes, I decline hot food, take bottled/canned drinks for the flight and sealed snacks for later. After everyone finishes eating, I quickly drink a huel I brought, a coke and some water through the SIP valve without taking off my mask.
It gets to roughly my usual UK sleep time, there are 4 hours of the flight left, I try to sleep.[5] I get 1-2h of sleep before food time comes again. A bit later we land, I wait under the HEPA filtered air fans until most people leave, so that I can just get up, grab my luggage and leave. I say 감사합니다 to the crew.[6]
1 day before - Incheon airport terminal
Here comes my cultural shock. Maybe 30% of airport staff are masked with pretty well-fitting masks, including my immigration officer. Mask off for 2 seconds for ID check. I get out to land-side and notice that all staff at both food places I saw are wearing masks and gloves. I decide getting a warm takeaway meal is worth the risk and a justified reward, instead of eating one of the 20+ protein bars I brought. I take it outside, find an empty spot, unmask after about 16h of wearing one, eat.[7] You should not eat food spicy enough to give you a runny nose if you plan to wear a mask afterwards, just saying… Oops.
5,000 ppm CO2 taxi drive
I look for a taxi driver without a beard for a better mask fit, find one, but don’t notice the glasses, which generally make mask fit worse. I estimate the size of their face[8] and ask them to wear one of the masks I brought: good material, ear-loop, nose bridge foam.[9] The driver offers to wear their own mask, but I ask that they wear mine. With hindsight, this was likely a mistake, as the masks they have fit very well, and the one I gave didn’t. I don’t know about the material of their masks, but fit is often much more important than the material.
We started driving. I noticed that the CO2 started climbing over 2k ppm. I couldn’t open the window, because it was raining like crazy. I asked via google translate to turn on the ventilation. The driver turned on the AC, which probably turned off external air getting into the car. The CO2 reached 3k ppm. The rain was still going strong. I should’ve turned on my portable air filter, but I forgot about that. Oops. CO2 at 4k, the driver starts coughing. I write a message and google translate it saying that the air is very stuffy and asking to open the windows a tiny bit. CO2 nearly hits 5k ppm. I think they get scared that I’ll barf all over inside the shiny Lexus and open the window quite a lot, letting the rain in on the car seats and me. CO2 goes to ~1k ppm, we arrive at the hotel in Seoul, Gangnam area a bit after that.
Hotel
I ask the reception to not have room service or anyone else entering my room. I press the “Do not disturb” button inside the room and keep it on the whole time. The CO2 monitor was showing 700+ ppm, meaning someone was likely inside recently. After opening the windows I turn on the portable air filter. 1h later I unmask, shower, take a 90min nap.
After waking up (about 18:00 local time), unpacking and eating I go out for a walk, randomly meet a labmate, look inside another 10 food places, count 8 with all staff wearing masks, not bad! About 10% of people on the street are also wearing masks.
This feels very different from the UK, where people often react weirdly to masking. For example, my GP is quite aggressive about my masking, questions it in a mocking way and tells me that masks don’t work. He then agrees to my request for a reasonable accommodation[10] and wears the mask I provide. Upside down. With the nose bridge foam on his chin. Maybe that’s why they don’t work for you, mate! Another example is our homebirth experience. We had a superhero main midwife looking after us, who was doing things for us without us even asking, like sending emails around to make sure that no one who can’t wear a mask for medical reasons attends the birth and such. Labour starts, the first midwife arrives on scene, I politely ask her if she could mask, “of course not, why would I do that?” … Rant over, got carried away a bit, sorry! Back to the trip. Back at the hotel at 22:00 (14:00 UK time), I try to sleep, get a good 4h in, then spend a lot of the time just resting in bed with eyes closed.
Workshop day
I get up, shower, eat, go to the conference, find out I need my student ID to get my discounted conference badge. Oops. Wife is sleeping, doesn’t answer the phone. I manage to find it on my home PC through remote connection. I go to hang my poster at a spot in the corner of the room with no other poster board on one side. I asked the organisers for a quieter spot in advance, and they assigned a new one for me, this was great, thank you![11]
I take the lift to the open car park on the roof to eat some protein bars. In the lift, I see these signs. Civilisation has moved ahead in some places when it comes to infection control.
I prepare my 2min spotlight talk, rehearse it, give a demo to my labmate, he approves, I sit down in front to wait for my turn to present. I present:
Poster sessions
I put on my stoggles, because people will be talking directly to my face, tape the CO2 monitor to the poster board and do this:
For about 3 hours instead of the allotted 1 hour. People kept coming and were genuinely interested and fascinated by the work. A person from one of the big labs said something along the lines of “if what you’re saying is true, does that mean we’re screwed?”. I also met a past collaborator for the first time in person. The poster session and the old and new people I met there was the highlight of the trip and made it all worth it.
I take my poster off, go outside, shove a couple of protein bars at my face, mask and go back inside for the other poster session where I’ll be checking the posters of others. I prepared a bit in advance and knew which spots the people I wanted to chat with were at. This helped me dive in to the crowd and go straight for the target. After chatting for a while with the first person, I notice someone else I wanted to talk to walk by. I say bye and catch up with the new person. We chat on their way to the main workshop room,[12] sit at a table, meet someone else who is also very interesting, talk about babies, a little known Tom Lehrer song, Minecraft speedrunning, all sorts of good stuff.
After the lightning talks started we couldn’t chat anymore, and I can watch the talks online later, so I leave to grab some food before the mechinterp social at 17:30, sorry! I scout for an empty spot outside I could unmask and eat at, go to grab some takeaway, get some Gong Cha pearl tea[13] and go back to the spot outside. I eat as I contemplate why I chose spicy food again… Oops. I wrap up and go to the mechinterp social.
Mechinterp social
Lots of people inside. Stoggles back on and I go upstairs to find the loo. I notice the upstairs room is nearly empty, great! I come out from the loo, the upstairs room is now full, windows closed. Oh well, I go back out. There are enough people outside to chat with. Lots of fun chats about pleasant nonsense, about research, about life. At some point I go to the loo again, notice the upstairs room is pretty empty, but the CO2 monitor shows 1,900 ppm, no thanks! Back outside, more chats, people start leaving. Downstairs room is relatively empty now, one full wall is open to outside, CO2 showing 700 ppm inside, so I go in to chat with the same past collaborator I met at the poster session before. I leave after that, call my labmate, we have a bit of a walk around the area, then back to the hotel, shower and sleep at 23:00.
1 day after - travel back
My body is still in UK time, so I get like 2h of sleep and lots of resting with my eyes closed. This sucks because I will need to drive back home late evening UK time. I do have an option of spending the night at a hotel in Heathrow and drive home in the morning, but I’d rather not. I get up at around 5:00, shower, eat, pack my bags, go meet the taxi I booked for 7:00. The driver has no beard, but a very large face and glasses, so I ask them to wear their own mask, it fits very very nicely, including going perfectly under the glasses. I ask to turn outside ventilation on. The taxi is a large van, the CO2 stays around 1,000 for the whole drive to the airport without even opening windows.
At the airport I find an empty outside spot to wait for the flight without my mask. 2h before the flight I grab takeaway at the same place, go to my spot, mask off, eat the food. Not spicy this time. Four dragonflies are hugging the window right next to me.
Put on my other SIP valved mask, go in. Here, as expected, I lose my Huels at security - Incheon still does the “100ml max per container, clear containers, etc” thing. I spend some time finding the highest kcal/ml drinks I can - 3 bottles of some sweet milky stuff at 200kcal/240ml. This was surprisingly difficult - there was no proper food store anywhere near my terminal gate. I go to the gate, meet several of the cool people I met at the workshop, yay! I had to unmask twice this time before boarding.
Flight
14.5h this time. I booked the same window seat (I chose the sides to have less sun on my side both ways). The seat next to me stayed empty until the very last passenger to enter the plane took it. They were from ICML, but I chose not to talk to them, didn’t want the extra exposure so up close and for so long. During food time I mentioned to the flight attendant that I can’t eat the proper food, so they gave me some extra liquid calories!
Sleep. Now I have to balance the risk of infection from a broken fit on the mask while sleeping vs driving sleep deprived vs having to stay at the hotel. I decide to try to get as much sleep as I can. Between 1-2h sleeps I get up for a walk/loo, go for a chat with the people from the workshop, try to move around.
Drive
Same as before, wait for people to leave, etc. I didn’t have to unmask at all when entering the UK with a British passport! Get some food, eat in the car, start driving back. Google Maps says “Stay on M25 (M4?) for 42 miles” uh oh… sounds boring. I wasn’t sleepy, but my mind kept wandering and I had a bit of trouble with lane-keeping. After that it was a much more varied drive, not sleepy at all, I arrived back home safely at 21:30 or so.
Home. But wait, there’s more!
I enter the house and go straight into quarantine upstairs. We’re lucky to live in a house that allows a comfortable separation into two parts with separate bathrooms and showers. I do my Pluslife covid test, shower, go to sleep. Another test in the morning, food brought to the door, air filter running. Meeting the family in the garden with me masked.
It is currently day 5 of quarantine with tests every morning. Ideally we’d do 7 days, but this time we’ll do 6. That’s because my wife is flying to Lithuania to visit friends and family using all the same precautions tomorrow. Me and my father-in-law are staying on childcare duty. I know, it sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy film… 5.3 on IMDB type. Wish us luck!
Links and resources
P.S. I think you can probably get a large fraction of infection control we achieve just by wearing a well-fitting N95 or better mask in high risk situations. However, I have a hunch, that the Pareto frontier of infection control effort vs actual infections per year is quite sharp. I.e. if you want to go to basically 0 airborne infections, you need to be pretty extreme on the precautions. It is nice to never get sick though! Perhaps a silly example, but if you have kids going to a nursery, you probably shouldn’t drive 2h to a dentist that’s absolutely amazing on infection control. It’s not gonna change anything since you’re catching all the bugs like they’re pokemon from the kids anyway. We, on the other hand, love the Tangmere dentists and their full PPE, “VIRUS KILLER” air filters in every room, and other gear. They even proactively help us reduce risk by suggesting we wait in the car before the appointment, pay when we’re back home and such.[15]
P.P.S. At least for the first days after the trip, it felt very different masking in the UK compared to before the trip. I was walking on the beach with people around, wearing my mask, being all:
Not the first time they travel to us like that. We’re very lucky to have some supportive family members. Other family members keep telling us to go to a psychiatrist instead and that children need more infections to build their immune systems. I heard that last one from a health visitor too.
I ordered the SIP valves a bit too late. Despite the SIP staff trying very hard to expedite the delivery, they arrived from California about 2h after my flight departed. Thankfully, a kind stranger from one of the clinically vulnerable families groups in the UK sent me a couple. Thank you kind stranger and thank you Chatty for the idea to ask around!
Near PCR accuracy and sensitivity, ~300 EUR for the dock, ~10 EUR per test.
Breathe in fully, remove the mask, put it back on, make sure the fit is good, breathe out fully to push out the dirty air.
I’m not sure if I should have tbh, the risk of the mask fit breaking during sleep might be too high.
감사합니다 - gamsahabnida - thank you.
Wearing a tight mask for so long leaves marks, and they tingle for many hours afterwards.
I have two sizes of the masks I give people and choose the more appropriate one.
Ideally I’d want them to wear a 3M Aura 9330+ with head straps instead of ear loops, which is what I wear, but I found that people find them hard to put on properly. Also, while N95 certification requires head straps, I found that turning a 3M Aura into an ear loop mask by cutting the head straps and tying them into ear loops still passes the qualitative fit test. Ear loop masks can be good enough. We use such modified 3M Auras when we want to be able to put the masks on and off quickly in lower risk situations.
Which they advertise on the TV in the waiting room: “If you need anything, just ask for a reasonable accomodation!”
At the actual poster time more people were standing there and saying that it’s their assigned spot. Something went wrong somewhere, but we sort it out peacefully.
It was a separate one from the posters, not sure why, there was plenty of space.
Haven’t had that in forever, so I took a narrow straw… a rookie mistake. Oops.
There are plenty of others, just search around. These communities also do social Zoom gatherings. Join in if you want to hear horror stories from NHS doctors fighting for their right to wear a mask while seeing patients, cancer patients who have nurses forcibly remove their masks and such.
This proactive thinking is very rare and we treasure it. One of our nurses recently did something like that and now we try to make appointments with them if we can.