It doesn't matter. Putting literally anything in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to help to some degree. It's not as if the crook of our arms are rated to filter viruses, but that hasn't stopped health organizations all over the world from recommending the vampire cough for years.
It's true that a mask alone isn't enough to guarantee anyone's safety and while community spread is high sending kids into schools is pretty much asking for them to get infected, but wearing masks is still far better than doing nothing, it's just that sadly "nothing" is all some people are willing to do to prevent the spread of the virus.
Too bad you can't know if you're sick or not until it's too late. It's one of the reasons this virus spreads so quickly. Even if you're not sick wearing masks also helps to protect you from getting sick. It's win/win for extremely minimal effort/inconvenience.
compared to hospitals being overrun, people getting seriously ill and dying (2,200+ US deaths every day) continuing economic harm and disruptions in education yeah it's pretty small thing that it's a little harder to communicate because your voice is muffled and you cant watch people's lips form words.
The benefit is always vastly overstated with masks, and the cost always downplayed. You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience.
Reality? Masks don’t seem that effective, they may reduce spread in some circumstances, but there’s so little evidence that mask mandates (the way we do them in America) have done much good. Obviously there’s a risk reduction on an individual level when an infected person wears a well-fitted, effective mask like an N95, but at a population level it hasn’t seemed to really help much. Every study seems to have huge error bars and a lot of confounding variables.
> You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience.
Masks lead to fewer cases and yes that means happier hospitals. The science says that masks work and the majority of people accept that fact. Mandates work too, but only to the extent that they are followed and enforced. In fact they work so well that a certain embarrassed republican governor who had evidence that they work decided to try to hide that information from the public so he can keep pushing anti-mask lies to his base (https://missouriindependent.com/2021/12/01/missouri-health-d...)
The real problem with tracking the effectiveness of mask mandates comes from fact that case numbers and deaths are easy to track, but it's much harder to track the number of places that refuse to enforce the mandates that are in place or the number of people who decide to ignore the mandate or try to get around them by dick-nosing.
It's a difficult problem because there are a lot of reasons people oppose mask wearing. For some it's just simple petulance. Insisting on stricter enforcement of mandates just gets stronger push back from those folks who'll stomp their feet and take a very "You're not my mom!" attitude about anyone telling them what to do. Others have just been mislead by misinformation and they can be reached out to and informed but so many have made mask wearing political and it's extremely hard to get people to listen to facts that they've built an identity around rejecting.
Mandates aren't the ideal. I genuinely wish they weren't needed (both because community spread was lower and people had more faith in science) but because we're stuck with a percentage of the population that is anti-mask for whatever reason the best we can do is try to drag them kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by issuing mandates and hope that enough of the anti-maskers in our communities will do their part that it helps.
The problem, as you point out, is that mask mandates are effective only in the fantasy world where the population adheres rigorously and uses the right kinds of masks. And even then, you’re only limiting spread by some amount in masked scenarios. A mask mandate doesn’t stop one family member from infecting the whole family. The biggest spread vector has always been the home.
I agree, it's an imperfect tool. It's just one of the best ones we have at the moment and when things get bad enough in an area people will reach to anything that will help.
not to mention facial expressions transmit an incredible amount of non-verbal information that transcends language itself (which the article touches upon). not taking this, and all the other variables that we now have a better understanding of, into account is highly negligent.
Too bad that condemning everyone as sick with zero evidence isn't how a free society works. Let's imprison everyone who "might" commit a crime.
Masks have gigantic effort/inconvenience and mental health costs. I can't think of anything but counting down the seconds until ripping that f*cking thing off my face while being strangled by that shit. Yet nobody cares about anyone else's mental health over their own perceived safety.
> condemning everyone as sick with zero evidence isn't how a free society works.
That is like saying that seatbelts and speed limits condemn you as a bad driver.
A free society protects everyone's rights. What people tend to forget is that every right has a price, in the form of an obligation. For example: You have the right to private property, and the price is that you must respect other's private property.
One of the things that is difficult to get about Covid is that you can simultaneously be infectious (able to transmit it to others) and asymptomatic (no headhache, no fever, not even sore throat). That is not something we are used to deal with, our other infectious illnesses aren't that stealthy. There are other things that are atypical about this virus (the kind of vaccine we used is new, the amount of infected is unusually high, it transmits via air...). Treating this illness with the knowledge and techniques that we have learned from other illnesses is simply not enough, there are too many differences.
The free society is protecting your rights. In particular, your right to not be infected by another person might have no other chance but to get into close contact with. The price of that right is that both of you wear a mask.
Even if the mask is terribly uncomfortable for you, you must endure it because other people also have rights. The same way that just because you are hot, you are not allowed to take off all your clothes in front of everyone.
> being strangled
You might just need a better mask.
My head is big compared to the heads in China. Most of the masks I have access to locally for cheap are made there. They tend to be quite uncomfortable for me.
I splurged ~60 bucks into buying several from different makers and found a model that works for me (Adidas Made For Sport, I wear it at the gym and do cardio with it. Comfortable and makes you look like Bane). When I'm going to use the public transport or visit a hospital I wear an FP2 mask with an ear protector. It is not comfortable, but at least my ears don't hurt a the end.
You are confusing _right_ with _constitutional right_. The US constitution also doesn't say anything about seatbelts, speed limits, or privacy when browsing the internet. Other US laws have rules that encode and protect those non-constitutional rights.
Besides, this is a worldwide problem. Looking at it from a US-only perspective is insufficient. Other countries have other legal systems and encode rights in a different way (some of them don't even have a written "Constitution").
> The virus will be around forever and everyone will be exposed.
That link that you sent is just an opinion from a single person written on a website. "Vinay Phrasad, hematologist-oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco".
Let me try to share my thought process when I see something like this.
I have no medical training, so in principle that person is more knowledgeable than myself. On top of that, he teaches at the SF University. Those are very good credentials. How could I possibly ignore what this person says?
- I know modern medicine is highly specialized - When I go to the family doctor and he detects a problem on one ear, they might send me to an otologist, for example.
- There is a branch of medicine for infectious diseases: epidemiology. This person is an "hematologist-oncologist". That is already a bit of a warning sign. If I really wanted to dig, I would google his name, look for publications/studies. Maybe his practicing title is hematologist but he also has done the epidemiology training, he just doesn't practice that on a hospital. Let's assume he does, because I don't feel like doing that work right now.
- He's a single person. Individual people have every day problems. Get ill. Discuss with their spouses. Are sleep-deprived because they have to take care of a dependent person. And a myriad other things. I have to consider the possibility that Dr Vinay just had a bad day when he wrote that. The usual way to counter this is by looking for opinions of "groups of people". Peer-reviewed journals, etc. It does not seem like "medpagetoday" has a strong peer-review policy. This is published as an "opinion piece". That is another red sign.
- This is not a regular epidemic, it has reached pandemic levels. The number of people specializing in those must be very limited, because we don't have pandemics frequently enough to sustain large numbers of professionals. It also requires some budget - to gather information, travel to places, run labs to do analysis, etc.
So I would ask myself _which groups of medical professionals which specialize on pandemic illnesses and have a budget exist_. I know of two: The CDC, and the World Health Organization.
I would then compare what you are saying and what Dr Vinay is saying versus what those organizations are saying.
And for now, both the CDC and the WHO say that everyone should be wearing masks (they just differ in the age at which they should start).
> You can't seriously expect people to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks.
I try not to "expect things in long term", nowadays. Every day I try to get the evidence, and then re-evaluate with what I learn. Sometimes I wish that I could have a predefined idea of how the world works and then be able to ignore any piece of evidence that contradicts that, like I see some people are doing. Constant uncertainty is draining!
My expectation for _today_ is that everyone keeps wearing masks. So is my expectation for next month. I _hope_ that the CDC and WHO know what they are doing, and I think they are our best bets. I will follow their indications the best I can, but I can only _hope_ that the rest of the world does the same.
Actually there's no valid scientific or medical reason for most people to keep wearing masks. I recommend listening to infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi who explains it very clearly.
Dr. Monica Gandhi is an outlier. Outlier voices are important. Unique perspectives are valuable (her's coming from experience with HIV) but while listening to the views of an outlier can be comforting to cling to when they are telling you what you want to hear, it's important to look at what most experts are saying and to consider the evidence that cause them all to agree. A statement like "there's no valid scientific or medical reason for most people to keep wearing masks." is simply false. We have a massive amount of evidence that masks are effective. Once we have overwhelming evidence that something else works better to slow the spread of covid in our communities and protect ourselves and each other from infection I'll be thrilled to ditch the masks, but so far we don't.
If you experience a great deal of anxiety or feel like you are being strangled while wearing a mask you are either wearing it wrong or have a medical issue this isn't how most people experience wearing a mask.
This is what I wear. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/511sZBCeHES._AC_.jpg I have bad asthma. My lungs are basically shit. I can't jog a 1/4 mile without having breathing problems. I have no problems wearing this mask save for doing sustained physical activity.
wait until you find out about the mental health costs of not being able to get healthcare when you need it because of staff shortages or constant interruptions in education, or the effects of long covid or the loss of a loved one. I'll take masks over more of those kinds of problems anytime.
Interventions work differently for different diseases. Influenza is significantly hampered by social distancing, surgical masks, and elbow coughs.
Covid 19 is a different virus and the interventions of a flu pandemic are not going to yield the same results.
Infection is a binary status. You are either infected or not. There is no such thing as half infected or slightly infected. The probability of infection goes up when the air is more and more saturated with airborne virus... When air in a poorly ventilated space is fully saturated with virus, it simply does not matter if you wear a surgical mask or not as these interventions are doing nothing of significance for you in that situation.
> Covid 19 is a different virus and the interventions of a flu pandemic are not going to yield the same results.
The results don't have to be identical. As long as a benefit exists and it can help reduce the major problems we're facing right now it's worth it.
> Infection is a binary status. You are either infected or not.
The amount of virus matters in if you get infected or not. The more you do to reduce the amount of virus that is in the air the better. You are correct that you can't expect perfect protection from a mask while standing in a fog of virus, but that's rarely the scenario people experience. Masks have been shown again and again to he effective at helping prevent the spread of covid. I wouldn't feel comfortable sitting in a classroom with 40-60 other kids while there were thousands of new infections every day in my community, but if I were forced to, I'd make damn sure I had a mask on. What's the alternative?
Exhaling through a sieve still blocks the largest wettest particles, and limits the distance virus is forcefully expelled through the air. Again, it's not perfect, but infection is purely a numbers game. The more virus you can deposit on a mask, or a sleeve, or even a sieve, the less virus is in the air and the longer it takes for a virus to go from a mouth on one side of a room to a receptor on the other side of a room the better.
Many of the test aerosols they use to test N95s and similar are smaller than the coronavirus. Also they have done virus measurements from sick people through masks that prove there is filtration happening.
N95s work via an electric polarity of the filter. This charge is what captures the viruses. Filtration fades when the charge is lost.
I don't need to see your studies because I have helped build and certify N95 factories and know a lot about it. The masks arent usable for long and arent reusable, either.
Cloth masks do nothing and are not a consideration to any serious adult.
> N95s work via an electric polarity of the filter
...as well as mechanical filtration[1].
> To minimize the effect of electrostatic attraction, we used isopropanol (IPA) to remove nearly all dipole charges in the filter layer (Figure Figure77C) and measured the filtration efficiency. The filtration efficiencies of N95 respirators after IPA treatment decreased about 7–15% after removing all dipole charges. Such decreases in filtration efficiencies indicated that electrostatic charges contributed to the filtration performance.
Others here have pointed to studies RE the efficacy of cloth masks. Which, while not great, is not 0 either. I'm willing to be wrong, but do you have any research showing that "Cloth masks do nothing"?
> The masks arent usable for long and arent reusable
Only because lawyers got involved and are trying to minimize liability (ie: you used it wrongly, not our problem anymore).
Or are you telling me that if I put an N95, and remove it after 5 min, I can't reuse it 1 hour later, but it's fine if I wear it 8 hours straight. Yes, yes, it could get contaminated on the inside surface in between, I know. But will it stop filtering viruses just because I took it off?
From a Twitter thread by Dr. Claire J. Horwell, Director of International Volcanic Health Hazard Network (IVHHN), Professor at Duram Volcanology – “here's a short thread to answer the question: can you wear a disposable #facemask more than once? The answer is YES. Many manufacturers state that masks should be disposed of after 8 hours but this is not true. […] Unless a mask has become clogged full of particles in a very high exposure scenario (e.g. mining, construction) or the worker is in a contaminated front-line healthcare setting, it is still perfectly useable after 8 hours, unless it is broken.”
