3 ms·
Masks Mission Accomplished
- DanBC 7y agoThe kinds of articles are intensely frustrating because they all misrepresent the science. "Masks protect other people from you if you're infected". Here's a study where they used four patients who had an active SARS-CoV-2 infection. https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparison https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-sur... They asked the patients to cough 5 times onto a petri dish. There were four sets of 5 coughs, with a new petri dish used for each set. The first set of five coughs used no mask; the second used a fluid resistant surgical mask; the third used a home made mask; and the fourth used no mask. Wearing a mask does reduce the amount of virus that gets onto the petri dish, but it doesn't stop all of it. The infectious dose of SARS-CoV-2 is tiny, so if people are wearing masks and going out coughing then they're infection other people. We're maybe dropping the R0 from 5.5 to 3.5 -- not nearly far enough. Worse, when they swabbed the masks they found the outside of the fluid resistant surgical mask had the virus. We know the virus can remain "alive" on fluid resistant surgical masks for about 7 days. We know members of the public will be pulling the mask up and down and re-adjusting it. Now their fingers are contaminated, and that contamination will spread to anything they touch.