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> People are told to wear surgical masks, which say on the side of the box that they do not protect against viruses, because it is something they can do. It li

> People are told to wear surgical masks, which say on the side of the box that they do not protect against viruses, because it is something they can do. It likely has some protection, and it inhibits the onward spread of the virus. If enough people wear them, it has a protective effect on the entire population: “The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.” https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118

betwixthewires 6y ago
Wearing a grocery bag instead of a condom will likely also reduce your risk of unwanted pregnancy, that doesn't translate into being effectively protective. Masks help lower droplets and aerosol in the air from your breath. So they slow the contagion. But they do not stop it, if the average person were likely to contract a contagion within 6 months with normal behavior and a mask reduces transmissibility by 50%, this just means the average person is now likely to contract it within a year. It slows the spread. It does not reduce your risk of contracting the virus over your lifetime. And if you have comorbidities and are at risk, you are just as likely to die when you get it 1 year from now or 6 months from now. Masks did give us more time to develop a vaccine. So in the end they helped society. But they do not protect you. The only ways to protect yourself are a vaccine, social isolation until the contagion is eradicated, or hermetically sealing yourself in a plastic bodysuit every time you are in close proximity to other people. A lot of people confuse these two concepts (managing a population vs managing individuals) and think that they apply to and correlate directly with one another. They do not. It is the same counterintuitive mistake as misunderstanding test accuracy and false positive rate. This is the only point I was trying to make. CDC guidelines are not designed to protect you in a pandemic, they're designed to manage a population.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  By masks, I presume you mean surgical or cloth masks. FFPs are known highly effective in protecting people both ways against virus this large, more or less indefinitely, assuming there's no operational error. Trouble being that apparently USA cannot make enough of them. Mind you, operational error is likely over longer timespans.

betwixthewires 6y ago

Wearing a grocery bag instead of a condom will likely also reduce your risk of unwanted pregnancy, that doesn't translate into being effectively protective. Masks help lower droplets and aerosol in the air from your breath. So they slow the contagion. But they do not stop it, if the average person were likely to contract a contagion within 6 months with normal behavior and a mask reduces transmissibility by 50%, this just means the average person is now likely to contract it within a year. It slows the spread. It does not reduce your risk of contracting the virus over your lifetime. And if you have comorbidities and are at risk, you are just as likely to die when you get it 1 year from now or 6 months from now. Masks did give us more time to develop a vaccine. So in the end they helped society. But they do not protect you. The only ways to protect yourself are a vaccine, social isolation until the contagion is eradicated, or hermetically sealing yourself in a plastic bodysuit every time you are in close proximity to other people. A lot of people confuse these two concepts (managing a population vs managing individuals) and think that they apply to and correlate directly with one another. They do not. It is the same counterintuitive mistake as misunderstanding test accuracy and false positive rate. This is the only point I was trying to make. CDC guidelines are not designed to protect you in a pandemic, they're designed to manage a population.

AstralStorm 6y ago
By masks, I presume you mean surgical or cloth masks. FFPs are known highly effective in protecting people both ways against virus this large, more or less indefinitely, assuming there's no operational error. Trouble being that apparently USA cannot make enough of them. Mind you, operational error is likely over longer timespans.