Does wearing a face mask help to prevent COVID? Three and a half years after the pandemic began, here's what scientists have learned.
In an interview for 60 Minutes, CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook posed that question to Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech University professor specializing in aerosol science.
"They are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get COVID because it's reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you," Marr said about masks.
No mask is 100% effective. An N95, for example, is named as such because it is at least 95 percent efficient at blocking airborne particles when used properly. But even if a mask has an 80% efficiency, Marr said, it still offers meaningful protection.
"That greatly reduces the chance that I'm going to become infected," Marr said.
Marr said research shows that high-quality masks can block particles that are the same size as those carrying the coronavirus. Masks work, Marr explained, as a filter, not as a sieve. Virus particles must weave around the layers of fibers, and as they do so, they may crash into those fibers and become trapped.
Marr likened it to running through a forest of trees. Walk slowly, and the surrounding is easy to navigate. But being forced through a forest at a high speed increases the likelihood of running into a tree.
"Masks, even cloth masks, do something," she said.
Not that I expect most people to believe it at this point...
Lockdown has made me realise that people don't crave freedom, they instead crave a lack of responsibility to a sociopathic level. They are unwilling to consider a greater good nor anything else beyond the immediate effect on themselves.
The lock downs were always going to be a failure. Stay-at-home measures should have been last resort due to harmful effects (the economic harms, the educational harms, the harms to access to healthcare, the harms to societal wellbeing … just the way we all function … and especially mental health).
We destroyed and entire generation with lockdowns. Gen Z will never recover from that.
Lol. Meanwhile, in places with functional, proper lockdowns, you know what happened? No-one died of covid. (Well, 7 out of 2 million).
And then you know what they did? Because there was no covid anywhere around, there were (almost) no restrictions. And no-one died of covid for all of 2021 (actually zero).
People could walk around, free of worry, fear and disease. Because the lockdowns worked, and worked well - when they were actually done.
Now, half-assing things... That was basically the worst of both worlds. And if there is one thing the USA excels at, it's half-assing things.
Lucky for me you're not my PhD mentor and this isn't graded. You don't have to accept that isolation lead to a huge up tick in suicides, but you can't provide a argument that it didn't.
But you want to be a reality denier, and live in your imaginary fantasy world, I can't help you.
What's worse is how little you value human life. A secondary issue to the main topic of you ignoring reality and actual recent history of places that aren't where you live.
The science for responding to something like covid wasn't complete lockdown. It was isolating those at risk, quarantine the infected, do contact tracing, and limit large crowds of people.
The issue is not with lock downs, the issue is a piss poor government handling of the situation. Leaving everything "open" for business would have quite literally collapsed sectors of services to the point of potentially snow balling into something worse.
Everything should have remained open within countries, international borders should have closed for six months. International ports could operate with certain restrictions to prevent cross contamination.
Hospitals were on the verge of collapse WITH lock downs. Can you imagine how bad it would have been if everything remained open? How many people died because of covid WITH lock downs active? Hospitals fail because they are overwhelmed, and it spit balls from there. I believe your suggestion would have been catastrophic at the least.