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...
Even if the research had come out that masks did absolutely nothing to protect against Covid, I would have absolutely no regrets for masking up. We did what we thought was the right thing based on the evidence available and it harmed no one. The worst that would’ve happened if we were wrong (outside of a false sense of security) is that we looked silly for awhile. The people that were vehemently against wearing masks were tool-sheds who were manipulated into their position by an Administration who assumed it would affect Democratic-leaning cities/states more and who are so blinded by their anti-science views that they didn’t even understand the threat posed by Covid. Mask wearers did the right thing and the evidence backs us up. Anti-mask idiots hopefully learned an evolutionary lesson, but I doubt it has really ever sunk in.
The real problem for the Right Wing is that masks are at their most effective stopping the wearer's germs from getting OUT, even though they're also pretty effective at stopping others ' germs from getting IN. They can't stand the idea of sacrificing even a tiny bit of comfort for anyone else to benefit. Even if it also helps themselves.
So fucked up masks became politicized: I had hoped that the pandemic would help normalize them so people would just mask up whenever they feel sick. It could've mitigated the spread of all sorts of airborne disease.
Instead, they've been demonized by insane fascists. What a stupid world we live in...
Sometimes I just wear a mask to piss them off lol.
There's something to be said for masks that aren't 100% effective that isn't often said: letting in a little virus when out in public, but not enough viral load to cause an infection, very likely has a positive effect on your immunity to the virus.
Assuming a mask blocks 50% of particles or droplets in either direction (preventing yours from escaping if you're sick, preventing outside particles from getting to you), when 2 people wear masks that reduces the chances of transmission in a given retail encounter by 75%.
Reducing those odds by that much, when (from an epidemiological POV) the biggest math factor is to drive the r number down below 1, it's a huge deal. If you do that consistently, the virus becomes rarer and rarer and has fewer opportunities to mutate and more importantly, you're feeding fewer and fewer human beings to it.
It's such a tired topic. Most pathogenes of this kind travel by attaching themselves to little droplets, aerosols and larger spit particles. Thinking that even cloth masks aren't at least reducing those to a certain degree by catching said particles just feels dishonest, and medically related masks have been in use in hospitals and other locations for ages. Do people think they are worn out of fashion? And now we've got even more studies and data that confirms all of this even more, but covidiots will just continue with their idiocy. 🙈🙉
I hope I won't have to witness an even deadlier disease turning into a pandemic, but at the rate things are going it is probably not very unlikely.
The problem isn't that "most people" won't believe it. The problem is that there is very little conversion of people who didn't already believe it. The ones who most need to understand this will flat out refuse to believe any kind of science on the matter, because being right is what is most important to them. Admitting they were wrong just isn't going to happen.
Mask safety can be taught and ingrained with fire survival, wet cloth to breath through so you aren't sucking down hot ember and ash. It's akin to that. the forest analogy is a good one but instead of you being forced, it would be like the trees coming at you i think would have been a better way to say it. imo