It is known that this is an aerosolized pandemic. Airborne. Cloth and surgical masks do not work.
Source – there are many to choose from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...
The posted study on mandates has effectively no meaning. Closed FFP2/N95-style masks work. This is fact. A mandate does not make such masks magically appear on people’s faces. Therefore it is obvious that there is no effective correlation between the word “mandate” and what SARS-CoV-2 does.
Even a cloth or surgical mask does lower that probability. Not enough that it is likely to make a difference if you are going to be exposed for a long time, such as spending hours in room with infected people like might happen at school.
But if you are say going to just do say a quick trip to the grocery store and you only have a surgical mask available, wearing it will lower your chances of getting COVID at the grocery store compared to going maskless.
Some sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296 , https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm .
The only reasonable explanation I can find for this is that N-95 masks were in short supply at the time and they had to be saved for medical professionals. We needed a distraction to prevent the general public from hoarding N-95 masks.
But here we are, 2 years later, still debating whether masks with holes orders of magnitude larger than the airborne virus particles they are supposed to stop are effective.
N95 masks work due to a dipole charge, not necessarily because of the mechanical filtration size.
I saw firsthand, working with findthemasks.com, just how many people came to that conclusion on their own and rapidly aggregated and donated as many N95s as they could.
It is bonkers to me that we're not all wearing N95s by default until case-rates really come down, but I have accepted that our current state is the way of the world.
And I assumed water droplets were in fact several orders of magnitude larger than the virus, but would still be caught my masks. Otherwise what's the point for any virus?
control-f for "mask": 1 match, and it's in a sentence talking about how mask quality and fit is important to preventing infection, but doesn't elaborate on the effectiveness of cloth/surgical vs n95 masks.
On the other hand there are also studies that show it working, eg. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>The surgical and N95 masks were both effective in significantly reducing the risk of infection, which together with the finding that 30% of non-infected staff did not use masks (table 2) supports that transmission is not airborne.
Do you have better a better study for this, preferably some sort of meta-study?
this sort of statement really bugs me.
anything that slows the airspeed/spread is helpful. and there for "works". A cloth mask is definitely better than no mask... its has a much higher chance of catching larger droplets than no mask, it has a much higher chance of rate limiting even smaller droplets than no mask.
if 100% of the population worse cloth masks you would get a significant reduction of spread just because of the rate limiting.
N95 masks are not 100% effective.. so do we claim that they "Dont Work" as well? no we dont.
Nothing is black and white. nothing is works or doesn't work... every little step on the way every little effort all helps and by extension "Works".
Schools are not going to mandate this, and even if they do kids will wear them loose/wrong. So knowing that, where do school boards go from here?
There is, currently, no magic bullet available that will work in a school setting.
the fact thats uts still nit obvious, 2 years on us absurd
Makes ya wonder.
There are professions that've been doing this for decades without any apparent negative impacts.
I’m glad that public health officials are actually doing this research and publishing these conclusions. Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but I was worried that there would be limited retrospection about positions taken during the pandemic given the political sensitivities.
Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and are better prepared for the next pandemic.
Hehe, that's a great joke to start monday with
In my country, the concern wasn't transmission among K-12 students, who are at lower risk, but instead, transmission from K-12 students to adults who were at higher risk of hospitalization and/or death.
I wonder at what point such people will began to consider the evidence in earnest, regardless of the fact that most of these mandates have thankfully been repealed.
I remember seeing a kid forget to wear one and he was treated like a plague rat for the all of 5 seconds before he realized what was going on.
Also, the "mask" thing was _never_ clear. It flipped very frequently. Sure, science can change but if its "changing" that much, that fast it does make me loose a bit of faith.
Ad-hominem attacks are worthless on any politically-contentious issue, because of course people are going to be trying to destroy the reputation of scientists who present data that opposes a political narrative.
There are dozens of other studies about this topic, many of them done carefully by serious researchers.
But I get there’s a bunch of adults who can’t wear masks as well as a 3yo so in that case the adults are more likely to catch or spread covid with their inability to wear masks right.
Mask usage at the community level does not follow the same strict policies related to mask usage that medical professionals do, like discarding them between operations.
Wearing the same mask over and over every day and removing it when you sit down to eat is a very ineffective policy.
And it's kind of an abuse of power for the government to mandate something with such weak science.
Outside an industrialized hospital sanitization chain, it’s actually fine to reuse a mask – as long as it’s a mask that works against SARS-CoV-2 aerosol to begin with.
I can provide sources.
As another pointed out in a different sub-thread, N95s work as long as they are fit-tested and worn to spec. If you have facial hair, muss the banding so that it doesn't form a perfect seal, etc., the N95 might help, but is not a solution. This means that people with facial hair will not benefit from N95 neither in the form of protection of self nor others.
We have seen in the US that children are now develop-mentally behind. The US govern said what was normal for 24 month child is now normal for a 30 month child. All for a mask program that never worked.
Would love to see your sources if you have them handy.
I doubt that very much given the spate of laws controlling teachers passed recently, the record low pay, record staffing shortages, and record resignations.
The sad part is the hundreds of thousands of tons of waste produced due to ineffective mask materials, design, and usage.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/15122577603...
Also, look under the authors, it lists "truth in data LLc" a right wing conspiracy nuthouse.
As expected.
Simply put, as the science now states, the majority of masks weren't worth wearing. If it's not a KN95 or better, it's all but pointless. That is, you're effectively wearing no mask at all.
We know this. Yet occasionally mask mandates kick in again, and the updated science (i.e., KN95 or better) is completely ignored.
The disconnect - and those virtue signaling with subpar masks - is disturbing.
