What a weird sentence. “I’m not someone who doesn’t give the great unwashed zero credit.” Hmmm.
I’m STILL trying to parse all the possibilities. And it could be a typo, too. But I understand his/her intent now (thank you).
I think you miss my point. I’m talking about leadership. I’m talking about judgment. I’m talking about liberties. I’m talking about all the myriad aspects of public policy as it relates to this pandemic, not about aerosols and interferons.
Though, for that matter, I might point out that one thing this ordeal has laid bare is that, yes, although I certainly know it’s not what you meant, not at all, but yes, science – or actually, here is where I should say ‘the science’ – is in its way very much a kind of popularity contest. It is revealing itself to be every bit as fraught with human failings as every other human endeavor. Productive debate and open-minded thought was one of the very first casualties. I am not talking about the scientific method, of course. Far from it. I’m talking about the industry of science, with all its human actors. I think a lot of people associate the word ‘science’ in their mind with things like physical constants and the laws of motion. Like, science is something that just is, and the best we can do is try to discover it. But of course, that’s not the case at all. It’s something highly politicized and leveraged toward specific ends. Great scientists are out there doing great science, yes. That has always been going on and always will. But a whole lot of other people are out there doing, well, a whole lot of other things. And their voices are everywhere.
I don’t recall who said it, a day or so ago, I think, but boy did they hit the nail on the head. They said that the biggest weakness we have right now in public policy is that scientists are playing amateur politicians and politicians are playing amateur scientists. Amen to that.
Thanks for the catch on the ill-formed sentence. One should never try a triple negative!
You’re welcome. So was it a typo? I take it ThelmaLou had it about right? (Just curious)
That’s incorrect. Scientists are being scientists. They’re just not telling you what you want to hear.
Nah. You were talking about masks and aerosols. You can’t pull the woolly mask over our eyes.
Whoa, bobot, helluva good call!
Naw, think about the basic physics. Like, did you see the cartoon that compared it to peeing? A little crude, but a good illustration.
If neither of us wears pants, and you pee in my general direction, I get covered in your pee. If I wear pants, that provides me a little protection, but I still get your pee on me. But if YOU wear pants, I stay dry – whether or not I’m wearing pants.
That’s pretty much how low-effectiveness masks work. They do a really good job of catching most of the crud the mask-wearer exhales, but only a mediocre job of filtering out crud that’s already widely dispersed in the air.
My mask doesn’t do me much good if you are going around bare-faced. It really is only protecting you.
Just like the surgeon’s mask is really only protecting the patient.
33,843,979 total cases
1,012,657 dead
25,148,268 recovered
In the US:
7,406,146 total cases
210,785 dead
4,648,683 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Love the analogy but haven’t seen the meme, so I looked it up.
The pee meme for mask wearing for anyone else who hasn’t seen it.
There’s a promising drug for the treatment of COVID 19:
As I understand it, it binds to and disables a key protease used by some coronaviruses to replicate. That includes SARS-CoV-2 as well as a feline coronavirus. In fact, it was originally developed for the cat disease.
Here’s a technical paper from Nature about it:
That’s a nice way of thinking about it, and sure, it definitely seems like a hypothesis to be explored. But hypothesis is, of course, a long way from law. The aerosols and the pee are, I’m sure you will recognize, quite different things. We could get into the whole other question of whether someone could pee on you from across the room, but I think it would be best to start with the physics of the particle sizes and the ways in which they travel.
Again, if it’s science you insist on, then it’s science you have to be faithful to – ideally with experimental data, not analogy. I know you know that no one knows what the threshold viral load is for infection by this very contagious bug, no one knows exactly how much of it is exhaled through a mask or around a shield, and no one knows exactly how far it can travel or how long it can float in the air. The only proper – the only truly honest and forthright – scientific statement to make is that we just don’t know the exact effects the masks are having in every situation. It’s not that ‘the science’ is long settled.
Not sure a typo, per se. But yes, I meant to say either ‘who gives zero credit to’ or ‘who doesn’t give credit to’.
The relevant physics with unsealed masks, like surgical masks and cloth masks, is that when you exhale most of your breath is forced against the mask, which is “sticky”. Even though a lot of the air eventually travels around the mask, most of it is brushed up against the mask. Whereas when you inhale a lot of the air gets sucked along the side and never touches the sticky mask.
There are studies of masks, you know. I posted one months ago that compared the efficacy of surgical and cloth masks in Vietnam to protect the wearer from respiratory bugs. It was done prior to covid and found that surgical masks were a lot better than the cotton masks often used in that hospital – at protecting the wearer.
It’s true that we don’t know the exact effects masks have in every situation. We didn’t know the exact mechanism of penicillin when it was first used to fight infections, either. But it’s well established that non-sealing masks are more effective at protecting others than at protecting the wearer. And that’s the basis of the public health recommendations to wear them – not that it will protect the wearer (although it might offer some benefit) but to protect others. And that’s why you can’t assume that others can “protect themselves from you”, it’s your responsibility to do that.
On the way in, you are mostly drawing air from the sides of the mask and not through it? Or at least, comparatively so, as compared to exhaling? See, I’m not sure I believe that. Are there studies that have measured the phenomenon? My own little individual experiments don’t seem to support it. I actually observe more air going around the mask on the way out than it seems like it’s doing on the way in. Like, I can see the hairs around my ears move. And of course, my glasses fog up. But I can seal the sides as much as I can, yet still inhale more or less exactly the same.
How about this? How about I counter the pee-on-jeans analogy and say instead it’s like peeing through a fence? Now we’ve got competing hypotheses! How should the science proceed?
No, it’s not that your exhalation is forced through the mask, so much as it’s forced to flow against the mask in turbulence. And masks are sticky, specifically, they are sticky to small particles. My claim is that the air exiting through the sides has been subject to more turbulence within the mask than the air that enters from the sides.
Anyway, surely you are aware that surgeons and others dealing with immune compromised people (such as people with big open cuts) have worn masks for many decades, and that medical orthodoxy believes that is adequate protection from the surgeon. But that medical professionals who have to interact with infectious people (rather than with vulnerable people) wear sealed N95 masks for protection. So… we at least have decades of medical orthodoxy on the side of “unsealed masks protect others. You need a sealed mask to protect yourself”.
Air is going to take the path of least resistance, whatever path that is. If there are gaps along the sides, a significant amount of air will come through the gaps. You can demonstrate this yourself with a cup pressed tightly around your mouth. With a good seal, you won’t be able to suck any air in through your mouth. But release the edge just slightly and you’ll be able to breathe without any difficulty. The gap can be so small you can hardly feel it, yet it lets in enough air for you to breathe completely normally.
It is possible for a mask to seal better on the inhale than exhale, since the inhalation will tend to create a suction effect which presses the mask to your face. How good of a seal that creates is going to depend on a lot of factors, including mask construction, mask material, and strength of inhalation. What is better is to use a mask which always has a proper seal and doesn’t have any gaps at any time.
This is a study from 2013.
The finding is that the homemade mask protects others from infected individuals more than the wearer. It provides better protection to others from infected individuals than no protection.
from this article as of Aug. 25, 2020
That’s a study aimed specifically at sorting out relative degrees of protection provided to front-line medical workers, in cases in which such workers weren’t able to get the masks they should have had in those situations. It doesn’t discuss the degree of protection provided to the wearer as opposed to the degree provided to other people the wearer is around, because that’s not what it’s designed to do.
From that article:
Of non-traditional materials, the vacuum cleaner bag resulted in the greatest reduction in mean risk of infection (20-min exposure 58%, 30-s exposure 83%), while scarves offered the lowest reduction (20-min exposure 24%, 30-s exposure 44%)
So the degree of protection provided to the medical workers, in cases in which they couldn’t get proper equipment, was between 24% and 58%; more if the time of exposure was extremely short. That is a very long way from total protection. (Vacuum cleaner bags are difficult for many people to breathe through. I’ve tried it.)
Nobody has said that the mask wearer gets no protection whatsoever. What people are saying is that masks protect other people even more than they protect the wearer; that the wearer is insufficiently protected if others aren’t wearing masks; and that protection is greatest if everyone is wearing masks, so that everyone gets the benefit both of their own mask and of the other person’s.
Never mind.