The mask I wear covers by my nose and mouth, but when I go shopping I’m seeing more and more people wearing masks over their mouths with their noses uncovered.
Assuming (and this is probably wrong) that those people are inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth, would that actually help to slow or stop the spread of the virus? Or will people just unconsciously breathe through both mouth and nose without realizing it, or will they exhale from the nose even if they are trying to intentionally exhale via the mouth?
Those people are maskholes trying to abide by the letter of the law (face covering), ignoring the spirit (cover your mouth and nose so that you don’t get the workers and people around you sick).
That said, if you were really good about breathing through your mouth, and never through your nose, it would be fairly effective, I imagine. Even exhaling through your nose will send the snot and other infected droplets mostly downward, I would guess, rather than outward when you talk, cough, sneeze, etc., through your mouth.
The most important thing to remember is that those people are maskholes who don’t give a shit about the people around them, about the country as a whole, especially about the workers who are exposed to other maskholes all day long. These maskholes apparently love to be locked down, because they’re not doing the minimum to prevent the spread – they already have the mask, cover your fucking nose.
Anyway, as a non-epidemiologist, my guess is that it’s better than no mask over the mouth, but much worse than if they covered all of their snot-spewing orifices. Fucking assholes.
Not a scientist, but I’d think you’re still putting others at risk. Few people who breathe only through their mouths do it consistently. Mouth-breathing isn’t natural to most of us, so we tend to inhale and exhale through our noses from time to time without realizing it.
Try it yourself. The average grocery store visit is 43 minutes, so try to go that long breathing solely through your mouth. Make sure you’re not exhaling through your nose at all during that time, even when you’re talking, and you should talk a little during the experiment, as you’d be talking to the cashier, bagger, etc. Avoiding nose breathing requires concentration–tough to maintain, particularly when at a store, where you have other things to think about.
In the real world, masks that sit below the nose likely have many other issues which will impact their performance. I typically see wide gaps along the top of the mask which can allow air to freely pass. If the mask fit snugly around the mouth, then what you describe could theoretically work, but such a person would not be very likely to employ the disciplined breathing technique necessary to make it work. So yes, it could work, but likely just in a laboratory setting.
What you’re describing is the inverse of a typical respirator mask. Those are the large masks with filters that people wear for things like painting. Those masks have sets of one-way valves which force air to come through the filters on the inhale and pass through an unobstructed valve on the exhale. If you made a reverse respirator mask, then it would perform like you describe. The inhaled air would come through the unfiltered port and the exhaled air would be forced through the filters.
Yeah, I forgot about talking. Unless you sound like Ernestine, you breath through your nose when you talk.
I guess it’s fair to say that people who don’t cover their noses are mouth-breathing idiots. I saw on Twitter – wearing your mask or not is not a political statement, it’s an IQ test.
I’ve seen so many people in stores with their nose uncovered.
I actually told one girl her mask had slipped off her nose as a polite way
of suggesting she fix it. She said, “I know.”
I saw someone at the store the other day with his mask only over his mouth…then he removed it so he could lick his fingers to open a bag. I get it, bags can be a PITA to open, but of all the times to not A)put your fingers in your mouth and B)touch something after putting your fingers in your mouth…this is the time to really not do those things. At least before now it was more gross than actually dangerous.
In any case, it’s certainly better than nothing at all since (I assume) a lot more particulate matter gets expelled via your mouth than your nose, but when you’re so close to complying, you might as well just lift the mask the extra inch.
Homing in on this part in particular, if this assumption does actually turn out to be true, those people are losing whatever protection the mask provides to them. This increases the chance that they themselves would catch it. And that by itself is a per se spread of the virus, and creates further possibilities that they would later spread the virus to others.
Another excellent point. Between this and the point about talking, I should have dialed back my rant and focused on all the other ways what they’re doing it stupid. It’s not just that they don’t care about others, they are putting themselves at risk, too!
Not to make excuses for the selfish and ignorant, but the messaging on masks didn’t help.
First healthcare experts tried to give the accurate, nuanced advice that while the risk to the general public was low, people must not panic buy masks because they were needed by healthcare workers. But, due to a combination of the media’s desire to simplify the message, and maybe experts’ exasperation, it evolved to: “masks don’t work”.
And even now, many agencies for some reason emphasize that the masks protect other people from the wearer, but not the wearer from infection, and this has become the new meme, repeated in lots of places including the Dope.
This one is harder for me to fathom since there was no point even making such a distinction, but anyway now there are signs of a U-turn on this too. Who would have thought something shown decades ago to have protective benefit for healthcare workers against viruses, also has some protective benefit for people in general against this virus?
While 90% of the blame for people either not wearing masks or wearing them tokenistically goes to ignorance and an asshole president, 10% could be cynicism about masks given the mixed messaging.
To make all of this worse, many people (in this case, the GOP, which happens to overlap with people not wanting to wear a mask) use drs and scientists saying ‘we used to think that, now we think this’ to suggest that no one should listen to them since they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. Unfortunately those people are mainly just picking and choosing which advice they want to take (in this case, not to wear masks) and don’t seem to have the ability to grasp how science works, that things change as we gather more knowledge and what we have going on now, everything is new (because this isn’t ‘just the flu’) so we’re getting a lot of new data very quickly.
However, you made an interesting point, if we had just said, from the beginning, that people should wear masks to protect themselves, as opposed to explaining how it protects others more than you, that would have changed everything, IMO. The people that aren’t wearing masks, aren’t wearing them because they honestly don’t care about others. If they were told it’s one of they only ways they can protect themselves, they’d be wearing them. I think a lot of them are also too short-sighted to understand that the sooner we flatten the curve, the sooner this’ll be over.
I suspect a lot of that attitude will change once we hit a critical mass where everyone knows someone that’s been killed (or become seriously ill) by it. We’re still at the point where, for the majority of Americans, it’s just something we hear about, but have no personal experience with.
If, 3 months ago, a few people close to Trump (close WH staff or Trump family members) wasted away on a respirator for a few weeks before dying alone in a hospital, Trump’s entire attitude might be different…might not, but might.
The funny thing about it being a ‘hoax’ is that while Fox News was trying to convince people of that, there were also internal memos telling them to stay off of airplanes and away from crowded places. Just goes to show the virus isn’t the hoax…calling it a hoax is a hoax. They (fox) were literally trying to convince their base that it was fake, knowing full well it wasn’t.
NO. We had a relatively flat curve but it exploded again. The sooner we build up “herd immunity” the sooner it is over. The immunity can and most likely will come from a combination of positive cases early on followed by an eventual hoped for vaccine.
No, that’s not really a good way to look at it. “We” as in the whole USA, didn’t go through it together. New York and New Jersey flattened their curve/got over their hump, and now other regions are having their turn. I had expected the other regions to follow more closely and when they didn’t I thought they had gotten away with it, but here we are.
