The “receptionist” (orderer) deals with every patient that walks in the door, and even though they are behind a counter, they are within cough range.
The phlebotomist was dealing with people AFTER they had been screened at ordering and found to be low risk. If virus was suspected, they would have issued you a mask to wear, the phlebotomist would likely don a disposable gown, mask etc. before doing the draw. They also would have wiped down the draw station with antiseptic wipes after you left. This is partly to protect the phlebotomist, but also all the patients that come in behind you.
The suspect the logic behind saying the surgical masks don’t work isn’t that they offer no additional protection. It’s that the additional protection is minimal statistically, because most people are not at significant risk in the first place. As I’ve seen in several articles, people will engage in more risky behaviors if they believe they are protected. So I would surmise that this effect dwarfs the benefit of wearing the masks in the first place.
A similar logic is used for the respirators, but with a more clearly defined purpose. The additional protection for people who aren’t directly in contact with infected people is low, but the additional protection for healthcare workers is high, and the respirators are in limited supply. So this is said to keep people from hoarding masks.
I do also wonder how much extra protection the masks even offer in most cases, since the viral load will be coming in from multiple directions, including where there is no seal on the surgical masks. All I know is that they claimed that studies show that masks are far less effective than all of the other recommendations about washing hands, staying six feet away from people, sanitizing surfaces where people have been, etc.
“You can understand why people are doing it - every picture you see you see people are wearing face masks - but masks don’t protect you from infection,” said Dr Killingley.
"They are useful for healthcare workers because we change them regularly. We wouldn’t wear a mask for any longer than 30 minutes.
“But someone wearing the same mask all day and still touching their face… the best bet is to follow the public health campaign and do the easy thing, which is to wash your hands.”
I had considered not wearing them correctly, but not that the masks need to be swapped out to remain effective.
What I pick up on regarding the public at large using them.
There’s a scale. From “Sure, they help a lot.” to “Complete waste of time, false sense of security, etc.”
If the former end of the scale was just a few outliers, nutjobs, non-pros, etc. then I’d go with the latter. Instead, it’s the latter that seems to have a surfeit* of “overly ardent” folk.
Yes, the data isn’t as solid as we want one way or another. But as long as there is some reasoned, rational arguments/data/etc. for wearing them, then I go with wearing them.
Just don’t get them from the stream heading to the health care pros.
I wonder how long I’m going to notice the “i before e …” exceptions due to the posts in a recent thread.
It still seems to be that the point is being missed constantly, even in these threads.
Widespread mask usage is basically saying, “Treat everybody (including yourself) as though they are already infected”. It’s like handling a gun - you treat it as loaded, even if you absolutely know with certainty it is not.
Masks will offer limited personal protection for the reasons stated above (not N95, constant touching, etc). But what they can do is reduce (not eliminate but reduce) the effect from asymptomatic cases where even breathing or speaking are enough to spread the virus. It’s less about protecting yourself directly from infection (which is again questionable for a variety of reasons) and more about protecting yourself indirectly via reduced community spread.
And that’s what the current debate is over. While they offer only limited personal protection, they reduce the spread from people (including ourselves potentially) who already have it yet are in public and spreading it. The only concern in making the recommendation for widespread usage, however, is they would like to reserve the N95 masks for medical personnel and this would probably make it harder to obtain for them.
That recommendation is based on preventing infected people, whether symptomatic or not, spreading the virus, not about how masks are effective in filtering viruses. Anything you do to help the spread of the virus is great. Hence the lockdown orders and social distancing.
There’s no problem with recommending masks to do that, except perhaps there are people on the front line that probably need them more than the general public would. In the meanwhile, us plebs can cough into our elbows or use a handkerchief.
I agree with that.
In the early days of this crisis, I think the health agencies were a bit more candid about the need to conserve masks for those who needed them most.
At some point though, maybe from being asked repeatedly, it became a more simplistic “masks bad”. Then you had legions of people, not just on the Dope but I saw it in my personal life, that found the need to point out to the “idiots” wearing masks that they’re “useless”.
If it does turn out that not wearing masks was a factor in how it’s spread in the US, then some of those experts are going to have difficult questions to answer, even though it was never the case that there were sufficient masks available for the general population to wear.
Well, since I last read this thread, I have found a decent peer-reviewed study showing that “medical masks” (which from context means ordinary surgical masks) are better than cloth masks at preventing respiratory illnesses:
I’m clearly not the only one to have found this study in the past few weeks, because the authors of the study have now posted an update regarding the implications of their work in light of the coronavirus crisis. Basically, they say that health care workers shouldn’t work without at least surgical masks, but if they decide to do so anyway, they should have at least two cloth masks and wash and dry and sterilize them.
I can’t believe we’re still even having this conversation. Masks (really anything that can block an aerosol) work to some extent, period. And a mask worn by a healthy person helps prevent infection from a sick person. Many studies say so - and they are actual experiments, rather than some dentist hypothesizing that they don’t work because viruses are smaller than the filter size. We didn’t need to “learn any more about the virus” before we knew this. Every doctor I know knew this. Public health officials now have egg on their faces and are are trying to justify their idiotic recommendations. They basically lied, even if with good intentions, and now suffer a serious loss in credibility.