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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I thought the nuanced explanation is something more like "technically it's possible that a bit of material in front of your face could stop a droplet carrying a pathogen, but unless used as intended (which generally requires training) the masks are largely ineffective and you'll actually be less safe if you inaccurately estimate your risk due to thinking that a mask is an effective preventative device for you."

In other words, it's actually unnuanced for you to say "the masks are not useless." It must also be technically possible for a wide-brimmed hat to happen to block a pathogen-carrying droplet and prevent you from inhaling it. It's probably even possible that wearing a magnet around your neck could just ever-so-slightly nudge a single droplet and cause it to not enter your mouth or nose.

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there isnt much training required. I worked in a BSL 3 lab with aerosolized tuberculosis and the training was like 5 minutes.

Even if you touch the mask with your hands and it is contaminated, if you wash your hands after taking the mask off you will be fine.

The "you need training" is part of the media agenda.

I agree that statistically masks wont stop the virus from spreading in the public. While masks used by health care workers will stop the virus from spreading to health care workers. The reason is that most of the public wont use masks while all health care workers will.

I could have left out the training part of my comment because it's not important to my argument (although my guess is that you'd be very surprised how many people who wear these masks in public use them extremely cavalierly and improperly).

The rest of my argument stands if you drop the part about training.

It's not like there are week long courses on how to wear a mask. Most anybody watching a youtube video or two could wear a mask mostly correctly, so that it would mostly do what it is intended to do. Nothing is perfect, but the goal is risk reduction anyways. The correct response to the problem of improper mask use is give people the little bit of information they need and strongly encourage them to use that information, not fall into despair or indifference. I have a P100 mask with manufacturer published pandemic sterilization procedures for work[1]. It's not expensive and it's not hard.

And yes of course medical professionals need them before everyone else, but being shamed for taking basic precautions during a pandemic is just embarrassing for society.

[1] https://www.srsafety.com/us/products/pandemic-flu-kit-sr-100...

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