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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Surgical masks are protecting patients not doctors. Please educate yourself.

"The coronavirus is an upper respiratory virus and a surgical mask does not protect you from that kind of virus,” he said. “In fact, when people buy up these masks and hoard these masks then they might not be available for healthcare providers to use for patient care.”

He said surgical masks are more effective on people who are already infected with an illness to keep them from infecting others rather than the other way around. He said other types of masks are not very effective at preventing you from getting sick either."

https://www.wibc.com/news/local-indiana/surgeon-general-surg...

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https://www.health.com/condition/cold-flu-sinus/surgical-mas...

>“Yes, a surgical mask can help prevent the flu,” Sherif Mossad, MD, an infectious disease specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, tells Health. “Flu is carried in air droplets, so a mask would mechanically prevent the flu virus from reaching other people.” It would work both ways, says Dr. Mossad, preventing transmission of the flu virus to others and for keeping a mask-wearer from picking up an infection.

“Disposable is best and you should discard your mask after each use,” says Dr. Besser. “If a mask gets wet—and it will by simply breathing into it—the effectiveness of its protective effect is reduced.”

Are you really going to change your surgical mask every 3 minutes to make it effective against getting infected?

Do surgeons change their surgical masks every 3 minutes while performing surgery? And the operative word the doctor used is "reduced" effectiveness, not "eliminated" effectiveness.

Surgeons wear it so that their breath/mouth droplets don't end up in patient's intenstines while performing a surgery, causing an infection. For that purpose a single surgical mask can last hours (i.e. it keeps droplets on the inner surface of the mask). If they have to perform surgery on highly dangerous patients, they use hazmat suits instead:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9bd2e88c4296be54e7f845...

> the effectiveness of its protective effect is reduced.

How did you jumped from "reduced" to "completely useless".

> Are you really going to change your surgical mask every 3 minutes to make it effective against getting infected?

My typical situation is not surgical situation.

You obviously don't get it how a virus survives outside body. It survives because it is inside a wet biological droplet; breathing through a surgical mask would make the area around intake wet with some human cells, making it a wonderful spot for survival of viruses; it basically makes it a prime collector surface. The mask itself is permeable and whatever viruses are collected on the outer layer thrive there unless the surface was strongly antiseptic (hint: it isn't). To be safe, you'd have to change it pretty often; surgeons moreover don't touch their masks while they are performing a surgery, you probably wouldn't have such limitations. "I have seen such a mask in a Hollywood movie, that means it must work."

COVID-19 family is also pretty agile:

"The analysis of 22 studies reveals that human coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus or endemic human coronaviruses (HCoV) can persist on inanimate surfaces like metal, glass or plastic for up to 9 days."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...

Good luck relying on the safety from wearing surgical masks! /s

Aaaaand there is adjacent recommendation to boil them.

Aaaand you wear them also to not make sick others by spreading your virus as far as you breathe.

"(N95) Masks won't protect you" was an expedient lie. How can it be that medical professionals are in dire need of N95 masks to protect them from the virus, yet they are powerless to do any good in the hands of the public?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

If everybody in the US could wear one of these when out in public, we would be in a much better place. The sad truth is we don't have enough to do that, not that this would not help.

N95 is not a surgical mask. That one is a professional respirator. Yet infection can enter via eyes, so one has to wear airtight glasses as well to be sure.

Surgical mask looks like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask

There is no respirator embedded as you can see, it's just a simple piece of fabric.

The point of my original reply was that we could reduce R0/transmission rate only if everybody had to wear surgical mask in public. If you are the only one wearing it, it doesn't really help. Some EU countries now require everybody to wear a mask while shopping or using public transport.

Which EU countries? I have not heard this before.

Both parts of the former Czechoslovakia come to mind:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Prague/comments/fkdxvj/face_masks_n...

> The coronavirus is an upper respiratory virus

I thought it was a lower respiratory virus. I have no idea if that changes the efficacy of masks but...

Probably a typo/fumble finger. Wading through all the dreck it seems that it causes viral pneumonia which is always bad news.

Read just today that an advantage of any mask is it keeps people from transferring the virus from their fingers to their mouth and nose. A paper on the effectiveness of home made masks, like from tee shirt material says they are in no way a replacement for N95 masks but are better than nothing.

My understanding is that it starts as an upper respiratory virus (mainly concentrated in the throat), leading to flu/cold-like symptoms and only those unlucky ones that get it deep in their lungs attached to ACE2 receptors end up with a life-threatening lower respiratory illness requiring ICU and ventilator/ECMO due to immunity going berserk and killing off lung tissue with virus embedded in it, a cytokine storm.

Unlike with SARS there is a significant viral load in the upper respiratory tract too.

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