CDC Now Recommends “Use of Cloth Face Coverings” (DIY Masks)

Intervention: Wearing N95 Mask Intervention Effectiveness: 91%.

It's true that handwashing, wearing some kind of mask, gloves, and gown combined is also 91%, but that was not a study arm that specified an N95 mask. Wearing any mask has an intervention effectiveness of 68%. Adding the gloves and gown brings it up to 91%.

What the meta-analysis is saying is that wearing any mask + gloves + gown + handwashing is about the same effectiveness as wearing just an N95 mask. It also supports the idea that "don't touch your face" is probably good advice, but it's also probably not the primary means that SARS spreads. It's probably mostly breathing in droplets that someone just exhaled.

I understood perfectly well what they wrote. They say that evidence is limited for the superior effectiveness of N95 over any mask because the lower confidence interval of N95 and the upper confidence interval of any mask overlap by 5%. Based on the studies they analyzed though, it's likely that N95 is more effective than masks generally. It's also very logical since N95 masks filter better and have less leakage than surgical masks.

I am tired of people like you trying to bend science to their ideology. That is part of what got us into this horrible mess.

For god's sake, this thing is so serious that we're not allowed to go outside for normal activities or go to work. We are all prisoners on very limited work release. If you're not taking extreme measures to protect yourself, you're an idiot.

If you're an HCW, no question, you had better be PPEing up to the max and following donning and duffing procedures to a T. You have huge exposure, and if you screw up, you're very likely to catch COVID.

If the level of risk is so high that I am not legally allowed to leave my house except for specified purposes, you would have to be utterly foolish to think that wearing the best mask available to you is not an utterly obviously correct precaution. You really need to be incredibly gullible to not see this.

If you're not an HCW, in March, as an American, you had about a 1/1000 chance of being a LAB CONFIRMED case of COVID. 1000 people are dying every day of this in America, and the numbers keep going up. If this continues, we will have millions of deaths from COVID.

Being an HCW now is like being a Formula 1 driver. You had better have a crapload of safety gear, and even then your risk is very high. Your chance of dying in a car accident in the next month is roughly 1/500,000. Your chance of dying of COVID next month is perhaps 1/1000. That's 500x the risk of driving. Your argument comes down to "Well, since you're not driving in a Formula One race, there's no need to put on your seatbelt." If you wouldn't dream of getting behind the wheel without a seatbelt, why would you go outside without a mask when the risk is 500x higher?

And the solution here is to gain experience. I don't "adjust my mask" because I've been using it for household projects for the past few years. My first grocery run with a mask was a month ago. I definitely got to points where I messed up steps or did not have a good plan, but I learned. The best time to start is now.

> Most people would have to open a few doors to get to the taps. Now all those door handles, and the taps, are contaminated, so you need to clean them too.

So then, the same exact situation they're in if they go to the grocery store without a mask? People obviously need to wash their door handles as well.

> The entire front face of that filter is to be regarded as contaminated

The 7503 is the face piece, with my point being that I can grab that part without touching the filters. I have the 2297 filters, which are large round cloth discs - exposed liabilities. The 7093 filters would be better as the filter element is encased in plastic, but alas that's not what I already had.

And yes, it has an exhalation valve which is sub-optimal. I'll try remedying this next time I take the whole thing apart to deep clean it.

> WHO, CDC, PHE, etc have all been pretty clear that masks don't provide any benefit to members of the public

They have not backed up this position with data showing that individual mask wearing is actively harmful, and neither have you. Furthermore, they do recommend that healthcare professionals wear masks, which is inconsistent - if masks are effective against virus particles in a hospital, they can be effective against virus particles in a grocery store.

A basic analysis of the physical system is that all contamination ending up on mask filters would have otherwise been breathed in. So even if all of the filtered virus ends up on someone's hands and is not washed off, that is still better than it being in their airways!

If mask wearing is not actively harmful, then why discourage it at all? The meat of your argument seems to boil down to "you're likely to do it wrong" which is neither scientific nor productive.

You say that most infection in hospitals happens during doffing, but that’s precisely because the PPE is very effective at keeping the virus out of HCW’s noses. If they had leaky PPE, they would be getting infected while wearing it. It might be that doffing is 1/50 of the risk of going in unprotected, but at the viral loads in a COVID ICU, you’re that 1/50 is still a huge risk.

For an average person in lower risk environments, proper doffing may be valuable at reducing risk, but I strongly suspect that just wearing a mask cuts risk a whole lot.

Pick one. Exterior appendages, or face?