> It's not rocket science.
Tell us how to correctly don and doff a surgical mask, or a filter, and we can tell you how many steps you got wrong.
Tell us how to correctly don and doff a surgical mask, or a filter, and we can tell you how many steps you got wrong.
This video shows him using bare hands to touch the front of his mask to take it off. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776002
Literature suggests that 80% of HCP infection is caused by incorrect doffing
https://twitter.com/drbencb/status/1236635924274057216?s=20
https://twitter.com/cmac_evans/status/1236689340123754496?s=...
Because it's so hard we see healthcare settings strongly encouraging "dofficers" / "spotters" -- a second person to watch you taking off your PPE to make sure you're doing it right.
https://twitter.com/heatherevansmd/status/124443236962241741...
https://twitter.com/Dolores_McKeen/status/124432789143070720...
Duffing protocol is very important if your PPE is massively contaminated. I’m not as convinced if you may have been breathed on by a carrier at the supermarket.
That's what the CDC previously said! This post is you agreeing with the CDC.
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?
Most people have someone in their life they can ask to spot them as they practice removing their mask.
Also, wouldn't washing/disinfecting your hands after improper doffing prevent self-contamination?
2. Take off mask.
3. Wash hands thoroughly.
The main point is to wash your hands in between each hand touching things of different contamination levels (eg mask body and back of head).
One's implementation may not be perfect, but it's much better to attempt, practice, and slowly get better - rather than succumbing to do-nothing disinformation being pushed by western governments caught without the will to stockpile and procure enough PPE.
You got the doffing procedure wrong btw.
What "clear science" are you referencing? I have not seen data demonstrating that individual mask use increases the chance of infection, which would be necessary to argue against individuals wearing masks on its own merits. Please share if you have it.
In general, calling something a "conspiracy theory" is fallacious. From what I've seen, the intellectual argument underlying the "no masks" narrative is that individual mask use will "take away" from hospitals. When compared to other countries (eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776614), this is patently ridiculous.
I'm saying that donning PPE is hard, and that members of the public can't do it. They usually miss out several hand washing steps, or they don items in the wrong order, or they don't have a safe place to doff items.
You've said "wash your hands" -- you do that by touching taps/faucets. 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.
> FWIW I use a 3M 7503 with discrete filters so there is a mask body to grab
The entire front face of that filter is to be regarded as contaminated. You must not touch it when doffing the mask.
People in this thread are claiming that one use of the mask is to prevent infected people from infecting others, but this mask has an exhalation valve, so it doesn't stop infected droplets leaving the person wearing it.
Masks provide marginal benefits to people walking around in public, but only if they're worn absolutely correctly. As soon as people deviate from the rigorous protocols those marginal benefits disappear. Worse, there's a chance that they increase risk. If people are touching their masks but not immediately washing their hands, or they are touching their face to adjust their mask then the mask is causing harm.
> From what I've seen, the intellectual argument underlying the "no masks" narrative is that individual mask use will "take away" from hospitals
WHO, CDC, PHE, etc have all been pretty clear that masks don't provide any benefit to members of the public. This thread is full of paranoid nonsense that this was a deliberate lie by the CDC/WHO to preserve stocks.
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.