Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

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COVID-19 is very likely only marginally spread by aerosols (I take this from Robert Koch Institute, Germany information [1]), approximately 10% by contact spread and mainly by direct transmission of droplets.

Faceshield therefore protects from the main transmission vector. It's not impossible to get infected otherwise, simply much less likely. Your main enemy are getting coughed/sneezed/talked at in close proximity.

Surface spread is likely also extremely limited (source: Prof. Hendrik Streecke who continues to study COVID-19 in the German epicenter of Heinsberg [2]). Money quote from source:

> "Wir waren in einem Haushalt, wo viele hochinfektiöse Menschen gelebt haben, und trotzdem haben wir kein lebendes Virus von irgendeiner Oberfläche bekommen.“

English: "We have studied a household where highly infectious individuals resided and have still been unable to find any living virus on any surface."

All virus residues found have been dead virus material.

[1, German] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

[2, German] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/covid-19-wie-lange-sich-das-c...

So this is likely a dumb idea, but if things got truly desperate I wonder if a snorkel mask would be a decent improvised protection. Your eyes and nose would be completely covered and your mouth is getting air from a direction/location that is unlikely to be in the "line of fire" from someone coughing or sneezing.

Definitely. A snorkel/scuba mask is going to be better protection than most masks, though relatively expensive to produce and clean and can't be treated as disposable.

But if you have to breathe in infected air, doing so with your nose is far better than your mouth, since your nasal cavity has thicker membranes and a lot of mucus and hairs to catch particles, whereas through your mouth the particles are going straight into your lungs.

In fact, that effect might be so significant evolutionationary that it is the reason we have a seperate nose and mouth, rather than combining the two.

A nose lets you breathe while you eat.

Put a peg on your nose... You won't have any trouble eating after a few minutes practice. You just breathe between chewing.

The biggest problem is actually eating hot food - it seems the mouth can withstand hotter foods than the lungs, which get painful if you breathe in the steam from the half chewed food in your mouth.

They already are, actually: European researchers retrofit snorkel masks for coronavirus fight - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-czech-...

Face shields also stop you from accidentally touching your face through habit which is the main transmission vector

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