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Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure there was any popular doubt over the efficacy of N95 masks. The problem was rather getting one - marketplaces like Amazon restricted access to masks if you weren’t affiliated with a hospital. So you were left with sketchy deals and weird vendor sites.

I suspect Amazon killed quite a few people over the last year by restricting access - supply scaled pretty quickly.

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According to the data presented, surgical masks are still highly effective even after converting the scales to linear. Add social distancing on top, it is almost as good as N95.

And I very much doubt that N95 masks are effectively utilized by the general public considering how many poorly fitted masks I have seen over the past year.

Before the pandemic there had been several studies looking at the efficacy of N95 vs. surgical masks at preventing the transmission of influenza in hospitals. Most of them never got anywhere because it was soon realized that even doctors and nurses cannot be trusted to wear and change masks properly during the daily routine. Let's hope things have improved by now.

> And I very much doubt that N95 masks are effectively utilized by the general public considering how many poorly fitted masks I have seen over the past year.

I agree. When people can't even wear surgical masks properly, there's no hope with an N95.

> Most of them never got anywhere because it was soon realized that even doctors and nurses cannot be trusted to wear and change masks properly during the daily routine. Let's hope things have improved by now.

At the very least, everybody is washing their hands. Before Covid, you couldn't even get all the doctors to do something even that simple.

Unfortunately, a few of my friends fell victim to the Qanon conspiracy bandwagon and the fact that mask pore size is wider than the virus was heavily circulated as a reason for mask ineffectiveness.

That wasn't a Quanon conspiracy: that was misunderstanding that I saw plenty of mainstream doctors and other health professionals promote. What it showed is that either they were intentionally lying - which I kinda doubt - or that they were so confident in what they had heard that they never bothered to do any research for themselves. Just reading the relevant wikipedia pages carefully would have corrected that misunderstanding.

This is your not frequent enough reminder that "doctor" is not a synonym for "scientist", or more specifically epidemiologist.

Medical doctor's are basically mechanic's for the human body. The human body is complex, so this is a high bar to clear and an important function, but it doesn't magically grant them knowledge about concepts outside that field.

Everyone is having assumptions about these observations. The conclusions might not be always right, but at least the observation is real. And when you observe that mask mandating states don’t do significantly better than mask-free states, then a curious mind rightfully starts pondering. No need to unterstand conspiracy theories (a difficult topic) to understand that science isn’t getting it right yet.

> And when you observe that mask mandating states don’t do significantly better than mask-free states, then a curious mind rightfully starts pondering.

If this is true, which I haven't confirmed, wouldn't that say more about the effectiveness of political policy rather than about masks themselves? When we have seen throughout the pandemic that healthcare workers have a dramatically lower rate of infection compared to the general population, despite having more direct contact with infected populations, it is clear to the that proper precautions including protective equipment (principally masks, for a respiratory disease) can impede COVID transmission heavily. With that being the case, the question becomes: has mask policy been effective in getting enough people to wear masks properly and consistently, in states where it is mandated?

Q is a symbol used by pedophiles to say that they are pedos ;). Just look at "Q", and you will see what I mean. Nothing complex about it.

The US seems to have relied heavily on cloth masks, even long after the shortages were over. From my understanding, surgical masks are much more effective (while often being more comfortable) than community/cloth masks. (I don't have a source for this on hand, but the German government did ban cloth masks/require at least surgical masks in many areas for this reason.)

I suspect a lot of that was out of a desire to not appear as backtracking on a previous position.

This was an education issue. There were KN95 and KF94 masks available for purchase. I bought KN95 masks off Amazon sold by Amazon proper and later switched to KF94 when they became widely available. Both masks have similar performance to N95. Someone of the KF94 masks i bought showed 99% filtering effectiveness in government testing.

You could get halfway with other solutions. The 3-layer design with the synthetic layer in the middle tries to achieve the same idea. It's not going to be as effective as a certified N95, but it's better than a simple cloth. Not sure how common the idea was globally, but it was quite common to make them in Australia.

Unfortunately there is _absolutely_ popular doubt about this, and every other thing you likely think is obvious about covid and the world. I don't think educating people about masks is really the answer though. I don't know what the answer is, or if there even is one. Feel like our society is coming apart at the seams.

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