The important part is buried:
The fit of the mask is the most important factor, Bodenschatz, said. “It turns out that leakage dominates over filtration.” Masks should have a tight fit around the face and nose to minimize any air leakage.
The fit of the mask is the most important factor, Bodenschatz, said. “It turns out that leakage dominates over filtration.” Masks should have a tight fit around the face and nose to minimize any air leakage.
Wasn't this exactly what people against mask mandates were ridiculed for saying? That most of the cloth masks were effectively just for appearances because they didn't form a seal around the sides of your mouth? I vividly recall people being mocked for suggesting this early in the pandemic. Seems like governments were just trying to cover for the fact that N95 masks were in short supply
(I ignored your attempt to drag "mandates" into this, because the primary aspect is personal behavior. I've yet to see an anti-mask-mandate protest/movement where everybody voluntarily wears respirators and distances, while philosophically arguing against legal mandates for doing so. And I would remember if I had, as this would align with my own politics)
You are asking them to respond to an argument the pro-mask contingent was afraid to even make.
For an illustration of the difference, I recently had some trouble entering a hospital due to their mask mandate - they seriously insisted that I take off my P100 respirator and wear just their cosplay mask instead. I was able to escalate to someone higher up and find a (more but still not entirely sensible) compromise that they'd let me wear my own N95 under a cosplay mask. Where is the political group that represents my predicament, which was caused by a broken centralized mandate? It's certainly not in the unmasked people berating customer service people for enforcing some basic pandemic etiquette!
> nobody really expects the public to be able to wear the good mask the correct way.
IMO this was a terrible groupthink counterargument (aka straw man) led by the other political team of ersatz maskplayers and condescending healthcare workers, following from the early central authority lie that respirators are ineffective (in order to reduce consumer demand for them). The red herring that wearing a mask primarily protects others also followed from this rationalization of ersatz cloth masks.
The open society / freedom approach is that you treat people like adults, assume they can understand a mildly complex thing, and then increase education to help everyone do better. Instead two years later we've still got the two political teams arguing over which stupid approach is better, while mostly looking at anyone who wears more effective respiratory projection as some aberration.
If I had been in charge of pandemic response, I would have sent everybody a kit including a N95 mask as soon as possible, and made it clear that the primary reason to wear a respirator is to protect yourself and your family. Then I would have ramped up production of elastomeric half face masks (which are more comfortable and thus more sustainable), and perhaps just given those out as well - their (pre-pandemic) cost of $30 per person is peanuts compared to what we've lost. These utterly backwards post-reality memes spread by both political teams have caused so much needless death and suffering.
The surgeon general released the demonstration of making a cloth mask from household items on April 4, 2020.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLXEhSjVsw
Fauci on February 5, 2020 wrote in an email:
> The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.
In general, I disagree with the “ridicule” but instead, trying a new or different way of explaining it.
I remember people saying that, but I had always understood the primary benefit of cloth and other masks was to limit the wearer's ability to spread virus-containing droplets if they were infected by asymptomatic (or symptomatic and very reckless, I suppose). I thought it was widely acknowledged that they provided very limited protection for the wearer. "My mask protects you, your mask protects me." This is why, for example, there were recommendations to not wear vented N95 masks.
Of course, the fact that the mask doesn't form a tight seal around the mouth surely undermines its ability to provide both forms of protection, to some degree. But I seem to recall a fair amount of discussion of the fact that masks could still be fairly effective at reducing the number of virus-containing droplets expelled into the surrounding environment even in the absence of a tight fit. (And, for what its worth, that has always made fairly intuitive sense to me. Though I acknowledge that's not a very good reason to believe it.)
Maybe others' experiences differed, but I thought this was very clearly explained by the 'authorities.' Though that didn't stop people from misunderstanding or, in some cases, spreading misinformation to score political points by making mask proponents look stupid.
Which is the direction we should be going, anyway. High risk people who cannot get vaccinated should wear an N95.
Edit: As numerous people have pointed out, this is wrong. All the N95 masks I’ve seen had a valve, but apparently this is uncommon. TIL.
But, in any case, its consistent with my point that, supposedly, there are benefits to cloth masks, even if they don't fit tightly around the face. That's not to say it wouldn't be better if everyone wore an N95/KN95/etc.--especially people who are at high risk.
Absolutely not? How would that even work. A well-fitting half-face mask has virtually no leakage when breathing in or out.
Only if they have a valve. Masks with valves are usually considered inappropriate for covid.
All valveless masks, including N95, surgical and cloth masks protect both ways, there is no difference between the front and the back of the filtering material. Some masks are better than others, but none are one-way unless there is a one-way valve.
That's also a reason why they recommend N95 and not N99. Most N99 masks have valves (can be uncomfortable without them) and are therefore inappropriate. These are mostly to protect construction workers from harmful dust.
We really need to be honest with people about masks and stop pretending like they do anything if they aren’t at least surgical, clean, and fitted correctly on the face.
> That most of the cloth masks were effectively just for appearances
Yes, because it is fallacious to say `if(protection < 100%) { masks are not useful }`.
Any level of protection is better than zero. We really can't afford to all wear PAPRs, and wearing the best that we can get is always the best solution. When (K)N95s were in short supply, the best we could reasonably have everyone wear was cloth.
Walking around a grocery store is now a high risk environment.
That sentence does not translate to "cloth masks are useless". In comparison, a bullet-proof vest may only protect part of your body from danger but it's still better than nothing if you're being shot at.
It's stunning to me that literally billions of pounds are being spent on now futile testing without getting this basic stuff right.
Your risk calculus is out of whack.
Airplane air turnover is _extremely_ high, apparently even higher than many specialized hospital environments. If there's any danger, I would imagine that it would come from the immediate airflow within the cabin, and not from gradual saturation of the cabin's air.
I don't actually have a good model of airplane risks. But I recognize that many of my intuitive assumptions about what's going on would need to be checked against real data.
An airplane where you are packed in with other people in a small tube close enough that you are essentially (and often actually) in physical contact on one (or both if you are neither in a window or aisle seat) side is a hot spot, but Costco where you are moving, everyone else is moving, there are wide spaces where you don't have to be particularly close, and high ceilings and wide bay doors so it's essentially outside, is relatively benign.
> Your risk calculus is out of whack.
No, yours is, unless you are on some weird airplanes where everyone is wearing a breathing mask so that the constant filtration happens before your exhalation gets all over your neighbors.
- NIOSH certified N-95s with a head band. These are just about impossible to keep from fogging my glasses. The long elastic seems to "fatigue" after an hour or so and I can't keep a seal.
- Good KN-95s sourced from an allegedly trustworthy source. These seal much better around the nose, but they tend to leak under the chin.
- KF-94s (chosen after trying on multiple brands). These use ear loops, but they seal very tightly around the nose, and they seal tighter than the KN-95s at the bottom. They do occasionally leak a small amount of air at the bottom.
I suspect that as long as you're using certified, authentic "94+" masks with good filtration ratings, the biggest remaining factor is how well a specific mask seals for a specific person.
I notice that with KN95 ear loop masks consistently.
Also, you're kids, so you were at extremely tiny risk in the first place.
Better than not vaxxed, but with Omicron not nearly as well protected as against prior strains, and with both Omicron and Delta not protected against infection and retransmission enough not to be a public health risk if unmasked, even if your personal risk is low because of your combination to age, vaccination status, and general health.
...against symptomatic infection. The vaccines still provide excellent protection against severe outcomes. There is no debate on this point.
> with both Omicron and Delta not protected against infection and retransmission enough not to be a public health risk if unmasked
The vaccines still reduce risk of infection by 30% (if not more), even against Omicron. You need only look at the statistics from a state that breaks down by vaccination status to see that this is true. As of right now, the unvaccinated in NYC have a case rate of 3292 per 100k, and the vaccinated have a case rate of 457 per 100k -- a seven-fold reduction in risk of infection.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily
Masks are nowhere near this level of effect size. Worrying about masks after vaccination is the ultimate bikeshed. You've already done the thing that slashes your risk, and you're fixated on the thing that has almost zero evidence of effectiveness, because it's the thing you can see.
It's not a bikeshed; it's an easy, cheap action with added benefit, not a way to waste time dithering that impedes useful work.
Yes, it's much lower value than vaccination, but that only matters if you treat them as alternatives, which they aren't.
Prove it. Cite one study that shows added benefit after vaccination. Not a lab study. Not a study on rats or ferrets or mice or mannequins. A controlled study of humans, who are vaccinated, who are wearing masks in the real world.
You've had two years now. It's time to stop making things up, and back up your claims with data.
One correction: Airplanes are safer than Costco.
When I first read the claims about air exchange rates on airplanes, I thought it was corporate propaganda. I looked at the research. Flying is authentically pretty safe. The air gets cycled and scrubbed insanely quickly. There's still a risk, but it's safer than Costco.
If you do need to travel, you want to be paranoid exactly at airports and similar. The flight itself is not so bad.
There was a flight a while back, where everyone wore masks (cloth or surgical) and had some crazy number of people with COVID on-board, but no in-air spread.
Evidence for limited spread on airplanes is pretty solid, but everything from here on out is speculatory:
* A lot of people get sick traveling. You're interacting with all sorts of people from far away who have novel viruses, many of which aren't circulating in your area. That doesn't mean you catch it literally on the airplane.
* Masks probably make a bigger difference on airplanes than elsewhere. Even cloth masks catch big particles. By the time droplets evaporate into small droplets, odds are they've passed through a HEPA filter many times.
But its pretty clear medicine has a very poor understanding about how viruses spread given how long they denied coronaviruses were airborne. So who knows.
Anecdotal but my friend had taken off his mask for 5 minutes for eating during a flight (this was during India's massive wave) and he got infected. Almost everyone would have been wearing a mask (unless eating themselves). Off course it's possible that masks are incredibly effective (and I'm not doubting that) but I'm not convinced aircraft filtration systems are that top tier.
Omicron aside, peak infection rates were around 30 cases daily per 100k. The odds of the guy next to you having COVID were always very low. The odds of someone in the same building, airport, plane, bus, classroom, workplace, etc. having COVID were often quite high.
Airplane filtration systems mean you /only/ have to worry about the guy next to you, and not about everyone else on the airplane. That's pretty low risk.
The other curiosity about COVID are superspreaders. Most people don't spread COVID very much. A few people spread COVID /a lot/. The question isn't just whether you're sitting next to someone with COVID, but whether you're sitting next to a superspreader. If the person next to you has COVID, but isn't shedding a lot of virus, you're probably okay too.
That said, the guy next to you likely isn't shedding microscopic particles, but pretty large droplets. Your mask stops large droplets pretty well. The airplane filtration system just needs to get them before the become microscopic particles.
Rather, some of the air going into the big fans of the engines is diverted into some air conditioning machinery that gets it to a comfortable temperature and humidity, and then pumped into the passenger compartment. In order to maintain the correct pressure, there are basically "leakage" valves that let air flow out of the plane. An airplane maintains pressure by balancing how much air is allowed out of that valve vs how much air is coming in through the AC machinery. The result is the vast majority of air inside of a plane at any time is air that was previously outside the airplane.
To be pedantic, modern bleedless engines don't do this but just directly get fresh air :)
What kind of respirator have you switched to? Smells are vapors and not particles, so they're removed by eg activated carbon and not particulate filtration. I would bet your better respirator has "nuisance organic vapor" protection or something like that.
For example, with my 3M silicone facepiece [0] you can use a 2291 filter (no OV), 2297 filter (nuisance OV, what I use for Covid), or a 60921/6001 for full OV which blocks any smell I've come across (in addition to protecting against hazardous levels of some specified organic vapors).
[0] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/40744O/3m-respirator-car...
I've been using different P100 masks since the beginning of the pandemic and while it occasionally garners strange looks, I love not smelling anything when forced to use a port-a-potty.
I think wearing a mask has made me more sensitive to smells. So one of the things I like about masks is not having to smell other's bad breath occasionally or those closed air conditioned spaces that have "humid" smells.
When I worked shifts in a vaccination center, I used medical tape along the top edge of the masks I wore.
No problems with reusable half-masks with their flexible rubber seals, though those are kinda impractical for the purpose of papers-please-compliance.
It's basically a pain in the ass but it works for my particular face anyway. I can now, 9 times out of 10 fit it well enough that my glasses won't fog, and with n95, there's no evident leaks.
Edit: Found the link - https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Aura-Particulate-Respirator-N...
Most of the time I don't even see people wearing their surgical mask properly. Hell, I just went to a medical clinic, and the assistant there didn't even press the nose wire completely against the nose.
And that's not counting the chin diapers, nose rhinos, and the countless people taking the mask off by pulling on the outside of the mask instead of taking it off from the ear loops.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.