Study: Association between mask mandates and Covid infections in North Dakota
researchsquare.com
researchsquare.com
It is known that this is an aerosolized pandemic. Airborne. Cloth and surgical masks do not work.
Source – there are many to choose from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...
The posted study on mandates has effectively no meaning. Closed FFP2/N95-style masks work. This is fact. A mandate does not make such masks magically appear on people’s faces. Therefore it is obvious that there is no effective correlation between the word “mandate” and what SARS-CoV-2 does.
Schools are not going to mandate this, and even if they do kids will wear them loose/wrong. So knowing that, where do school boards go from here?
There is, currently, no magic bullet available that will work in a school setting.
the fact thats uts still nit obvious, 2 years on us absurd
The only reasonable explanation I can find for this is that N-95 masks were in short supply at the time and they had to be saved for medical professionals. We needed a distraction to prevent the general public from hoarding N-95 masks.
But here we are, 2 years later, still debating whether masks with holes orders of magnitude larger than the airborne virus particles they are supposed to stop are effective.
N95 masks work due to a dipole charge, not necessarily because of the mechanical filtration size.
> In both respirators, large decreases in the dipole charge density were observed after several heat treatments. However, there was no significant drop in filtration efficiency because multiple parameters (i.e., mechanical filtration) were involved in the filtration performance.
I saw firsthand, working with findthemasks.com, just how many people came to that conclusion on their own and rapidly aggregated and donated as many N95s as they could.
It is bonkers to me that we're not all wearing N95s by default until case-rates really come down, but I have accepted that our current state is the way of the world.
This is the sort of thing gov will have years to solve but I’m sure many will fail to do it and a bunch of countries will be pushing surgical masks then next pandemic (or Covid 2.0).
How long can a person wear one? The few times I work in office I wear one all day, and don’t find it difficult.
How long can a single N95 be reused? I’d read research indicating the real limiting factor seems to be the quality of the seal, and the straps tend to fail before the mask loses efficacy. Basically, if it seals without air escape, you’re good.
I can't wear the 3M ones I have (with a decent seal) for longer than half an hour without getting lightheaded.
Another option is to look for a respirator with an exhalation valve. You give up a level of source control but any exhortations to "protect others!" is pretty silly when they come from people who aren't wearing anything to protect themselves. The Aura has a vented model (9211+) which I've not tried but have heard excellent things about.
You could also consider a half-face elastomeric respirator. You wouldn't expect it, but I've found the ones made with a quality silicone material (3m 75xx / Honeywell North 7700) to be far more comfortable than disposable N95s. They have far more breathable area, which is a major plus. When adjusted properly, they also do not "dig into your face" the same way disposable respirators do - you can keep the straps surprisingly loose & still maintain a seal. And they have a much lower TCO because the respirator media lasts for a long time. Muffled speech is the biggest problem, but speech diaphragms go a ways towards fixing that.
In general though, as you move up the ladder of protection you end up using tools that are both more effective & more comfortable. Pre-pandemic I had a crawlspace under my house spray foam insulated. A team of three guys crawled around under my house in mid-August while wearing full face respirators. They told me they were actually more comfortable than the old half-mask / goggles combination they used to use.
And I assumed water droplets were in fact several orders of magnitude larger than the virus, but would still be caught my masks. Otherwise what's the point for any virus?
The cloth mask still stops the vast majority of such drops, cutting risk significantly compared to no mask.
There are professions that've been doing this for decades without any apparent negative impacts.
They've been used extensively by enough people the burden of proof lies on the folks claiming they're somehow dangerous at this point.
Almost nobody doing industrial work with comparable PPE doesn't spend at least 1-2 hours of a typical workday out of the PPE.
The linked PDF has an example of a typical workday when removing asbestos, note how many times it involves putting on or taking off the PPE.
I'm not making any claim about COVID mask mandates, other than your examples seeming irrelevant to "chronic, day-in-day-out long term use of N95s".
https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=7478&langId=en
Which leaves many thousands of hours in PPE, for many thousands of people. If the N95 masks caused health issues, we'd know. If someone can demonstrate a) a mechanism and b) any evidence for such an effect, I'm all ears.
control-f for "mask": 1 match, and it's in a sentence talking about how mask quality and fit is important to preventing infection, but doesn't elaborate on the effectiveness of cloth/surgical vs n95 masks.
On the other hand there are also studies that show it working, eg. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>The surgical and N95 masks were both effective in significantly reducing the risk of infection, which together with the finding that 30% of non-infected staff did not use masks (table 2) supports that transmission is not airborne.
Do you have better a better study for this, preferably some sort of meta-study?
Even a cloth or surgical mask does lower that probability. Not enough that it is likely to make a difference if you are going to be exposed for a long time, such as spending hours in room with infected people like might happen at school.
But if you are say going to just do say a quick trip to the grocery store and you only have a surgical mask available, wearing it will lower your chances of getting COVID at the grocery store compared to going maskless.
Some sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296 , https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm .
Makes ya wonder.
this sort of statement really bugs me.
anything that slows the airspeed/spread is helpful. and there for "works". A cloth mask is definitely better than no mask... its has a much higher chance of catching larger droplets than no mask, it has a much higher chance of rate limiting even smaller droplets than no mask.
if 100% of the population worse cloth masks you would get a significant reduction of spread just because of the rate limiting.
N95 masks are not 100% effective.. so do we claim that they "Dont Work" as well? no we dont.
Nothing is black and white. nothing is works or doesn't work... every little step on the way every little effort all helps and by extension "Works".
I’m glad that public health officials are actually doing this research and publishing these conclusions. Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but I was worried that there would be limited retrospection about positions taken during the pandemic given the political sensitivities.
Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and are better prepared for the next pandemic.
Unless there's some additional context to this the figure of "12% per day" doesn't tell me much. Is this better or worse than covid? How does it compare to other endemic infections like the flu? Without knowing how bad the spread rate is, it's hard to know whether "the same lagged response" is justified or not.
They based the decision on data showing that almost all cases involve that demographic.
The US has a large stockpile of ACAM2000, but it is unpleasant, potentially dangerous, and has at least a mild FDA warning for use in patients with HIV.
That's in part because health authorities are using being in that demographic as a major factor (and in some cases, a mandatory criteria, even if a very clear symptom pattern is present) for getting tested. They've literally made a decision to avoid/minimize seeing it outside of that demographic.
I'm not sure. The vaccine situation is much better than COVID. It's still really scary, and I hope we can get it under control soon.
Hehe, that's a great joke to start monday with
In my country, the concern wasn't transmission among K-12 students, who are at lower risk, but instead, transmission from K-12 students to adults who were at higher risk of hospitalization and/or death.
I wonder at what point such people will began to consider the evidence in earnest, regardless of the fact that most of these mandates have thankfully been repealed.
I remember seeing a kid forget to wear one and he was treated like a plague rat for the all of 5 seconds before he realized what was going on.
Also, the "mask" thing was _never_ clear. It flipped very frequently. Sure, science can change but if its "changing" that much, that fast it does make me loose a bit of faith.
Ad-hominem attacks are worthless on any politically-contentious issue, because of course people are going to be trying to destroy the reputation of scientists who present data that opposes a political narrative.
There are dozens of other studies about this topic, many of them done carefully by serious researchers.
But I get there’s a bunch of adults who can’t wear masks as well as a 3yo so in that case the adults are more likely to catch or spread covid with their inability to wear masks right.
Pretty much all masks are surgical 3ply now, at the start of covid it was quite hit and miss, alot of 'surgical' were not 3ply.
Mask usage at the community level does not follow the same strict policies related to mask usage that medical professionals do, like discarding them between operations.
Wearing the same mask over and over every day and removing it when you sit down to eat is a very ineffective policy.
And it's kind of an abuse of power for the government to mandate something with such weak science.
Outside an industrialized hospital sanitization chain, it’s actually fine to reuse a mask – as long as it’s a mask that works against SARS-CoV-2 aerosol to begin with.
I can provide sources.
Would love to see your sources if you have them handy.
As another pointed out in a different sub-thread, N95s work as long as they are fit-tested and worn to spec. If you have facial hair, muss the banding so that it doesn't form a perfect seal, etc., the N95 might help, but is not a solution. This means that people with facial hair will not benefit from N95 neither in the form of protection of self nor others.
We have seen in the US that children are now develop-mentally behind. The US govern said what was normal for 24 month child is now normal for a 30 month child. All for a mask program that never worked.
I doubt that very much given the spate of laws controlling teachers passed recently, the record low pay, record staffing shortages, and record resignations.
The sad part is the hundreds of thousands of tons of waste produced due to ineffective mask materials, design, and usage.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/15122577603...
Also, look under the authors, it lists "truth in data LLc" a right wing conspiracy nuthouse.
As expected.
Simply put, as the science now states, the majority of masks weren't worth wearing. If it's not a KN95 or better, it's all but pointless. That is, you're effectively wearing no mask at all.
We know this. Yet occasionally mask mandates kick in again, and the updated science (i.e., KN95 or better) is completely ignored.
The disconnect - and those virtue signaling with subpar masks - is disturbing.