Study shows N95 masks near-perfect at blocking escape of airborne Covid-19
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With all of the mandates to wear a mask everywhere I at least would have liked to wear one that worked well. You would have thought if they could produce 6 free tests per household per month, they could produce 6 free N95 masks per household per month.
It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.
This is revisionist history. I remember many Democrats being staunchly anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and it was only when their party came into power did they turn into human pincushions nearly overnight, "believing in science" and not being able to get enough jabs into them.
The vaccines, of course, were one and the same.
https://time.com/5887777/rushed-vaccine-democrats-republican...
> Unsurprisingly, the degree to which Americans are concerned about the President’s influence rushing the vaccine process falls along political lines. About 85% of Democrats and 61% of independents said they were concerned, compared to 35% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll.
There's a big difference between anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and anti-"Trump rushing vaccine".
> After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from -0.9 percentage point (95% PI, -2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
So if the people that literally couldn't wait to get their shot, got it 4 weeks earlier, that would have been deemed rushed and too early to be safe? But four weeks later it's perfectly safe?
No, this is about political tribalism and not actual vaccine safety.
This isn't remotely true - it was on the expedited path and was always forecast to be ready in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. The "few weeks" was whether they would be approved before the election or after it - which had clear and obvious political implications. Rather than resting on the laurels of having created Warp Speed and helped usher the the vaccine through development and approvals in under a year, they were leaning on the science teams to approve it to improve his election prospects. There were tons of articles in real time about the entire debacle;
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/politics/trump-fda-coronaviru...
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-mark-m...
The right wing media outlets would be praising it and claiming that it was everyone's patriotic duty to get vaccinated.
The left wing media outlets would be pushing out articles and documentaries about how vaccine compliance is rooted in implicit white supremacy.
In 2013, 38% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans supported Obama's missile strikes on Syria. In 2017, 37% of Democrats and 86% of Republicans supported Trump's missile strikes on Syria.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same...
The political parties aren't simplistic mirror images of each other. The Republicans are the ones that really flip mindlessly based on whoever is in power (and then once their guy is no longer in power -- like Bush -- they turn on him years later and forget they ever supported those policies at the time).
Democrats were criticising Trump for rushing the vaccine, and flaming vaccine scepticism, helped by mainstream media.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2671R8/ September 17, 20201
Democrat Biden warns against rushing out coronavirus vaccine, says Trump cannot be trusted
Not exactly.
> Biden, who leads the president in national opinion polls, has questioned whether Trump is pressuring agencies like the FDA to sign off on a vaccine to boost his re-election prospects. At the same time, Biden has been careful to say he wants to see a safe vaccine as soon as possible.
> "There has to be total transparency, so scientists outside the government know what is being approved," Biden said. "I’m saying, trust the scientist."
"Trust the scientist" != "flaming vaccine skepticism"
In the US, there were two - the first, via OSHA, affected all employers with > 100 employees. Employees would need to be vaccinated or tested weekly and required to wear a mask. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The second, via CMMS required vaccinations for all health care employees if Medicare or Medicaid money is involved. SCOTUS allowed that one.
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1483831305448173578
I personally received free masks. However, it was too late.
It was mostly early COVID when the masks were most needed and not available. Even the strategic stockpile essentially ran out after distributing them to vital areas. By the time they had enough to give them away, everyone had multiple masks of various qualities.
Kinda telling and depressing that everyone was ordering random knockoffs of varying quality from overseas, because we couldn't seem to produce enough domestically.
B) money doesn’t magically turn into materials and finished goods. Someone had to make masks to distribute and they had to get their raw materials from somewhere right when the supply chain was disrupted.
I’m not surprised that cloth beat surgical, but beating KN95 is kind of a shock. Of course, I’m sure there was quite a bit of variance in cloth mask quality. I wonder if anyone has done specifically a study on the home made cloth masks.
At 1 Euro a test, you could easily test yourself every morning before heading to work or school.
Inexpensive is not a word I'd use to describe a mask you need multiple of in a week and monthly replacements of thereafter. For a virus that affects the entire world, "developing" and "developed", it's not an easy sell.
But this rather harmless inference could've been promoted instead of the fake initial narrative of "masks are not that useful, save them for medical staff" that happened early on in the pandemic. Policymakers should never be gatekeeping information and acting like the public is too dumb to solve resulting supply-side issues.
I think one could reasonably stretch out a box of 20 duckbills for a whole year even if worn daily. They are about $1 each. While I could see that there would be places that $20/year would be too much, I don't think money is the barrier here. People just don't like wearing masks (especially respirators, which are bulkier) for many reasons.
Seems like a vulnerability in the system.
These were sealed shut onto the test equipment using wax (ie: perfect fitment, so best case scenario). They found a much higher penetration through the materials per se for cloth coverings and procedure masks.
> Particle penetration through the surgical mask ranged from 2% to 17%. Procedure masks were most variable and ranged from 1% to 85%
> For the six cloth face coverings, the submicron particle penetration ranged from 24% to 92%. For the two types of fabric from cotton t-shirts, submicron particle penetration ranged from 45% to 91%. Although this sample size was small, these penetration percentages for the cloth face coverings and fabric from cotton t-shirts are comparable to the 40% to 90% penetration found by previous NIOSH testing of cloth face coverings and fabrics.
For the respirators with exhalation valves their finding was the particle penetration was <1% to 55% without any additional mitigation and under 5% when using the ECG pad mitigation strategy tested. Relevant since a common earlier critique (perhaps assumption) of valved respirators was they weren't as decent as even common masks for non-wearers.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/pdfs/2021-107.pdf
Wearing face masks as a potential source for inhalation and oral uptake of inanimate toxins – A scoping review https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014765132...
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Possible toxicity of chronic carbon dioxide exposure associated with face mask use, particularly in pregnant women, children and adolescents – A scoping review https://www.cell.com/heliyon/pdf/S2405-8440(23)01324-5.pdf
Quarantines and lockdowns are good old tested ways, but infeasible for prolonged periods of time. Having everyone wear a mask and drastically reduce the spread was such a no brainer I never understood all the panic around it.
If you can, there’s absolutely no reason to force other people to mask anyway & you get the same benefit. That’s the ideal situation for everyone.
Why can't "you" force people to wear masks? Depending on exactly who you mean by "you" (the particular poster, an abstract actor (individual or organization), etc.), what you say could be true to mostly false.
Until the reaction is along the lines of "we're so afraid that people shouldn't be allowed to protect themselves": https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections...
But wouldn't that also protect the unselfish?
From the 'less selfish' segment, yes, but not from each other.
(Though I must admit, having accidentally bought a few of the valved ones early on in the pandemic, I found that the exhale valve actually meant my warm breath didn't heat the mask & my face quite as much, which was really nice for me as I suffer from hyperhidrosis - excessive facial sweating - but I stuck with using non-valved masks since I'm much less at risk than various friends and family members are.)
I think a good chunk of it was the CDC randomly changing its recommendations with no real explanation.
At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, from January to May of 2020, there was a big campaign by the CDC to discourage people from wearing masks. I remember seeing various guest "medical experts" on the news claiming that people who wore masks were actually MORE LIKELY to contract COVID. At the same time, virtually every other country was encouraging or mandating masking.
Then June of 2020 came around, masks quickly became encouraged and then mandated. Fauci only made vague and nonsensical statements like "the science changed!" and "we're moving at the speed of science!" to explain the abrupt change in policy. As if there was ever any scientific data to suggest that COVID-19 was not capable of airborne transmission or that masks wouldn't help limit said transmission.
I get that there was a shortage of masks early on and the CDC was probably just trying to prevent panic buying (which occurred anyway, there were N95s selling on amazon for $40 per mask). The ridiculous claim that "masks make you more likely to get COVID" followed by a sudden requirement to wear said "COVID causing" masks completely destroyed public confidence and fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories.
It's obvious that masks help if they're worn correctly, but the uncertainty was around the question of whether the general public would actually wear them properly. In hindsight, it seems obvious that mask-wearing should have been encouraged from day 1, but it somehow wasn't initially clear.
One problem, I think, might be the emphasis on controlled randomized trials (RCT) in medicine, which are not always appropriate. Think of running an RCT on whether parachutes prevent death when falling from planes. We understand the physical mechanism underlying parachutes, so we know mechanistically why they prevent death from falling. Covid is a respiratory virus. Masks physically filter the virus out of the air you breathe in and out. You don't need a study to know that if worn correctly, they will reduce transmission. The real question is how to teach and encourage the public to wear masks properly, not whether masks work in principle.
I can see a logic that goes: we don’t know if masks help yet. Therefore, if you decide to wear a mask, keep that in mind, and continue to follow the distancing guidelines. Also, be careful when donning and doffing your mask, as you are likely to accidentally touch your face at that point.
This is the advice I remember from reading stuff. But, I could definitely imagine people trying to “dumb it down” on TV and coming up with “maybe masks will harm more than hurt.” As a public policy, given the data available at the time that seemed plausible.
Unfortunately everybody’s a pundit on TV, so they might discuss public policy and personal advice (as well as their speculation about how people will feel about public policy, completing the media ouroboros) in one sentence and mix them all up.
Not sure what the fix is, maybe the CDC needs a more active media department to keep on this stuff. In particular, panicking people seem to want to see how these decisions are made. Have every interview be about the error bars, bookended with the current advice, which is just stay far apart.
Then there were obvious propaganda lies surrounding masks. One was that soldiers wear them- and i was a soldier, with a abc-mask and we "trained" marching with them and unscrewed them to get some air. Then some other world-unaware office worker suggested using them in freezers and cooled environments- which basically boils down to waterboarding yourself with condensing air-moisture. Good idea, pushed by panicy people into bad policy, communicated badly, resulting in massive resistance.
Not trying to be snarky, tbh that is more important to me personally, too... but probably not in the broader sense...
It also helps that N95 masks tend to have better nosewires for fit, and specify real head straps, which makes them practically more dependable than some masks like most KF94s.
Edit: With all the statistics that were bandied around in that time, I wonder how many accidents were caused by steamed-up glasses due to leaky masks.
I guess it's called boob tape because boobs like me use it?
I didn't see any need to wear a mask outdoors (except in a crowded circumstance) or when driving.
It's like when Bill Nye debated creationist Ken Ham; when asked what would convince them they're wrong, Nye said "evidence" and Ham said "nothing".
For the rest of the population it is hard to determine a mask measure works. Even with this study it's hard to determine. Regular people tend to reuse masks too much, not care for quality labels (N95, etc), and not adjust them well.
Only disposable paper surgical masks (actually disposed of after single use!) worked (if the definition of worked was "reduced the transmission of at least droplets when coughing"), or real masks like KN95 or N95 certainly worked.
Those cloth masks that were reused every day did far more harm then good, especially if they were not washed. They did nothing against the pressure race of a cough, and most transmissibility was via aerosol anyway, not droplets.
The politics simply distorted the science, like when we saw Executive staff wearing logoed blue cloth masks more as a fashion statement than any real science, while subjecting the wearer to reduced air flow, exacerbating things like asthma or cardiac issues, and trapping some virus and random bacteria in a cess pool of saliva in a cloth mask that got saturated within minutes.
It's a real shame that people who knew better didn't say, "these masks work and these other masks are worse than no mask at all."
Politics took over and both sides were trapped by the nuance, and the result is a stain on the history of science and public health.
> Led by researchers from the University of Maryland School of Public Health (SPH), results showed other masks also performed well, blocking at least 70% of viral particles from escaping from the source – an infected person’s exhaled breath.
> Cloth masks also outperformed both KN95 and surgical masks. Milton theorizes that cloth masks with greater coverage, wrap around the face and give a better seal than either KN95 or surgical masks. With cloth mask filters, flow resistance is also lower, allowing breath to pass through the filter and not leak out the sides of the mask.
What in the studies are you basing this on?
> And your quote doesn’t say how often they need to be washed or material or thickness
Everyone I know washed theirs at least daily. Perhaps we should've done better "how to wear/wash" education, but we generally don't need regular PSAs to remind people to wash their underpants.
And if we're being pedantic, men typicall have ~10% larger lung capacity than women, which may well have an impact on mask performance as well.
So while the original commenter was factually incorrect, the concern doesn't seem terribly far fetched to me.
"The right mask, worn properly, can do a nearly perfect job of blocking COVID-19"
It's incredible to me that after all this, we still write and publish declarative headlines and articles like this.
> Even without giving participants fit tests or training on how to wear masks correctly, all masks significantly reduced the amount of virus escaping into the air.
Including interesting results around cloth masks fitting better than surgical/KN95 masks:
> Cloth masks also outperformed both KN95 and surgical masks. Milton theorizes that cloth masks with greater coverage, wrap around the face and give a better seal than either KN95 or surgical masks. With cloth mask filters, flow resistance is also lower, allowing breath to pass through the filter and not leak out the sides of the mask.