Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Bofferbrauer2]

SvennoJ said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Had he said that they were effective, then people would have stormed and looted pharmacies just to get their hands on them at the time, and healthcare professionals, who need them the most, would have stayed empty-handed. He was between a rock and a hard place; admitting that masks work and risk a riot from people to get them and those who need them most not getting them; or lying to buy some time to get more stocks on the masks so everybody could get some at a later date.

The only other thing that he could have said is that any cover over the mouth and nose, be it a homemade mask, a bandana, a scarf, a visor, or anything else along those lines would be helpful, but that the medical masks will be reserved for medical staff until they got enough stocks in reserve. But I'm not sure about the efficacy of these compare to the medical masks, and they maybe also didn't, so they didn't want to go any risks later down the road with those and rather said that masks don't help.

Appealing to the avg person's common sense (leave medical masks for frontline workers) sadly doesn't work. Proof is in the toilet paper rush. And true early on it was already established that standard surgical masks still got health care workers infected, so they are indeed not truly effective to stop the virus. They still aren't but do reduce the chance to get infected which helps against community spread.

So it sort of was the right choice. Lock downs, don't really need masks in that phase. Re-openings, use masks to limit spread. N95 masks aren't perfect either, 95 stands for stopping 95% of airborne particles and only if you use them correctly.


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-evidence-masks-covid-.html

Whether cloth masks protect others from the wearer was studied in the 1960s and 1970s. A mask made of three layers (muslin-flannel-muslin) reduced surface contamination by 99 percent, total airborne microorganisms by 99 percent, and bacteria recovered from the smaller particles, aerosols, by 88 percent to 99 percent.

A commercial mask made of four-layer cotton muslin was shown to reduce all particles by 99 percent, compared with 96 percent to 99 percent for contemporary disposable medical masks. Even for aerosols, the cloth mask was comparable with the medical masks of the day, the researchers say.

The filtration of cloth is quite variable and single layers of scarf, sweatshirt and t-shirt may be in the 10 to 40 percent range. But multiple layers increase efficiency, and modern studies have confirmed that some combinations of cloth, for example, cotton-flannel, block more than 90 percent of particles.

It all depends on the material, how well you close it up around your mouth and nose, how you handle it, and if you can still breath through it!
Aerosols are harder to block and you need the N95 masks for that, but you also need a lot more/longer exposure to aerosols to get infected.

Every bit helps

That was my point, and he could just have mitigated it a bit by pointing at other kinds of improvised or handmade protective wear, but the panic buying would have been impossible to prevent if he admitted even just a sliver of efficacy. So he was pretty much forced to lie, and by doing so protected countless lives of medical professionals who would have been forced to work without any protective gear whatsoever otherwise.