We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..
> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..
The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.
Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.
The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.
"Compared with a baseline of 1-foot separation with no masks employed, particle count was reduced by 84% at 3 feet of separation and 97% at 6 feet. A modest decrease in particle count was observed when only the receiver was masked. The most substantial exposure reduction occurred when the aerosol source was masked (or both parties were masked). When both the source and target were masked, particle count was reduced by more than 99.5% of baseline, regardless of separation distance or which type of mask was employed."
We no longer believe that Covid is spread by large droplets that will fall to the ground within six feet of being sneezed or coughed out. Cloth masks catch those droplets just fine.
We now know that Covid is spread by minute particles so small that they float on the air for hours. Cloth masks do not filter the air you breathe from particles of that size.
You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.
Remember that mask wearing almost completely did away with last year's Flu season while we simultaneously had a huge Covid surge.
Indeed. If you need to filter out tiny particles from the air you breathe, you can't allow unfiltered air to leak in and out through the sides of the mask.
>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
All the pro-mask studies are like this: Some simulated situation that doesn't take into account whether spread actually happens like that in real life.
They can simulate blowing stuff through various types of filter material all they want, it doesn't change that none of the epidemiological curves reacted to mask mandates anywhere.
They do work great as an ideological symbol though, thanks to the topic's polarisation.
I think this works like condom statistics, where the statistic is that they are 98% effective, but that statistic includes people who go "we normally wear condoms, but we didn't that one time and she got pregnant" as a condom failure.
So basically, the masks are effective, but people take the masks off around family and friends and if one of their friends or family has COVID they will pass it on during the unmasked time.
Can you help me understand how “catching COVID while not wearing a mask” is meaningfully different from “catching COVID from a family member while not wearing masks” in the context of whether masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID? Seems an irrelevant distinction to me.
You’re not catching covid in situations where you’d typically wear a mask (regardless of masking), rather where you typical don’t wear a mask, like from family member.
I’m not really saying I agree, but I think that is the context.
The case count for Germany atm is very impressive, but we ditched masks in June, and cases actually plummeted after that, and only started to rise with the delta variant. We still compared to most have a low infection rate.
There is nothing to support the theory that shops are hotspots for spread, if that was true alot of supermarket employees etc, would have been infected, at a larger rate than average. However this has not happened anywhere.
You can cite 100 counterexamples when using this simplistic kind of reasoning. Covid numbers are quite high in South Korea and Japan which both have sky-high mask compliance, for example.
Isn't that part of the scientific process? Is there some other way to come to the truth aside from observation and examining variables related to the observed outcomes?
We wore them for a year. Covid is still here. It won't go away if we wear them for another year. It won't go away if we wear them for another ten years.
That sounds like an argument against bullet proof vests. People still die while wearing them. LEO have been wearing them for years. Obviously, they don't work.
You don't understand the actual goal of wearing masks: protected people and reducing the spread of covid. It's not going to magically eliminate covid when half the country doesn't actually wear them.
And it might be a shocker to some, but there is more to life than myopically focusing on slowing the spread of exactly one disease. We have the rest of our lives to worry about. Expecting society to live a covid centric lifestyle where all that matters is “does it slow the spread” for 1.6 years and counting is does not make for a mentally healthy population.
There remain differences of opinion among scientists on how effective non-medical masks are in reducing COVID-19 transmission.
However, on the question of medical-grade masks, there is clear research that now shows some masks (e.g. FFP3 masks) are effective in stopping COVID-19 infection.
> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..
The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.
Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.
The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.