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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this. The US Surgeon General needs to be fired and delicensed from medical practice after his claim yesterday that no one should buy masks because masks don't work. He has no business representing himself as a qualified medical professional.

His statements are such egregious malpractice that they rise to the caliber of extreme negligence and should expose him given his position to liability and possibly criminal charges for contributory homicide.

South Korea is looking at charging church officials with "murder through willful negligence" (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/coronavirus-news.ht...). The reason? They told church members to remove their masks during services as it was "disrespectful to God." Telling people not to wear masks is murder through willful negligence.

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I suspect its also that patient 31 decided that it was ok to run a fever and go to dinner, despite being told that they were at high risk of having the flu.

Masks don't protect you from others, they protect others from you, and if you are a health professional dealing with infected people from vulnerable populations, or a surgeon asking for a scalpel over an open body, you are going to assume that you are infected and capable of transmitting disease out of an abundance of caution. Masks for the general healthy public is borderline hysteria and affects the medical supply chain.

Respiratory masks do indeed protect you from others. This is the whole point of this article.

I wasn't saying n95 respirators don't do anything. They are very effective. I was talking about disposable surgical masks that people are now wearing everywhere.

You should consider reading the scientific study that this entire thread is about.

> In this article, a risk assessment model previously developed in general form was used to estimate the effectiveness of different types of protective equipment in reducing the rate of infection in an influenza outbreak. It was found that a 50% compliance in donning the device resulted in a significant (at least 50% prevalence and 20% cumulative incidence) reduction in risk for fitted and unfitted N95 respirators, high-filtration surgical masks, and both low-filtration and high-filtration pediatric masks. An 80% compliance rate essentially eliminated the influenza outbreak.

It's not the only study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903134732.h...

> Summary: The study reported 'no significant difference in the effectiveness' of medical masks vs. N95 respirators for prevention of influenza or other viral respiratory illness.

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