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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

This could be tried if there were enough masks. China prevented western N95 manufacturers from exporting masks out of their China facilities in February, so they will get first dibs on attempting this strategy. One of the unforeseen risks of globalization.

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If you look at the pictures of people wearing masks in china, most are most definitely not wearing N95 masks, those are surgical masks. The only time I’ve seen everyone wearing an N95 are pictures coming out of hospitals.

The article states that they're using homemade masks -- even t-shirts wrapped around their face.

It's not about filtering... there's something else happening here... I'd guess that the mask is a constant reminder to keep your hands off your face.

It's simple:

Spitting virus phlegm at people while coughing = BAD

Based on my own personal experience, I have to wonder if you're not on to something here. I wear just one glove every time I go to the supermarket and my nurse friends have been quick to point out to me that gloves are completely unnecessary. But I do not wear them because I think they'll protect me. I wear them precisely because they are a reminder not to touch my face. It's a simple reminder to myself that: "oh yeah, things are different now... be extra careful, don't touch your face, keep a safe distance from other people, etc." I'd be interested in knowing how many other people think like this. Having said all this, due to the shortages, I should probably stop wearing gloves and maybe just draw a large X on my hand or something to serve as this reminder.

The messaging here around the improvised masks was not about filtering (protecting yourself), it was about protecting the other people from bigger droplets. By proxy that also protects yourself somewhat if pretty much everyone is wearing something on their face.

This is of course only meaningful if almost everyone wears something. This is true at the moment.

Anyway, even improvised masks have some filtering capability. It just varies a lot based on many factors, and would not be something to depend on when you want predictability from PPE in a hospital. It's just that regular people should not have an excuse to spread their sputum everywhere just because they can't buy medical grade PPE.

>This is of course only meaningful if almost everyone wears something. This is true at the moment.

It's not true that you need almost everyone wearing something. Jeremy Howard wrote

>Studies have documented definitively that in controlled environments like airplanes, people with masks rarely infect others and rarely become infected themselves, while those without masks more easily infect others or become infected themselves.

>Masks don’t have to be complex to be effective. A 2013 paper tested a variety of household materials and found that something as simple as two layers of a cotton T-shirt is highly effective at blocking virus particles of a wide range of sizes. Oxford University found evidence this month for the effectiveness of simple fabric mouth and nose covers to be so compelling they now are officially acceptable for use in a hospital in many situations.

http://archive.vn/Dlabz#selection-1639.0-1653.170

Does that assume that infected people know who they are?

Sorry, I think I was confused by the "This" in your sentence that I quoted. I meant to point out that a mask protects you directly (if you are not sick) and not just by lowering the spread of the disease throughout the population. It seems that you actually agree and I misunderstood.

I think it is about filtering. Even simple cotton t-shirt cloth is about 50% effective at filtering 23nm microbes. Definitely not good enough to give to a healthcare worker in a high exposure environment, but also definitely good enough to flatten the curve when used at a population level.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...

I think very basic face masks would be ok, as the idea is to limit people who are infected, from spreading the viruses so that other people get infected. The 2 m distance rule is about how far viruses are spread when speaking or coughing.

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