Part of it is the pre-Omicron, it took more virus to typically infect people. So the more typical masks helped a lot. Now even a tiny bit can easily infect, so aerosol (as opposed to droplets) was not nearly as big an issue.
Here's one of the scientists from President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS last year:
> I have had concerns that date back to april of 2020 about the concept of masking.
Needless to say it's a political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health, and yet at the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.
When you actually look at face cloth coverings, those cloth pieces of hang over your face, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.
In fact in 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.
I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking does or does not do.
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.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
>Fitted particle-filtering masks like N95s are up to 75 times more effective at preventing infection with COVID-19 than surgical masks, according to a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://www.axios.com/n95-mask-protection-covid-958039c9-07f...
My child is too young to go to school. If my child was school age I'd likely unenroll this semester. If that somehow were not an option I'd send with an n95. Are you satisfied?
So one, you would need to know you were casually exposed (most folks don’t) And two, you would need to have a pretty good supply of masks carried with you at all times to replenish on every exposure.
1) not being able to touch your mucus membranes with your hands anymore
2) limiting the amount of air circulating near your face by limiting induced currents due to your inhale/exhale cycle
If I'm right, your conclusions about gaining the effectiveness of a simple cloth mask are completely off base.
Definitely curious if you happen to know of a study that looks at the mechanisms of protection for a non filtering mask!
If you can point me to a peer reviewed study extolling the virtues of cloth masking, I’ll read it. But pretty much all of the positive masking studies with any real statistical benefit of protection seem to be centered around n95 or surgical masks—worn correctly and disposed of after one use.
I don't need a peer review study to tell me to ignore the epsilon squared term when the epsilon term is already being argued to be marginal. If an article comes through claiming the inverse, that is surprising and worth communicating at large.
My point is that if a cloth mask is only partially effective for an incidental exposure than it must have been somewhat effective at a given moment, but due to virus size and cloth weaving…every moment that the particle didn’t reach your nasal passages due to that momentary chance then that virus still has a 67%-95% of entering you and infecting you every moment it is near you. So any incidental exposure becomes non-incidental.
Perhaps randomness and chance is magical. I always thought it wasn’t.
A) using incorrect concepts (moment in time? A 15 minute infection window turns into a 20 minute infection window)
B) simply irrelevant. Unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, cloth masks aren't trapping any relevant amount of virus