Let me paint a bit of a difficult conundrum from the pandemic:
Masks work dramatically better when the person wearing the mask is the one who is sick. A grocery store where the one infected person is masked is better than the grocery store where the one infected person is openly coughing around 30 masked people.
Everyone masked works best, but the heavy lifting is done by the sick persons mask.
In short; You wear a mask to protect others from you, not the other way around.
However, this creates a severe social stigma problem however: People wearing masks are outing themselves as being sick (whether or not they actually are). The result is people don't wear masks for fear of social retaliation.
So now you, as a scientist, have to figure out what the messaging around masks is going to be. Wear a mask to protect others? Wear a mask to protect yourself? Everyone wear a mask all the time because we say so?
It was a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. They went with everyone wear a mask all the time, alluding to the implication of masking being a tool of self preservation. Of course masks don't work great at stopping you from getting sick (outside of being specially trained in their use), which is easily proved, and half the country recognized they were being lied too (while never acknowledging that the sick person wearing a mask works great).
it also depends upon the mask type who you're protecting? IIR surgical masks tend to only protect other people, whereas you can protect yourself with FFP2/FFP3/N95/P99/...
but deciphering that is part of the problem, the layman had to come to terms with the difference between IIR masks and the other more protective to self standards.
the messaging was unclear but it required the avg person to do their own research.
imo, the real problem was the culture war?
i don't think there's any problem with someone making it clear that they're sick; society needs to be more accepting of the sick and more accepting of call-outs of work due to illness. this would help everybody in the long run.
That procedure (I guess you speak about fit tests, especially with a dust of saccharin) is important when you need to be 100% sure to be protected, such a dealing with with ebola or equivalent; but even a badly fitted mask will reduce the inhaled dose and improve the chances to develop a benign infection.
Of course masks work well at protecting you - why do you think people wear masks when exposed to dust?
The problem is that you can't wear it when you eat, and who does one eat with? Family, including children, who are prime infectors.
The great lie here in Switzerland has been to pretend that kids don't get ill and don't infect others, to keep schools open (without any attempt at e.g. air filtration) to keep people working (because the prime function of school here seems to be daycare, to free both parents to go to work)
Over 100 years of medical use helps, too. You know, the idea of using masks to prevent the spread of infectious disease isn't exactly a new idea and is widely employed by medical staff every single day.
Masks are worn by surgeons to protect the patient in case spittle drops into them whilst the surgeons lean over them. It isn't to stop the spread of respiratory illness, at which they are completely ineffective and always have been.
My impression of mask effectiveness for aerosolized illnesses like COVID (it doesn't spread primarily through spittle, unlike what a lot of public health authorities assumed early on in the pandemic when the initial mask recommendations were made), after reading the arguments on both sides during the pandemic, is that they can be usefully analogized to birth control methods:
- Surgical masks: douching after sex. Probably has some small effectiveness compared to doing nothing, but shouldn't be considered as a serious method to prevent propagation.
- N95-level masks to prevent transmission: coitus interruptus. Definitely effective, but also almost impossible to use at anything resembling 100% effectiveness. With coitus interruptus, pre-ejaculate and general inability to precisely control ejaculation mean the method will assuredly fail after a while. Analogously, N95 masks would probably significantly reduce transmission if everyone used them, although probably not to 0. But outside of hospitals, compliance is probably not strong enough to significantly affect the progress of an infection wave.
- N95-level masks to protect against infection (including masks with vents): condoms. Almost 100% effective if used perfectly, but can easily still mess it up on occasion. N95 effectiveness is much worse than condoms in practice outside of hospitals because masks have to be worn for the majority of the day, unlike condoms, which are only worn during the sex act itself.
- Abstinence: staying away from any carriers. Unlike with sex, almost impossible to do for a contagious respiratory cold-like pandemic like COVID.
People do not wear masks correctly to withstand being around sick people. This was abundantly clear during the pandemic.
To wear a mask to keep viral particles from spreading is fairly hard to screw up. To wear a mask to stop viral particles from getting in is very easy to screw up.
If someone is walking around with a water mist sprayer, is it easier to keep people dry by having them wear all manner of layers, or to simply drape a cloth over the mist nozzle?
>People do not wear masks correctly to withstand being around sick people. This was abundantly clear during the pandemic.
Enough people wear masks correctly, so well that almost all airborne diseases disappeared during COVID.
But everyone seems to have forgotten that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely contagious, with a R0 extremely high amongst viruses (I think it is only topped by measles?), far higher than flu.
> If it isn’t severe, then why bother protecting yourself at all? (Leave it to those that want to, or need to, to protect themselves.)
It was a severe disease for a certain portion of the population, especially before the vaccine.
If you're willing to write off anyone with any preexisting condition and with older than a certain age, or just have them not participating in society for a few years, that's one kind of tradeoff. Everyone taking extra precautions like wearing masks and trying to socially distance is a different tradeoff.
There's no getting around the fact that given a novel risk, we as a society had to make tough choices and tradeoffs over how to deal with it. There was no way to get out of this with zero negative impact - because the world gave us a bad situation.
Revisionism these days seems to accept that we didn't get it right, but rhetorically asks "could you have done better?", and gives only a shrug.
We should have done better, and we could have.
We put those with preexisting conditions and those over a certain age at greater risk by pretending our protection measures were good enough when they really weren't.
That narrative ignores the actual flip-flopping on masks. First we were told not to use them because they were ineffectual (probably an attempt to hoard PPE for health care workers) then we were told that we had to wear them. So do you believe what the scientists (Fauci in particular) said initially, or believe what they said next, completely contradicting themselves and not explaining how the science had changed.
A lot of us accept that science is constantly growing and only gives us the best answers we have in the moment (as opposed to hard truths like in mathematics). That's a strength of science! When there's a sudden change in alleged consensus for no apparent reason, it seems political.
Masks work dramatically better when the person wearing the mask is the one who is sick. A grocery store where the one infected person is masked is better than the grocery store where the one infected person is openly coughing around 30 masked people. Everyone masked works best, but the heavy lifting is done by the sick persons mask.
In short; You wear a mask to protect others from you, not the other way around.
However, this creates a severe social stigma problem however: People wearing masks are outing themselves as being sick (whether or not they actually are). The result is people don't wear masks for fear of social retaliation.
So now you, as a scientist, have to figure out what the messaging around masks is going to be. Wear a mask to protect others? Wear a mask to protect yourself? Everyone wear a mask all the time because we say so?
It was a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. They went with everyone wear a mask all the time, alluding to the implication of masking being a tool of self preservation. Of course masks don't work great at stopping you from getting sick (outside of being specially trained in their use), which is easily proved, and half the country recognized they were being lied too (while never acknowledging that the sick person wearing a mask works great).