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Bash's avatar

I'm in London for spring break where its basically 2019 here.

People in masks are a slim minority and look like weirdos

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Michael DAmbrosio's avatar

5 Questions for believers in the mask hypothesis:

1) The size of a micropore in an n95 is 8 microns [1]. The size of micropore in cloth masks range from 80 to 500 microns [2] (and this is before they are washed, which increases gaps). The size of Covid virions ranges .08 to .14 microns. At the best-case scenario, an n95 micropore still could fit ~2,550 of the larger virions side-by-side, and just under 8,000 of the smaller virions. And this is assuming the air current you are pulling in through your mouth passes through the holes and not the sides of the mask. For surgical and cloth masks you could fit somewhere between 785,000 and 30,000,000 virions PER micropore (someone please check my math, I'm basically just treating this is the "how many small circles can fit in a larger circle"). Doesn't this completely negate the premise that community masking serves any benefit? Does this not explain why we have known for 100 years that they didn't do anything after trying them in 1918? Why even in the operating theater we have been unable to find through RCT any benefit and probably just have our surgeons wear them out of tradition? [3,4]

2) After we realized the virions were airborne and not in respiratory droplets [5] why are mask-adherents still treating this as if the virions are attached to large enough particles to be filtered? What is going on?

3) Why can't a blind RCT be conducted using "fake masks"? Couldn't Abaluck have supplied a bunch of villages with realistic looking fake masks [6] and told the villagers a "noble lie" like they had extra special electrostatic charge? See how they compared to villages with real surgical masks?

4) Why don't we know the following (anyone who comes across this comment and has these answers please share sources, I have a few weak citations only):

- Exactly how many viable virions are expelled per breath, per activity

- Exactly how many virions pass through each type of mask per breath

- Exactly how many virions which are initially trapped are pushed through after subsequent breaths for each type of mask

- The infectious dose, in terms of virions, to trigger infection

5) Why the Nordic countries had the best outcome by almost every metric [7] even though they had the lowest mask usage in the entire world? If the masks stopped covid in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan in 2020, why did they stop working in 2022?

._____________________________

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7253999/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6599448/

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214031X18300809

[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01658736

[5] https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

[6] https://fakemaskworldwide.com/the-fake-surgical-mask-2-layer/

[7] yes, that includes Sweden which had zero excess deaths ages 0-64 between 2020 and 2021, and lower total excess deaths than every country except Norway, New Zealand, and possibly Australia (lacking 2021 data) see: https://imgur.com/a/lJzh87w

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