Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
If they had it, they shouldn't have gone out in the first place. Coronavirus was always highly infectious, and omicron is more infectious than the earlier strands. When you see people wearing their gappy masks, and many wearing them under their noses, a highly infectious virus will not be contained.
We are kidding ourselves about the effectiveness of masks. They are two flimsy and badly designed to be effective.
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This is the thing. The cloth and paper face masks will have a minimal effect and there will probably be an added behaviour effect too, such as people keeping apart, being reminded there's a virus by seeing everyone wearing masks, not going out if it's not necessary or if they're feeling ill, etc etc.
But the point is that they are badly used and that is partially down to the messaging which seems to have got out to some people as "if you cover your face it stops covid" or "if you wear a mask all the time it stops you getting covid" without giving any thought to selecting a mask, how to use it, how to store it, how to wear it etc.
The key point which gets lost in messaging about masks is that they are single use. Once you have put that mask on, it is contaminated for future use, and when you take it off it needs to be washed if it's washable or thrown away if it isn't and you put a clean mask on the time after. And to avoid transferring contamination between the mask and your hands (and then everything else they touch) you need to sanitise or preferably wash your hands before putting the mask on and after taking it off. Very few people did this properly.
The effectiveness of the KN95 and FFP2 as methods of preventing the virus spreading is a lot higher than with other masks but most people weren't wearing those as the FFP2s are both expensive and single use. And even in countries where they were strict about masks and type of masks worn such as in Germany, they still got spikes of the virus same as we did, which leads to the conclusion that whilst it may have potentially blunted the spike, it ultimately didn't stop it. What did was a combination of the vaccine and infection from a variant which generally isn't as lethal when people get it.
People who have an infectious disease should stay at home if they possibly can. Because them wearing that paper mask which they already worn for the last six months walking in the open air isn't going to have much effect on anything really.