In an interview for 60 Minutes, CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook posed that question to Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech University professor specializing in aerosol science.
“They are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get COVID because it’s reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you,” Marr said about masks.
No mask is 100% effective. An N95, for example, is named as such because it is at least 95 percent efficient at blocking airborne particles when used properly. But even if a mask has an 80% efficiency, Marr said, it still offers meaningful protection.
“That greatly reduces the chance that I’m going to become infected,” Marr said.
Marr said research shows that high-quality masks can block particles that are the same size as those carrying the coronavirus. Masks work, Marr explained, as a filter, not as a sieve. Virus particles must weave around the layers of fibers, and as they do so, they may crash into those fibers and become trapped.
Marr likened it to running through a forest of trees. Walk slowly, and the surrounding is easy to navigate. But being forced through a forest at a high speed increases the likelihood of running into a tree.
“Masks, even cloth masks, do something,” she said.
Not that I expect most people to believe it at this point…
God I remember when this happened.
Right at the beginning of the pandemic, masks were being recommended by the CDC and everyone just sort of did it. COVID was novel and we were still trying to wrap our heads around it and being over cautious.
Weeks earlier, Trump was lamenting his polling numbers and complained that he didn’t have a “Katrina” that would rally his favorables.
Trump could have done something simple and just worn the damn mask. He could have told people that until they had better data, let’s be cautious and following the CDC guidelines.
But when he was asked point blank, he said he wouldn’t wear one.
Before that, conservatives and liberals were wearing masks. It wasn’t a “tribal” signal. But the second he said it, it was. You could tell immediately after that who conservatives were.
The funny thing is had Trump handled COVID better, he probably would have won re-election. Or at least it would have been closer.
But nope. That’s not the kind of person he was.
He could have made a MAGA mask and told his cultists that it was more effective and blessed with holy water or something, and then go on to make piles of cash. At the time, that’s what I was expecting to happen, but sadly I was wrong.
There was so much happening around this time. There was a story that didn’t get a lot of runtime about some company that he or someone who was connected to him set up where the federal government purchased masks bought a bunch of boxes from them but never got delivered.
The internal audit found that they basically the funds were misappropriated. The whole management of funds were so…shady to say the least.
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This is not what happened, they recommended people not to wear masks at the start. This might have undermined their later recommendation to wear a mask
This is true. They didn’t want to cause a mad rush for N95s and other medical masks, because they knew medical professionals needed them more. Because then as soon as they recommended the masks, there was a huge shortage.
But some people took the changing recommendation as some kind of conspiracy, that the government is just making it all up.
Unfortunately, the recommendations from most (all?) top-level officials in the US right at the beginning of the pandemic was for the general public NOT to wear masks (including Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, etc). This absolutely didn’t help matters when later they had to change their tune and recommend then mandate masks, after they had said that they were not needed.
Here’s a nice compilation video of these statements over the first couple of months of the pandemic: https://piped.video/watch?v=tRE59LJc6CA
He would have had more voters at least.