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CDC “Mask Guideline Update”
This could be medical malpractice of the highest sort. The data, and the science, show that mask-wearing by ordinary, uninfected members of the American Public does not slow or stop the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus. If it did, the State of Washington would have had very few new cases after July of 2020 when our statewide mask mandate went into effect. Instead, we are told that there are over 700 new cases appearing daily. And the average citizen of Washington State is extremely compliant. I can count on the fingers of two hands, the number of people I have seen in stores without masks.
Today, the CDC issued new “guidelines” on mask-wearing. The result of One Lab Experiment shows that two masks, one on top of another, help slow the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus. This is a bald-faced lie.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its mask guidance on Wednesday to include data from a recent lab experiment that found placing a cloth mask over a surgical mask, as well as using a properly fitted mask, was effective in stopping coronavirus spread.
The update, which was announced by CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky during a White House coronavirus briefing, comes after a lab experiment using simulated respiratory breaths found that placing a cloth mask over a medical procedure mask or using a medical procedure mask with knotted ear loops and tucked in sides decreased exposure to potentially infectious aerosols by about 95%.
This is the biggest bunch of baloney I have ever heard. The American population has already been subjected to a full year of lockdowns, business and school closures, unemployment, and deaths of despair of people young and old alike. Are they going to send a healthcare professional to each and every household daily to ensure that everyone is wearing a mask or two properly? Will a doctor be stationed at the door of every business to make sure all customers are properly wearing their two masks?
This new guidance is stupid and unnecessary. No mask mandate! Let the American People live their lives!
Published in Healthcare
No, the state did not require but the locality did. Current the government of Tampa are running around social media looking for people that were in Tampa without a mask to give $500 fines to.
Just so everyone knows, I am going to edit the title and the original post to make it less incendiary.
There are three hyuuuge factors that most people overlook about mask wearing. First of all, most medical authorities concede that masks do not protect the wearer from the virus. This is because the virus is so small that it flows through mask material as easily as the Autumn wind. The virus is about 100 nanometers large, and utility mask pores are around 2,500 nanometers large. It’s as effective at stopping viruses as a cyclone fence is at stopping mosquitos. Even the N-95 mask pore size is 300 nanometers.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-year-of-disguises/
That brings up the second point. The authorities try to convince us that masks prevent infected people, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, from spreading the virus because the virus is riding on tiny water droplets that are large enough to be caught by masks. This is true because those water droplets are close to 5,000 nanometers wide, large enough to be stopped by 2,500 nanometer pores. However, nobody thinks farther than this point. What happens when your expelled breath evaporates those water droplets within minutes or seconds? The mask is not a black hole where things disappear forever. It collects viruses and as soon as the water vapor dries, the viruses are then expelled into the atmosphere. The virus thus becomes aerosolized instead of harmlessly falling to the ground, entombed in water droplets. It makes more sense for an infected person to cough into a tissue that can be immediately discarded, than into a mask which acts as a permanent reservoir and disperser.
I learned about the preceding effect by reading microbiologist articles, but offhand I cannot locate some. The best I can pass on is this half-hour discussion with an organic chemist on The Tom Woods Show :
The third factor, which is so commonsense but often overlooked, is that 95% of masks do not fit very tightly over the face, allowing the virus to escape through air jets along the sides of the mask. You end up blowing your breath sideways much farther through these concentrated jets, than you would normally expel downward through your nose. Surgical masks are meant to be held tightly against the face so that the wearer gets crease marks in his face from the edges of the mask.
It’s not just here in the U.S. Here’s a site that shows places all over the world where mask mandates have been put into effect and cases just go through the roof.
https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
The info on that site is a few months old, so here’s a more recent example. The country of Czechia had one of the earliest mask mandates in the world, and at the beginning, they were one of the least infected counties in Europe. They gradually eased up on mask restrictions over the Summer and by Fall the cases started climbing again, just like in the rest of Europe. Then in mid-October, they clamped down even harder with more severe mask mandates than before, even while driving in cars. Soon the number of infections, which had been around 260 per day at the height of the Pandemic, surged astronomically to well over 10,000 per day. Certainly the masks, which seemed effective at first, have completely failed. There must be other factors that could be completely unknown that epidemiologists have not accounted for.
I checked the linked page, but I couldn’t find this piece of information: By how much does a medical procedure mask by itself “decrease exposure to potentially infectious aerosols”?
Does anyone know where I might find that?
You really need to keep up:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536?guestAccessKey=ad8562db-4f5c-4f5e-ba10-a3c44e783c75&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_content=olf&utm_term=021021
posting out of date medical info is useless.
That is true but the N95 mask is the gold standard for PPE in the current situation. Same comment applies…if two masks work for 95% of aerosols, then why go to the expense of N95 masks? I think the use of the “95%” is a deliberate attempt to blur the lines…and I thought the masks were to protect other people, not the ones wearing the masks – or has that gone away as well?
Numerous claims of mask ineffectiveness have been based on the observation that population infection rates don’t necessarily plummet when mask mandates go into effect. This is, in my humble opinion, an incorrect inference. We’d need to know a lot more, such as actual mask use rates before the mandates and after and what all the other confounding factors, like social distancing, infection prevalence, mask use at home, etc., might be.
The masks are made to stop small aerial liquid droplets like those produced by coughing, sneezing, and loud talking. It’s easily proven that they do that very well. It’s reasonable to presume they help prevent COVID-19 spread.
People can do as they like in private, but they should wear masks in public to avoid frightening the horses.
The claims of mask ineffectiveness are typically akin to claims that sanitation, antibiotics, modern medicine do not work b/c, after all, every patient eventually dies. If you do not properly control for a number of factors the gross data isn’t very useful.
Masks work both ways- but is very likely that high quality masks work better to protect the wearer-especially medical personnel in high viral load situations. We have reached a sad situation- on the right many people oppose almost all mitigation steps, while on the left they advocate EVERY mitigation step. Moderation isn’t just a virtue in Aristotles’s Athens
I agree with this. It makes sense that as people begin to notice that the case numbers are starting to increase–either more of their acquaintances are getting sick or the press is reporting case number increases–more people start wearing masks and doing so consistently. That doesn’t stop the cases that were incubating from becoming more active and making more people sick, especially people living and working in close quarters.
We had a Latin teacher in high school who used to spit whenever he was talking. I don’t know why. It got to be a joke among the kids–no one wanted to sit in the front row. :-)
Sound like a tic.
Iowa is doing just what you suggested, beginning Monday. At least, the governor is allowing the citizens to make their own decisions (unheard of in the present “crisis” situation).
At this point, with many state governors still ruling by decree with no input by state legislatures, masks serve one purpose: social control of the population. Americans are no longer free people.
I think this is right. I used to say that they had no idea if it lowered the coefficient of spread. It’s obvious that it doesn’t. They have no idea if double masks would work. It’s not going to matter after the vulnerable get vaccinated.
If you fight it with anything but supply, it gets really complicated really fast. Controlling the demand is a real mess.
I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise from the news reports. The coefficient of spread is one number and then you take that times what masks reduce it and it obviously doesn’t do jack.
Masks don’t add anything to social distancing. That is my opinion.
The big risk has always been spending 15 minutes, indoors, around somebody that is spreading. Nothing is going to change that.
Here’s another one. The vaccine doesn’t kill the virus. It just makes you not get sick from it. Say that is true, and I’m pretty sure it is. Then even if double masks work– they really lower the coefficient of spread–what is the point?
Maybe there is an answer, but you have to structure the question that way.
Someone should design a simple ‘breath test” to see if people are exhaling virus in their breath. Line a plastic bag with some sort of reagent that changes color when in contact with the coronavirus. You exhale into the bag, wait five minutes, and if the reagent changes color, you are spreading virus and can quarantine until you no longer exhale virus (test would be very easy to use, sort of like one of those home pregnancy tests). The one who comes up with that sort of test would be a very wealthy person in a very short time.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536?guestAccessKey=ad8562db-4f5c-4f5e-ba10-a3c44e783c75&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_content=olf&utm_term=021021
I don’t see how it changes the velocity on the charts in the news enough to make any practical difference. The government can do a better job of pitching it if it actually works. They don’t even try. Why can’t they pitch it as if it would be legislated like any other government force?
If this is actually true, the media is doing a terrible job of explaining it.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536?guestAccessKey=ad8562db-4f5c-4f5e-ba10-a3c44e783c75&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_content=olf&utm_term=021021
You can’t conclude differently if you WON’T
Look at my other post. I think it’s laughable that masks slow anything down in a practical sense. You sure as hell can’t tell that from the news.
In Minnesota, our governor has promised us that we are going to take down all of the plastic, pull up all of the stickers on the floor, let wild college bars wide open etc. before we get rid of the mask mandate. He has promised us that is the last thing he’s going to get rid of. We won’t be social distancing but we will have those things on our face.
Where are the journalists asking why we aren’t being forced at gunpoint to double mask? Why not?
Don’t give ’em any ideas!
I really don’t care. If they are going to say stuff like that, and I mean the government, they should have to answer why they aren’t shoving all this efficacious central planning down our throats for the greater good.
Honestly, for all I know it actually works. I saw an explanation of it this morning. Basically you are just forcing the surgical mask on your face like it should be. Then supposedly there is extra efficacy because there are two layers.
The damn paper masks start stinking really fast as far as I’m concerned. I think doctors normally only wear them for a couple of hours under normal circumstances. SEVEN A DAY COMRADE!
I read through the article you linked. It is not an actual experimental study on the effectiveness of masks. It is simply a compilation of previous studies that they decided to present. The preponderance of the article is a description of how masks should work, not actual findings. When it comes to the findings, just a cursory glance told me that they were using extremely weak anecdotes.
For instance, they chose as their prime example a case in Springfield Missouri where two hairstylists who were infected and masked, attended to 139 clients, and 67 of the clients they were able to contact had not gotten the disease. The first alert are the words “attended to.” They did not specifically say that they “styled their hair” or spent any prolonged period of time with them. Being attended to at a hair salon can mean anything from welcoming you to the salon or leading you to your chair, to taking your payment at the end. Also, they only contacted 1/2 of the customers. If the women had infected three or four people, they could easily by random chance have been in the non-contacted group. According to the latest Ro number, the average infected person is only expected to infect about two other people during the 10 to 14 days of the sickness. This makes their 67 healthy people out of 139 attended to an almost meaningless statistic.
There are even weaker results cited in their table. They show a 3.4% decline of Covid cases among health care workers in a specific Boston healthcare facility after masks were worn. 3.4% could be a rounding error. They cite an even more miniscule reduction in the state of Kansas where counties that wore masks saw an infection decrease of .08%. I’m not making that up. You’d have to look under a microscope to find that reduction.
Lastly, they cite the study that shows 15 U.S. States and the District of Columbia had daily reductions of a percent or two after implementing mask mandates. To start with, if masks work, then why do only 1/3 of States show positive results? 2nd, when I looked up the study, it was published eight months ago and was only looking at the small time period between April 8 and May 15th of last year. Infections in the U.S.have risen by eight-fold since that time, while wearing masks, pretty much making the whole study obsolete.
And you chided me for posting out of date medical info!