If One Mask Doesn’t Work, Try Two, or Three, or Four…

January 31, 2021 By Ted Noel, MD

Once upon a time, my primary specialty of anesthesiology was the most scientific of all the medical specialties that actually touch patients. Then I saw that Dr. Scott Segal, chair of Anesthesiology at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina told NBC news that we should consider wearing four -- count ‘em -- four face masks at once. I had thought that the insanity would stop at double masking. Welcome to the new normal. Panic porn has taken over even the medical community that should know better.

Albert Einstein is credited with the maxim that “Doing something a second time and expecting a different result is insanity.” So the first step in “Will more masks help?” is to ask, “Do masks help at all?” Lots of people have done a lot of good work on the mechanics of masks. Jose-Luis Jiminez at the University of Colorado and Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech are two excellent scientists who study the mechanics of the aerosols that transmit COVID-19. Both have demonstrated that masks will markedly reduce droplets. Numerous YouTube videos have also demonstrated that quite dramatically. Masks may even slightly reduce -- not eliminate -- aerosols.

The problem with all this work is that it starts from two primary assumptions. First is the questionable idea that droplets are responsible for spreading the bug. The second is that if we stop droplets, we will necessarily stop the virus. When the epidemic started, we were told to worry about droplets from speaking, singing, and sneezing. But while those can travel many feet, they follow a spitball’s path to the floor, where they cause no further problems. Unless someone sneezes directly in your face from close range as you are inhaling, they can’t get inside your lungs to make you sick.

The mechanistic (fancy word for how something works) answer to the first question is that it is not reasonable to expect masks used by the general public to be useful in preventing disease transmission. But as scientists, we must check out whether this is actually true. RationalGround.com has put together a lot of the data. Notice that Southern California put in a bunch of mask mandates, and the rate of COVID-19 cases skyrocketed. The simplistic answer would be that masks caused infections. A comparison of the fifty states would suggest the same.

Of course, infections went down later without a change in the mask requirements. Any rational scientist would suggest that this means that masks were irrelevant. RationalGround.com has many other charts that make the same point. Put simply, the mechanistic studies examine something that isn’t important in the transmission of COVID-19, because the bug isn’t spread by that way, and stopping droplets won’t matter...............To Read More.....