1. Don't go out unless absolutely necessary.

2. If you go out, wear the highest specification mask available to you.

3. If you go out, wear the best eye covering available to you. Sealed goggles are ideal, but even a pair of sunglasses will provide protection.

4. If you have to improvise a mask, try to use a filter material better than cotton. Some ideas: Vacuum Bags, HEPA filters, Furnace Filters, Car Cabin Air Filters. Try to make a mask that seals well against your face.

5. If you have extra masks, donate them. You may want to wait to donate them until hospitals start routinely disinfecting and reusing their PPE, because otherwise the masks you donate may get used once and thrown out. Masks donated later may make more of a difference.

Do not feel shame about wearing a medical mask out. The most useless mask is the one that sits on a shelf while its owner is outside getting infected or spreading infection. You are not denying a healthcare worker a mask by wearing one. You are being responsible and not getting infected. If you don't infected, you don't go to the hospital and infect a healthcare worker. If you don't get infected, you don't spread the virus to anyone else, and they don't go to the hospital either.

Look in your garage. Many people have a few masks left over from painting or sanding or wildfires.

6. Do not shake hands or otherwise touch anyone around you.

7. Keep a distance of at least 1 meter (2m ist better)

8. Do not touch your face, your eyes or your nose even when they are itchy.

9. Use your brain to foresee situations where you can be infected.

10. Don't use public transport and don't sit near anyone closer than 2 meters.

11. Wear gloves (any kind, skiing gloves are fine too)

12. Get desinfection gel after a possible contamination situation and wash your hands when you come home.

13. Do not enter your PIN codes with bare hands

14. Don't use cash! No coins in your pockets.

15. Don't share your mobile phone. Keep it to yourself.

16. Don't share your earbuds.

I’m predicting that if you want to donate, you should donate directly to front line workers, since a hospital wouldn’t use masks of unknown origin, and I’d be concerned about thefts and scams from charities. Anyone who really needs them will just accept a donation gratefully, and can share with others on front line.

There are multiple PPE donation drives going on right now, and these supplies do go to hospitals and other health care workers. I don’t know why you think hospitals won’t use these masks; they will soon have nothing else to use.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2020/4/2/21205935/cook...

https://www.milb.com/news/ppe-donation-drive-set-for-april-4...

https://mnnurses.org/minnesota-nurses-asking-for-public-to-d...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/woodlands-to-start-help-ou...

https://denver.cbslocal.com/video/4496510-ppe-donation-drive...

I’m sure there are others.

Is your goal to protect yourself or to protect others? If the latter, the fancy N95 or P100 masks with exhalation vents are of highly dubious value.

I can tell you that I see lots of people walking around the streets of my city with medical grade masks, worn improperly. Even if they are wearing them properly, I routinely see people pull the mask down with their bare hands to talk, use the phone, etc. Those masks are wasted.

As someone who has spent years working in a lab environment: you don't know how to wear a mask. You don't. It won't protect you. This guidance here is explicit that the reason they're asking people to wear masks is to protect other people. You can do that with a t-shirt wrapped around your face.

You wearing a mask is not taking anything away from anyone. It is rational protection. Many people have (non medical, but N95 or similar) masks sitting in their garage.

Those masks are not doing anyone any good sitting around. If you have masks and are going out not wearing them, you are putting healthcare workers lives at risk, because you could be spreading or contracting the virus. You or someone else will then go to the hospital and potentially infect a healthcare worker. The best way to protect that healthcare worker is not to give them a mask, it's not to expose them in the first place. If you want to donate them, that's a great thing, but the main thing is that masks should be worn, not gathering dust.

If everyone had been wearing masks for the past month, we wouldn't be in this situation. Let's not perpetuate the nonsense.

Tell us how to correctly don and doff a surgical mask, or a filter, and we can tell you how many steps you got wrong.

This video shows him using bare hands to touch the front of his mask to take it off. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776002

Literature suggests that 80% of HCP infection is caused by incorrect doffing

https://twitter.com/drbencb/status/1236635924274057216?s=20

https://twitter.com/cmac_evans/status/1236689340123754496?s=...

Because it's so hard we see healthcare settings strongly encouraging "dofficers" / "spotters" -- a second person to watch you taking off your PPE to make sure you're doing it right.

https://twitter.com/heatherevansmd/status/124443236962241741...

https://twitter.com/Dolores_McKeen/status/124432789143070720...

Duffing protocol is very important if your PPE is massively contaminated. I’m not as convinced if you may have been breathed on by a carrier at the supermarket.

That's what the CDC previously said! This post is you agreeing with the CDC.

If you're an HCW, no question, you had better be PPEing up to the max and following donning and duffing procedures to a T. You have huge exposure, and if you screw up, you're very likely to catch COVID.

If the level of risk is so high that I am not legally allowed to leave my house except for specified purposes, you would have to be utterly foolish to think that wearing the best mask available to you is not an utterly obviously correct precaution. You really need to be incredibly gullible to not see this.

If you're not an HCW, in March, as an American, you had about a 1/1000 chance of being a LAB CONFIRMED case of COVID. 1000 people are dying every day of this in America, and the numbers keep going up. If this continues, we will have millions of deaths from COVID.

Being an HCW now is like being a Formula 1 driver. You had better have a crapload of safety gear, and even then your risk is very high. Your chance of dying in a car accident in the next month is roughly 1/500,000. Your chance of dying of COVID next month is perhaps 1/1000. That's 500x the risk of driving. Your argument comes down to "Well, since you're not driving in a Formula One race, there's no need to put on your seatbelt." If you wouldn't dream of getting behind the wheel without a seatbelt, why would you go outside without a mask when the risk is 500x higher?

Most people have someone in their life they can ask to spot them as they practice removing their mask.

Also, wouldn't washing/disinfecting your hands after improper doffing prevent self-contamination?

2. Take off mask.

3. Wash hands thoroughly.

The main point is to wash your hands in between each hand touching things of different contamination levels (eg mask body and back of head).

One's implementation may not be perfect, but it's much better to attempt, practice, and slowly get better - rather than succumbing to do-nothing disinformation being pushed by western governments caught without the will to stockpile and procure enough PPE.

You got the doffing procedure wrong btw.

What "clear science" are you referencing? I have not seen data demonstrating that individual mask use increases the chance of infection, which would be necessary to argue against individuals wearing masks on its own merits. Please share if you have it.

In general, calling something a "conspiracy theory" is fallacious. From what I've seen, the intellectual argument underlying the "no masks" narrative is that individual mask use will "take away" from hospitals. When compared to other countries (eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776614), this is patently ridiculous.

I'm saying that donning PPE is hard, and that members of the public can't do it. They usually miss out several hand washing steps, or they don items in the wrong order, or they don't have a safe place to doff items.

You've said "wash your hands" -- you do that by touching taps/faucets. Most people would have to open a few doors to get to the taps. Now all those door handles, and the taps, are contaminated, so you need to clean them too.

> FWIW I use a 3M 7503 with discrete filters so there is a mask body to grab

The entire front face of that filter is to be regarded as contaminated. You must not touch it when doffing the mask.

People in this thread are claiming that one use of the mask is to prevent infected people from infecting others, but this mask has an exhalation valve, so it doesn't stop infected droplets leaving the person wearing it.

Masks provide marginal benefits to people walking around in public, but only if they're worn absolutely correctly. As soon as people deviate from the rigorous protocols those marginal benefits disappear. Worse, there's a chance that they increase risk. If people are touching their masks but not immediately washing their hands, or they are touching their face to adjust their mask then the mask is causing harm.

> From what I've seen, the intellectual argument underlying the "no masks" narrative is that individual mask use will "take away" from hospitals

WHO, CDC, PHE, etc have all been pretty clear that masks don't provide any benefit to members of the public. This thread is full of paranoid nonsense that this was a deliberate lie by the CDC/WHO to preserve stocks.

And the solution here is to gain experience. I don't "adjust my mask" because I've been using it for household projects for the past few years. My first grocery run with a mask was a month ago. I definitely got to points where I messed up steps or did not have a good plan, but I learned. The best time to start is now.

> Most people would have to open a few doors to get to the taps. Now all those door handles, and the taps, are contaminated, so you need to clean them too.

So then, the same exact situation they're in if they go to the grocery store without a mask? People obviously need to wash their door handles as well.

> The entire front face of that filter is to be regarded as contaminated

The 7503 is the face piece, with my point being that I can grab that part without touching the filters. I have the 2297 filters, which are large round cloth discs - exposed liabilities. The 7093 filters would be better as the filter element is encased in plastic, but alas that's not what I already had.

And yes, it has an exhalation valve which is sub-optimal. I'll try remedying this next time I take the whole thing apart to deep clean it.

> WHO, CDC, PHE, etc have all been pretty clear that masks don't provide any benefit to members of the public

They have not backed up this position with data showing that individual mask wearing is actively harmful, and neither have you. Furthermore, they do recommend that healthcare professionals wear masks, which is inconsistent - if masks are effective against virus particles in a hospital, they can be effective against virus particles in a grocery store.

A basic analysis of the physical system is that all contamination ending up on mask filters would have otherwise been breathed in. So even if all of the filtered virus ends up on someone's hands and is not washed off, that is still better than it being in their airways!

If mask wearing is not actively harmful, then why discourage it at all? The meat of your argument seems to boil down to "you're likely to do it wrong" which is neither scientific nor productive.

Exactly who am I propagandizing? Doctors?

"You wearing a mask is not taking anything away from anyone."

We have a mask shortage in hospitals. You are literally taking masks from people who need them more.

"It is rational protection."

For the medical professionals who need them, yes. For you, it's overkill.

"Many people have (non medical, but N95 or similar) masks sitting in their garage."

They should be donating those to hospitals, ASAP.

*"The best way to protect that healthcare worker is not to give them a mask, it's not to expose them in the first place."

The best way to protect health care workers who do not have masks, today, is to give them masks. The second best way is to stay home. The third best way is to wash your hands. The fourth best way is to not touch your face.

Way, way down the list is "wear a mask", and like the guidelines say, not a medical one.

In March, 1 of every 1000 Americans had a confirmed case of COVID. In April, it might be 1 out of 40. For confirmed cases, given that testing is mostly restricted to people appearing at the hospital, I estimate the fatality rate is 7%. That means that in April, you may have a 0.2% chance of dying from COVID. If you wear a mask consistently, that goes down to 0.02%. If you assume you have 40 years left to live, if you're maskless, COVID will reduce your life expectancy by 1 month. If you have an N95 mask that you wear consistently, COVID will reduce your life expectancy by 3 days. Wearing an N95 mask in April increases your life expectancy by 27 days.

By contrast, wearing a seatbelt over the next month, statistically increases your life expectancy by about 0.2 days. Over the next month, wearing an N95 mask is about 130x more important than wearing a seatbelt.

All of this discounts the massive other benefits from not being infected: No long-term lung damage. All of the people you don't infect because you didn't get infected. No infecting healthcare workers. No contributing to the overload of the healthcare system. Plus, wearing a mask, even if you do get infected, you're much less likely to infect other people, which has a cascading effect.

The point is: If you have access to a mask, it's vitally important that you start wearing it if you go out. Still, don't go out unless absolutely necessary! Minimize contact! Especially for essential workers though like grocery store employees, delivery workers, etc, wear a mask!

OK, cite it.

In fact, this is a meta-analysis of 138 papers from five different databases, and they say right at the top of the abstract that most of the studies were of poor quality:

"Study quality was poor for the three randomised controlled trials and most of the cluster randomised controlled trials; the observational studies were of mixed quality. Heterogeneity precluded meta-analysis of most data except that from six case-control studies."

The table you're citing says that they found an odds ratio somewhat better than frequent handwashing (55%), but worse than wearing a gown (77%) when they averaged the results of five different case-control studies, mostly in hospital conditions (the sixth didn't look at masks). Two studies investigated the use of N95 masks (specifically) at preventing infected people from transmitting their virus to others, and for these studies, they found a .09 odds ratio (with a wide confidence interval: 0.03-0.3), and they go so far as to say:

"Evidence was limited for the superior effectiveness of barrier devices to droplets such as the N95 masks...over simple surgical masks."

So they don't even believe the numbers.

This paper in no way supports the statement you made...in fact, it appears that you completely misunderstood what you read, because the only intervention with 91% effectiveness was "handwashing, mask, gloves and gown combined." But hey...if that's the way you go outside, good for you.

Intervention: Wearing N95 Mask Intervention Effectiveness: 91%.

It's true that handwashing, wearing some kind of mask, gloves, and gown combined is also 91%, but that was not a study arm that specified an N95 mask. Wearing any mask has an intervention effectiveness of 68%. Adding the gloves and gown brings it up to 91%.

What the meta-analysis is saying is that wearing any mask + gloves + gown + handwashing is about the same effectiveness as wearing just an N95 mask. It also supports the idea that "don't touch your face" is probably good advice, but it's also probably not the primary means that SARS spreads. It's probably mostly breathing in droplets that someone just exhaled.

I understood perfectly well what they wrote. They say that evidence is limited for the superior effectiveness of N95 over any mask because the lower confidence interval of N95 and the upper confidence interval of any mask overlap by 5%. Based on the studies they analyzed though, it's likely that N95 is more effective than masks generally. It's also very logical since N95 masks filter better and have less leakage than surgical masks.

I am tired of people like you trying to bend science to their ideology. That is part of what got us into this horrible mess.

I addressed this in my reply: this was based on two studies, both about transmission of the virus to other people. Moreover, the people doing the meta-analysis explicitly say that the evidence for using an N95 mask over a plain-old surgical mask is weak. The confidence interval extends from 0.03 to 0.30...in other words, the evidence is weak.

So basically, this study supports the CDC's guidelines: masks might help prevent you from spreading your infection to others. They don't support your claim ("wearing an N95 mask reduces your chances of contracting SARS by 91%") in any way.

"What the meta-analysis is saying is that wearing any mask + gloves + gown + handwashing is about the same effectiveness as wearing just an N95 mask."

It is absolutely not saying this. It is saying that the combined intervention is dramatically more effective than wearing a mask alone, except for two studies that explicitly talk about transmission. You don't understand what you're reading, and you're spreading misinformation.

It would be nice to have more rigorous studies to support the claim?

Just to be clear, I do think people should wear masks!

Seto 2003w47 13 healthcare workers infected with confirmed SARS within 2-7 days of exposure, with no community exposure

w45 330 probable cases of SARS reported to Department of Health, Hong Kong

For god's sake, this thing is so serious that we're not allowed to go outside for normal activities or go to work. We are all prisoners on very limited work release. If you're not taking extreme measures to protect yourself, you're an idiot.

Here are three doffing procedures specifically for covid-19:

https://twitter.com/EMedSligo/status/1245948283576561670/pho...

https://twitter.com/DisneyBen/status/1245224791122030592/pho...

https://twitter.com/ashaukat09/status/1245169306234769408/ph...

This is supported by your Cochrane review:

> Compliance with interventions—especially educational programmes—was a problem for several studies, despite the importance of such low cost interventions. Routine long term implementation of some would be problematic—particularly maintaining strict hygiene and barrier routines for long periods, probably only feasible in highly motivated environments such as hospitals without the threat of an epidemic.

Something like 80% of infection of healthcare professionals happens during doffing. These are people who are trained to don and doff PPE, and who are supported to do so by their infection control teams. https://twitter.com/drbencb/status/1236635924274057216?s=20 https://twitter.com/NydahlPeter/status/1244875837448638464?s...

You don't need this equipment, and your paranoia is risking the lives of other people who do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOnZFhxuw44

Is there anything in this video that requires an advanced degree to understand?

It's completely incorrect for infection control.

Donning: He starts by cupping the front of the mask with his bare hand! This is wrong.

Doffing: He starts by cupping the front of the mask with his bare hand! This is wrong. He's touching the infected part of the mask with his bare hands.

Health care professionals who were using correct PPE have died because of failures in doffing procedure.

You say that most infection in hospitals happens during doffing, but that’s precisely because the PPE is very effective at keeping the virus out of HCW’s noses. If they had leaky PPE, they would be getting infected while wearing it. It might be that doffing is 1/50 of the risk of going in unprotected, but at the viral loads in a COVID ICU, you’re that 1/50 is still a huge risk.

For an average person in lower risk environments, proper doffing may be valuable at reducing risk, but I strongly suspect that just wearing a mask cuts risk a whole lot.

Viruses are still infective after being captured in the mask. Touched the outside of your mask? Go wash your hands. Mess with the mask? Go wash your hands. Does the mask make you touch your face more? That's a huge risk. Does it unseal a little when you talk or move your mouth? Air will go in that way, and virus will come with it.

Moreover, if you are like most people I see on the street, and you push the mask down below your nose or mouth to talk, you are literally putting a super-concentrated source of virus right in front of your face. Most people, most of the time aren't exposed to enough virus to get sick. Breathe through a mask all day long, and then yank it down below your nose, and you're creating a problem. You have to be careful about how you put it on and take it off, especially if you're re-using a mask.

None of this is rocket science, but almost nobody gets it right without training. Even then, it's hard. Half of the reason medical staff wear face shields is to prevent them from screwing with their masks or touching their face. It isn't trivial.

Viruses may still be infective if captured by the mask, but they're much less likely to infect you. If they're captured by an intermediate layer of the mask, they pose no threat. Even on the surface of the mask, the chance of you being infected by a virus particle that you touch on the surface of a mask when you take it off are overwhelmingly less likely to infect you than virus particles that you breathe in. Of course, when removing a mask, you should sanitize your hands afterwards, which nearly eliminates the risk from virus particles you may have picked up by touching your mask.

You should not pull your mask below your nose. If you do however, the chance of a virus particle coming off the mask and then going into your nose is dramatically less than if you had been breathing in these particles directly.

It may take some time, but I think people will be held accountable. I think there should be prosecutions if it can be shown any of them knowingly lied, because in that case they would have intentionally caused deaths through the spreading of disinformation. Incredible that experts had to combat deadly disinformation or misinformation from the CDC, WHO, and US Surgeon General. It's as sickening as COVID-19 itself. We're really still living in the Dark Ages.

"Research shows that during disasters, people can show strikingly altruistic behavior, but interventions by authorities can backfire if they fuel mistrust or treat the public as an adversary rather than people who will step up if treated with respect. Given that even homemade masks may work better than no masks, wearing them might be something to direct people to do while they stay at home more, as we all should."

Is that true? I don't want to be inflammatory here but as far as I've seen there isn't much research to show that laypeople's use of masks is effective and there have even been some possible mechanisms suggested that could even make it worse than wearing no mask.

And furthermore I don't think that just because healthcare workers are recommended to wear masks that makes it "obvious" that they would be effective for laypeople too. Healthcare workers have full sets of PPE and also strict procedures and facilities for using them/putting them on/taking them off/etc that could potentially nullify the usefulness of that PPE if not followed.

If there really is research to show otherwise then I would be very curious to see it. Most of what I've seen so far specifically focuses on their use by healthcare workers.

EDIT: One promising datapoint for the pro-mask camp is that infection rates do seem to be slowing down in the Czech republic since making mask-wearing mandatory there. For a while there didn't seem to be any change but looking at the data again today, there does seem to be a decrease.

[1] see this video https://news.sky.com/video/coronavirus-medical-officer-cough...

Meanwhile, if someone were to say "it's obvious that wearing nitrile gloves and properly disposing of them reduces the chance of viruses coming into contact with your bare hands", true, this is not 100% obvious. There are potential failure modes here, there could be some unknown unknowns. But in general, this seems pretty obvious. We've been using gloves for these purposes for millennia. We have no reason to think they're ineffective at preventing harmful particles from touching your bare hands.

The same is true of a face mask. If a virus is likely to infect you by entering your nose or mouth, then covering your nose and mouth is likely to reduce the chance of infection from the virus. This has again been known for millennia. It's the reason why Asian countries have been wearing face masks since the start of the COVID-19 news. It's why every national and global health organization is now advising that people should start wearing masks. And it's evidence that the Surgeon General of the United States very likely knowingly lied to the US public, possibly causing unnecessary deaths.

I think this is a little bit unfair of an analogy because the question is not really "does it reduce virus particles from coming into contact with your bare hands", the question is really "does it reduce your chances of getting/spreading the virus" which is not so straightforward.

> If a virus is likely to infect you by entering your nose or mouth, then covering your nose and mouth is likely to reduce the chance of infection from the virus.

That mechanism does seem obvious but what if the reduction is only a few percentage points or something? Consider how the virus particles could potentially pass right through many coverings, and they do nothing for your eyes or other bodily openings. It could be totally counteracted by, for example, having virus particles trapped in a moist space in front of your face for hours at a time. I have no idea if that's true but I'm just trying to say, there are plausible mechanisms that could negate the effectiveness of masks outside healthcare settings.

> It's the reason why Asian countries have been wearing face masks since the start of the COVID-19 news.

Asian countries have acquired a culture of wearing face masks based around beliefs, not data. That is not a demonstration of face masks being effective, unless you are trying to say that since implementing such a culture we've seen a reduction in viral infections there. That would indeed be a good argument for masks.

And keep in mind that mask-wearing in Asian countries didn't begin with COVID-19. It has been popular since the SARS outbreak at least.

In other words, the CDC's guidelines were not totally irrational advice.

Yes it is. Are you more likely to subsequently touch other things with your exterior appendages or your face?

I'm still waiting for you to provide some proof that the t-shirt stretched over your face blocks anything at all.

Pick one. Exterior appendages, or face?

This is such obvious cope. Let's see you spit through a T-shirt. C'mon man, you should feel embarrassed posting this.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6744a3.htm?s_cid=mm... https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nioshtic-2/20044567.html

2 of those things aren't diseases. And none of them are contagious. They also did fuck-all for H1N1 epidemic which infected 60 million in the US and claimed five times as many lives here as C19 has so far.

While we were doing that, I decided to go see what Taiwan's timeline looked like. Pasting here for your sake.

New Year's Eve: Rumours of viral pneumonia in Wuhan. All inbound flights from Wuhan subject to inspection

Jan 5: All Wuhan travelers exhibiting upper respiratory inspections are now subject to screening

Jan 20: First positive test

Jan 21: Mask export ban, production ramp-up

Jan 31: Taiwanese government forced monopsony on masks (1/3 reserved for healthcare personnel). Announces rationing first week of Feb

Feb 2: Taiwanese defence personnel dispatched to bolster staffing at mask factories

Feb 6: Mask rationing starts

Feb 15: Mask production by end of month projected to be 10 million / day. Taiwanese population: 24 million

Mar 9: Mask production 9.2 million / day

Mar 16: Production 10 million / day

Mar 22: Production 12.6 million / day

April 3. Taiwan: Population 24 million. Density: 649 people/sq.km. First case: Jan 20. Cases: 348. Deaths: 5

April 3. Florida: Population 21.5 million. 136.5 people/sq.km. First case: Mar 7. Cases: 10268. Deaths: 170

Did we have to make the choice between the economy and lives? Did we have to choose between grandma and the dollar? Could policy have changed the outcome?

You decide.

The second thing was closing borders. We wouldn’t need a massive lockdown inside the country if only negatively tested people were coming in.

Airlines would have taken a big hit, yes, but you’d still save the economy. It would be way cheaper to pay the airlines for all their potential lost fare than 20% of the population unemployed.

The president still not wearing mask in public says it all. He won’t take this seriously until he himself gets infected and gets seriously ill. The negligence is atrocious.

Naturally, the "useful idiots" that the bureaucracy exploits are an additional problem. I haven't yet determined if they're a minor problem or if they provide the weight of opinion. If you have a thousand people who will say "Masks don't work" if the CDC says "Masks don't work" are the thousand people more dangerous or the CDC more dangerous. Probably the CDC, I think.

Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others

- You could spread COVID-19 to others even if you do not feel sick.

- Everyone should wear a cloth face cover when they have to go out in public, for example to the grocery store or to pick up other necessities.

- - Cloth face coverings should not be placed on young children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance.

- The cloth face cover is meant to protect other people in case you are infected.

- Do NOT use a facemask meant for a healthcare worker.

- Continue to keep about 6 feet between yourself and others. The cloth face cover is not a substitute for social distancing.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

"You do not have to do it," he said. "I don't think I'm going to be doing it."

edit: And to be clear, this wasn't a one-off quote. He made repeated variations of it. At best, he confused the message. At worst, he contradicted it.

Yes I know there’s a difference between an N95 respirator and a cloth mask. But that’s beside the point. If the virus can be transmitted over an air gap, then people should be able to buy whatever face covering they want to contain the risk to themselves or their family maximally. And there’s nothing morally wrong with them trying to acquire the highest degree of protection possible, including N95 respirators.

Predictably someone is going to respond to this comment and say that the mask is more necessary for medical professionals or that it is more to prevent particles from exiting your own mouth towards others. The former might be true but it is totally okay for people to want to prioritize their own health. And as for the latter - clearly the reverse transmission is very possible (particles into your mouth/nose) and it is just a matter of time before everyone acknowledges this more openly and starts recommending N95s (most likely once supply constraints are alleviated and the lies are no longer needed).

Just as a reminder: the WHO, possibly at China’s behest, claimed even as late as the middle of January that the virus wasn’t transmissible between humans, a month after Wuhan doctors observed exactly this. It took several weeks for airborne transmission on particles to be acknowledged. And then weeks again to note that the virus can linger on various surfaces and materials.

The lesson to be learned is to trust personal judgment and common sense. Be self reliant, and don’t put faith in random authorities who’ve done little to earn your trust.

EDIT: this article discusses the WHO’s failures in this whole fiasco and how they are a political organization, more than a trustworthy medical organization: https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

Masks should be plentiful. Citizens wearing masks also saves healthcare workers!

https://twitter.com/CDCgov/status/1243947313715961857

Btw, as usual there's more misinformation as to what masks healthcare workers will find useful.

People will tell you that you can't share those because they're contaminated - wrong! I already did so in a fully informed manner.

People will tell you that you can't reuse - wrong! You absolutely can reuse. Keep eight. Keep them separate. Do not allow contact of anything with the inside. Keep them face up in an isolated area. One every day of the week.

In fact, I'm just a random person. Don't trust me. Don't trust the agencies. Follow the actions people are taking that are working. Follow the evidence.

But given their failure with Covid testing early on, it doesn't surprise me to see them bungle.

https://www.sermo.com/press-releases/largest-statistically-s...

Doesn't matter what they say, doctors worldwide are using them anyway, in spite of the absence of rigorous, multi-year, double blind, randomized studies.

It'll probably take another week or two for them to not be able to sweep this under the rug anymore.

It’s not clinically tried but it works. Otherwise why would others do it? /s