Re:America is giving up on the pandemic?
by zingar on Monday June 08, 2020 @02:43AM
(#23454176)
There seems a fairly trivial explanation: they were talking about the effectiveness of a mask in protecting you from what you breathe in, not the communal action of everyone wearing a mask to protect other people from what you breathe out.
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Surgical masks offer some limited protection for the wearer (20-80 AFAIK according to some study).
Respirators offer good to very good protection for the wearer.
For a long time I was under the impression that surgical masks don't really help the wearer. There are some studies showing comparable effects to an N95, but I was assuming incorrect N95 usage and I was incorrectly dismissing the benefit of even low double-digit protection.
The thing that convinced me to take a closer look was an interview with the German infection specialist Peter Walger, which said that:
* all masks protect the wearer to a certain degree
* medical grade surgical masks clearly offer partial protection. This was a grave error, which made personnel also in clinical practice not trust the masks and wear them for protection.