How it started : "If people just wore these homemade cloth masks, this would be over in a few weeks!"
How it's going: "Germans will be mandated to wear either single-use filtering facepiece respirator (FFP) surgical masks or FFP-2 masks, such as N95s."
Fact is, nearly 100% of the mask wearing in the past year has been performative nonsense. A political symbol rather than a science-based intervention.
A global spend of ~$150 billion+, wasted.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/20/germany-mandates-medical-grade-masks/
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this is high quality N95 masks, worn correctly and consistently, probably do work at protecting you.
But the only way you're going to wear them consistently is if they have vents. Without vents, they're way too hard to breath through for any length of time.
Meanwhile, rather than allowing that option to exist for people actually at risk, we got campaigns to ban them. A 75 year old can't wear one on a plane here in Canada.
@manuelv The problem is masks just don't work well enough. Surgical masks aren't designed to protect against respiratory diseases, so they have low filtration % and don't even attempt to stop leakage. In lab tests in ideal circumstances, 50% filtration is a common number; in realistic tests I've seen papers measuring just %10 due to leakage.
Surgical masks are designed to stop splashing, which doesn't appear to be a big problem with covid.
If masks made a big difference it'd be obvious.
@pete I'm in Belgium and there's no real guideline on which masks to wear, let alone any checks in public on who's wearing what.
We mostly wear whatever we have, surgical masks, cloth, or the N95 masks FFP2 and so on... The problem is no one wears them correctly. (touching with hands on inside, hanging around neck, only covering mouth)... I stay indoors mostly b/c ppl are too far gone to bother.