Flutterby™! : Cotton Masks don't work so well

Cotton Masks don't work so well

2020-04-11 22:03:53.292084+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Annals of Internal Medicine Letters: Effectiveness of Surgical and Cotton Masks in Blocking SARS–CoV-2: A Controlled Comparison in 4 Patients

This experiment did not include N95 masks and does not reflect the actual transmission of infection from patients with COVID-19 wearing different types of masks. We do not know whether masks shorten the travel distance of droplets during coughing. Further study is needed to recommend whether face masks decrease transmission of virus from asymptomatic individuals or those with suspected COVID-19 who are not coughing.

In conclusion, both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.

[ related topics: virus Nature and environment ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Cotton Masks don't work so well made: 2020-04-12 13:28:13.771159+00 by: Ben W

My understanding is that the hope is that masks reduce the velocity and therefore range of droplets rather than stopping them completely, a la. Whether that actually reduces transmissions...

#Comment Re: Cotton Masks don't work so well made: 2020-04-14 21:28:58.107316+00 by: Dan Lyke

I got all excited, then I started trying to track the source of that visualization, and it's not at all clear how accurate it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/educa...eathing_with_and_without_a_mask/

Add your own comment:

(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)

Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke

for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.