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Thursday, May 14, 2020

Thoughts on Masks for the General Public

Masks for the general public possess a real danger to spread infection which is why so many smart minds and researchers are against them. In clinical/hospital uses they are indispensable but only if they are the correct equipment that is used and disposed of properly which is generally after one potentially infectious use! Otherwise it is absolutely dangerous and potentially an infection spreading practice to use a mask in the general public. Here are are some authoritative voices on the dangers of masks for general public use:
 Here is the recent peer reviewed Rapid Expert Consultation from the National Academy of Sciences on cloth mask use:
This last article is important because this group from the National Academy of Sciences has been designed to inform government policy during the CoronaVirus crisis. Their “Rapid Expert Consultations” are peer reviewed: https://www.nap.edu/collection/94/coronavirus-resources.  
Here is a summary of some recent pre-prints on mask use:
There are certainly *RXIV pre-prints that attempt to justify the use face masks in the general public. I find many of them lacking from a test engineering perspective. A product that can't guarantee more than 30% effectiveness is a broken product which will lead to many deaths. You can see some of these pre-prints here:
I don’t know how the use of masks by the general public became viable or a useful piece of advice. Perhaps another statistical misuse of p values by well meaning scientists? Or perhaps the general public believes their “common sense” ideas somehow overcome the obvious limitations of their understanding of science.

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