Does wearing a face mask help to prevent COVID? Three and a half years after the pandemic began, here's what scientists have learned.

In an interview for 60 Minutes, CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook posed that question to Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech University professor specializing in aerosol science.

“They are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get COVID because it’s reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you,” Marr said about masks.

No mask is 100% effective. An N95, for example, is named as such because it is at least 95 percent efficient at blocking airborne particles when used properly. But even if a mask has an 80% efficiency, Marr said, it still offers meaningful protection.

“That greatly reduces the chance that I’m going to become infected,” Marr said.

Marr said research shows that high-quality masks can block particles that are the same size as those carrying the coronavirus. Masks work, Marr explained, as a filter, not as a sieve. Virus particles must weave around the layers of fibers, and as they do so, they may crash into those fibers and become trapped.

Marr likened it to running through a forest of trees. Walk slowly, and the surrounding is easy to navigate. But being forced through a forest at a high speed increases the likelihood of running into a tree.

“Masks, even cloth masks, do something,” she said.

Not that I expect most people to believe it at this point…

  • @TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11•8 months ago

    He could have made a MAGA mask and told his cultists that it was more effective and blessed with holy water or something, and then go on to make piles of cash. At the time, that’s what I was expecting to happen, but sadly I was wrong.

    • @CosmicTurtle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8•8 months ago

      There was so much happening around this time. There was a story that didn’t get a lot of runtime about some company that he or someone who was connected to him set up where the federal government purchased masks bought a bunch of boxes from them but never got delivered.

      The internal audit found that they basically the funds were misappropriated. The whole management of funds were so…shady to say the least.

      • @ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8•8 months ago

        Blue Flame (take your pick of articles). These were a group of politically connected people who were using official avenues to divert (steal) desperately needed PPE away from hospitals and municipalities to resell for profit, often to the same destinations they diverted it from.

        Trump’s administration, especially Jared Kushner were all up in it, right around the time that asshole also thought it would be an effective political tool to withhold supplies from blue states as a punishment, as though viruses would all cave and go “oh, okay, I’ll stay in New York and not board EVERY FUCKING FLIGHT in existence to every other location just because I can” regardless of political affiliation.

        It was also around that time that the bodies were piling up in NYC requiring the use of refrigerated trailers because not even all the morgues could hold them, and healthcare workers were having to buy their own PPE (if they even could) or be forced to re-use the same mask for weeks on end.

        These were the folks that thought it would be great to profit off of massive human suffering, and make coin off of stealing by the literal truckload from their local and state governments and neighbors and heroic healthcare workers to do it.

        May every single person involved in Blue Flame fucking rot in hell, rotating eternally on a spit that goes up their ass and out their mouth with a bit of hot, stank, fume-emitting turd stuck to the end of it that they have to huff unto the end of time, with passersby laughing at them periodically just to remind them that no one else made them do it, it was their own bright idea, and when it comes to being a sentient human being, all of them are a total fail.