Covid News Around the World One Year Later

[Aragorn243]

I believe you did post that anecdote here.

I was more interested in learning about the mechanism behind it. Blame the engineer in me but I'd really like to know how that works. On face value, when reading that masks make healthy people sick, I think, "Ok...but why?"
Was wondering if someone had read a medical study on the subject they could share.

I have read them, they were easy to find at the beginning of all this. Search engines have since made them harder to find. Basically, when we breath, we release moisture from our lungs into the air. You see this in cold weather as "breath". When you put a mask on your face, the moisture is held by the mask, in theory, this is why they say they have some limited effect with sick people in reducing the distribution of water droplets. In any case, moisture is a breeding ground for bacteria. If you touch a surface with bacteria and then touch the mask and it is warm and wet, the bacteria can reproduce and if you continue breathing through the mask, it can get into your lungs and you have a bacterial infection in a day when anyone who gets sick is assumed to have Covid. Covid treatments do not work on bacteria. There was a woman again early on, a nurse specifically who was working with Covid patients and she got sick. Was treated and kept getting worse. Almost died before they discovered it was bacterial, not Covid.

This is why they say don't touch the mask, only wear the mask once, etc. But real people don't follow instructions, it's almost impossible to not touch the mask and people aren't going to go through half a dozen masks a day, especially when they can't get replacements.

That the masks also don't stop you from getting Covid is well known from scientific tests as well. Covid is so small, it goes right through a cloth mask. They studied this with SARS and this is when most of the mask studies happened because they were very concerned with SARS and wanted to know if various masks would stop or slow the spread. They didn't N95 masks were considered the bare minimum. Oddly enough, surgical masks aren't a whole lot better than cloth mask. They are basically designed to keep the surgeons germs out of the patients body not protect against airborne viruses. They also obviously don't seal very well.

One thing there isn't, a scientific study showing wearing cloth masks will prevent you from getting Covid. Yet this is what many people believe, those wearing them outside, in their own cars, etc. All the commercials kept saying were "your mask protects me, my mask protects you" But if you're not sick, the mask isn't doing anything for either of you. And they learned fairly early on that asymptomatic people, those without symptoms were very unlikely to spread Covid. It could happen but chances were very small. They based the asymptomatic spread theory on a Chinese woman in Germany they thought was asymptomatic but she was not. I think they figured this out last summer but they never changed the mask guidelines. By then, everything was political. This is also a reason why kids in schools shouldn't be wearing masks. Kids can get Covid but they are almost always asymptomatic and don't spread it. I don't think there has been a single outbreak in a school setting anywhere in the world. The kids that test positive generally got it from a family member or close friend outside of school. Being in close proximity to each other for long periods of time, the entire class should be infected with from one student but that's not the case. Teachers were also not getting it from their students.