Day 104: Doctors without Filters

The world stands at 4.5 million cases and 303,000 deaths, with Russia still chugging along at 10,000 cases a day in its quest for Spain's second place seat. India is very close to exceeding China, despite China's renewed testing in Wuhan after new cases were reported there.

Things are fairly calm in the US, with active cases flattening out. Though Illinois is looking a bit hot, it's too far behind New Jersey to catch up anytime soon. Massachusetts cases are up 2% today. The governor still doesn't seem to get that his order closing non-essential businesses expires on May 18th and everything legally reopens, unless he explicitly orders otherwise—not just hems and haws about a report coming out after the fact.

PJ Media has picked up on an anti-mask opinion piece by a neurologist originally posted at Technocracy News. Since there are no studies of preventing the spread of COVID-19 with masks, his model for masking is the flu, but he cites a literature review showing no evidence that masks prevented flu transmission. PlagueBlog has seen similar studies discussed before, and one consistent problem with them is that they're mostly about masking the well, not the ill (never mind the allegedly invisibly ill).

However, he does cover the base of not masking the allegedly invisibly ill. He says any kind of mask, whether ersatz or professional quality (though it's worse with N95 masks), will concentrate virus from the breather and send it back into their respiratory tract. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, with its penchant for entering the brain through your nasal passages (knocking out your sense of smell on the way), the last thing you want to do for hours on end is snort it back up your nose.

Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask. This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications.

PlagueBlog was particularly impressed by the N95 mask-wearing driver who fainted from lack of oxygen and crashed his car. The author also expressed some serious concern for the elderly and ill restricting their own oxygen supply with masks. He concludes with the usual argument for establishing herd immunity instead, but PlagueBlog believes that herd immunity is the outcome of a particularly successful immunization program (such as we don't have for the flu), and not something you get by just throwing up your hands and letting 'er rip.