Surgical/homemade masks are working only if everybody is wearing them and they just impede transmission from the wearer to other people around. If you are the only person wearing such mask, you might not impede infection by much.
Surgical masks are protecting patients not doctors. Please educate yourself.
"The coronavirus is an upper respiratory virus and a surgical mask does not protect you from that kind of virus,” he said. “In fact, when people buy up these masks and hoard these masks then they might not be available for healthcare providers to use for patient care.”
He said surgical masks are more effective on people who are already infected with an illness to keep them from infecting others rather than the other way around. He said other types of masks are not very effective at preventing you from getting sick either."
Probably a typo/fumble finger. Wading through all the dreck it seems that it causes viral pneumonia which is always bad news.
Read just today that an advantage of any mask is it keeps people from transferring the virus from their fingers to their mouth and nose. A paper on the effectiveness of home made masks, like from tee shirt material says they are in no way a replacement for N95 masks but are better than nothing.
My understanding is that it starts as an upper respiratory virus (mainly concentrated in the throat), leading to flu/cold-like symptoms and only those unlucky ones that get it deep in their lungs attached to ACE2 receptors end up with a life-threatening lower respiratory illness requiring ICU and ventilator/ECMO due to immunity going berserk and killing off lung tissue with virus embedded in it, a cytokine storm.
>“Yes, a surgical mask can help prevent the flu,” Sherif Mossad, MD, an infectious disease specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, tells Health. “Flu is carried in air droplets, so a mask would mechanically prevent the flu virus from reaching other people.” It would work both ways, says Dr. Mossad, preventing transmission of the flu virus to others and for keeping a mask-wearer from picking up an infection.
“Disposable is best and you should discard your mask after each use,” says Dr. Besser. “If a mask gets wet—and it will by simply breathing into it—the effectiveness of its protective effect is reduced.”
Are you really going to change your surgical mask every 3 minutes to make it effective against getting infected?
Do surgeons change their surgical masks every 3 minutes while performing surgery? And the operative word the doctor used is "reduced" effectiveness, not "eliminated" effectiveness.
Surgeons wear it so that their breath/mouth droplets don't end up in patient's intenstines while performing a surgery, causing an infection. For that purpose a single surgical mask can last hours (i.e. it keeps droplets on the inner surface of the mask). If they have to perform surgery on highly dangerous patients, they use hazmat suits instead:
You obviously don't get it how a virus survives outside body. It survives because it is inside a wet biological droplet; breathing through a surgical mask would make the area around intake wet with some human cells, making it a wonderful spot for survival of viruses; it basically makes it a prime collector surface. The mask itself is permeable and whatever viruses are collected on the outer layer thrive there unless the surface was strongly antiseptic (hint: it isn't). To be safe, you'd have to change it pretty often; surgeons moreover don't touch their masks while they are performing a surgery, you probably wouldn't have such limitations. "I have seen such a mask in a Hollywood movie, that means it must work."
COVID-19 family is also pretty agile:
"The analysis of 22 studies reveals that human coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus or endemic human coronaviruses (HCoV) can persist on inanimate surfaces like metal, glass or plastic for up to 9 days."
"(N95) Masks won't protect you" was an expedient lie. How can it be that medical professionals are in dire need of N95 masks to protect them from the virus, yet they are powerless to do any good in the hands of the public?
If everybody in the US could wear one of these when out in public, we would be in a much better place. The sad truth is we don't have enough to do that, not that this would not help.
N95 is not a surgical mask. That one is a professional respirator. Yet infection can enter via eyes, so one has to wear airtight glasses as well to be sure.
There is no respirator embedded as you can see, it's just a simple piece of fabric.
The point of my original reply was that we could reduce R0/transmission rate only if everybody had to wear surgical mask in public. If you are the only one wearing it, it doesn't really help. Some EU countries now require everybody to wear a mask while shopping or using public transport.
I'm from Australia, and I know how to read government documents here. They very rarely lie, but you have to read them very precisely.
If you are well, you do not need to wear a surgical mask as there is little evidence supporting the widespread use of surgical masks in healthy people to prevent transmission in public.
They can say "little evidence" because only a few recent studies show that.
"A common claim is that surgical masks do not protect against respiratory viruses. This is not true. Several peer-reviewed studies in medical journals have found that correct and consistent use of surgical masks in household or community settings conferred a significant degree of protection against influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome and other respiratory virus infections, especially when combined with hand hygiene."
and
"Another misconception is that surgical masks should only be worn by symptomatic individuals. In fact, surgical masks are effective when worn by both respiratory virus-infected persons and their contacts. Furthermore, it is well recognised that even asymptomatic Covid-19 patients can still be infectious to others, rendering this recommendation inapplicable to the current pandemic.
Like other respiratory viruses, Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, is largely transmitted by droplets from infected persons. Therefore, the scientific evidence in favour of mask use against other respiratory viruses is generalisable to Covid-19."
and
"have no hesitation in recommending universal mask usage for people living in neighbourhoods with community Covid-19 transmission"
By Dr Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor, Department of Microbiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong
In this pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial involving 2862 health care personnel, there was no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among health care personnel with the use of N95 respirators (8.2%) vs medical masks (7.2%).
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