It’s surprising that after a year, people still haven’t figured out that reusable elastomer respirators with long life replaceable filter cartridges and >99% small particle filtration effectiveness are the best option from the perspectives of safety, overall cost and sustainability.
I’ve been using the same pre pandemic 3M P100 industrial respirator with a retrofitted exhalation valve filter for months. It fits with a perfect seal and doesn’t get uncomfortable or warm during extended wear.
Hopefully public health experts and governments will back consumer friendly, low-profile reusable respirator designs. There’s no reasonable reason for there to be a shortage at this point, after all this time, and even sending a few to every household with a link to an instructional video would cost a tiny fraction of the past and future direct and indirect economic consequences stemming from lack of optimal PPE for the general public and essential workers alike.
The 3M 100 (your example) is a big, bulky heavy mask that costs (according to Amazon currently) $33, and as you say, isn’t actually fit for Covid protection (in both directions) without modification.
And you wonder why, after a year, “people” haven’t widely adopted them? Honestly, this is such a prime HN comment I’m not sure you’re not trolling.
Define big and bulky. But fair enough, that’s why lightweight 2020 pandemic redesigned versions are desirable. $33 is 9 cents a day averaged out over the year. Double it so you have a spare; that’s 18 cents a day. Not out of reach for most but they should be subsidized or provided free by the government anyway.
Even as a one off, a single respirator costs less than three or four good quality cloth masks, and less than a months supply of single use designed N95s or surgical masks.
Few who have ever ever worn an elastomer respirator would argue it’s less comfortable than an N95 or less efficacious than a 1918 flu era cloth mask.
The exhalation valve filter adaptation could be cut and fitted with the craft skills of a five year old and took two minutes.
How did you retrofit the exhalation filter? I have a similar 3M mask (6000 series) but haven't used it since March since the exhale port doesn't make it easy to attach a filter. Being able to use it would solve my glasses fogging, which I've only been able to mitigate somewhat with shaped 3D printed pieces of plastic in the nose-wire slot of my fabric mask.
I appreciate the thought and effort you and like minded are spending on this, and it hurts my soul to see the disasteraus mass Thanksgiving shopping crowds, that then showed up again in even greater numbers for Christmas in busy shopping centers.
By cutting some N95/best available filter fabric and fitting internally over the exhalation valve. When flying I’ve worn a Korean nanofiber mask over the top for added social protection from ignorant flight attendants and airport staff who otherwise might ask me to remove it because they can’t see the internal exhalation valve filter. Korean commercially available masks are great by the way and there’s no shortage over there.
In situations where a respirator isn’t viable or necessary a some masking tape over the nose bridge wire area is quite good for reducing or eliminating glasses fogging and providing a better seal.
> Assembly and Mechanical, Chemical Clean-up, Chemical Handling, Chipping, Chiseling, Cleaning, Furnace Operations, Grinding, Laboratories, Machining, Masonary, Painting, Pouring/Casting, Sanding, Sawing, Welding
They are intended to protect yourself from the environment, not the other way around. So they come with incoming filters only. To change that, a retrofit filter is needed.
Seems like there’s no trade off to over-engineering health and safety in the context. N100 would be adequate but the P100 additionally provides a broader spectrum of air pollution exposure reduction which in the context of infection control helps protect the mucosal barriers from damage and preserves immune fitness, preventing T-cell depletion caused by inhalation of vehicular pollution and industrial/commercial combustion emissions, smoke, and so on.
Imagine the archeologists in the year 100,000, sorting through rock samples and going "oh look, there's the mask pollution from the great 2020 pandemic"
I've thought about it a little. If everything is digital and in deprecated formats then there could be a sort of "dark ages"... even without some kind of end of world scenario to wipe out the evidence. We could simply just forget how to access it. Eg: in yr 3030 will we still know how to open pdfs ,flash files, or say PS4 games?
We have a lot of documentation and clues, so it shouldn't be that bad. There are decades of rants about the shortcomings of the pdf format, at least :)
Those formats are also more logical(ish) than human language, so reverse engineering them should be possible in some cases.
Also, there will be plenty of 'rosetta stones' around: media that exists in both an obsolete format and a more recent, better understood one.
There’s already “digital dark ages” and it’s a reason archive.org and retro tech collection is so important.
From the 70s-90s most consumer tech was thrown in land fill when people were finished with it. There wasn’t yet much of a “collector” mentality because it wasn’t old enough to be cool, and there was such a mad rush to always have the newest developments in that tech-honeymoon period that people threw the old stuff out.
Then for the software side, storage was expensive and complicated. People didn’t keep copies of every single old thing like lots of people do now, websites were purged of old content to fit new content, versioning in development didn’t really exist (on a large scale).
I’m a retro tech/software collector and there’s plenty of stuff from my childhood that I can’t find a single trace of anymore.
I'm curious if there is an aggregation site for "lost" things? Something where people can put traces but indicate it missing? (eg an advertisement for a game that we can't find the cartridge) ?
"Why do you think people in the 20th century used to bury some women with bags of plastic on their chest? Surely some religious ritual but I found no mention of it."
To protect wildlife, it's been recommended by wildlife nonprofits to snip the straps of your face masks before disposing, to minimize the potential for it to harm an animal.
Many things could happen to the mask, even if you disposed of it in a proper location. The trash bin could be tipped over or rummaged in by wildlife, for instance. When the trash collector comes, the trash bag could rip and the contents spill out. Strong winds might cause small and light objects like masks to fly out.
I've lost a lot of masks and it's not because I'm intentionally littering. I just get home and find that I don't have it anymore. Perhaps the shape of it makes it work out of a pocket easily?
Yep, it's pretty frustrating, I see them outdoors all the time. Not quite as frustrating as people who fill doggie bags then leave them on the side of the trap for the crap fairies to pick up.
The big problem with the masks is, while many people will pick up litter, masks seem extra dirty like a used condom. People aren't likely to pick them up.
But this assumes some level of knowledge/understanding of the subject at hand. If I read research papers about Covid (assuming I have the time) I doubt I'd be able to follow the arguments or understand the nuances of conclusions, caveats and so on... Time is also a problem as I mentioned above. This approach essentially duplicates the effort needed to analyse and distill the research.
To me it kind of reads as "all documentation is bad documentation, just read the code".
Not all articles that digest the information some are equally bad about making "all news bad news" for the sake of being an attention whore.
"Duplicating" effort to do your own analysis is better than drinking the koolaid on shitty ideas that will royally fuck you over if you believe them and then someday having to deprogram yourself from their shitty ideas if you actually want your life to work.
Current research on Covid is pretty preliminary. Most of what's being said is sort of speculative to some degree. We mostly aren't getting solid conclusions out of it, which is part of why people are still scared of it and the pandemic rages on.
If we actually knew what the hell was going on and how to fix it, we would have put a stop to the pandemic already, just as we put out the oil well fires in just six months instead of taking the predicted years to solve it: Because oil well fires were pretty well understood, so it wasn't all that hard to invent new solutions when we had motive to.
The world rapidly forgot that it was honestly and sincerely in a not click-bait fashion predicted to be a global environmental disaster. We just took it for granted when it got fixed and found some new "news" to bellyache about.
I'm a former homemaker. I get really tired of people simultaneously dismissing me as an idiot who knows nothing because I chose to be a full-time wife and mom for some years and also telling me my solutions are out of reach for ordinary people because that requires more brains than they have.
At the risk of appearing cynical or condescending - do you have any links or references to studies about press consumption and it's impact on views/mental health/general wellbeing etc.? I'd be legitimately interested in reading that (I do read research papers when I want to make sure I understand something well - just not all the time)
You don't sound cynical or condescending, just lazy (or desperate for any excuse to talk with someone). This is such a common question that google autocompletes it if you start to type it into their search engine.
But here are my first two hits, which both appear to link out to actual supporting studies:
I live in a near-pristine area on the coast where people pay high prices to eat seafood dinners on a pier while they gaze at the sunset and let their plastic straws and oyster cracker foils blow into the ocean below them.
I estimate conservatively that at least one piece of something plastic from every table winds up in the ocean.
I think you may want to reexamine things. What you describe is just about the last cause for concern about ocean plastic pollution. You should look into it a bit.
Of the supposed total 5.25 Trillion pieces of plastic or 269,000 tons in the ocean[1], apparently 90% of that comes from 9 rivers, 7 in Asia and 2 in Africa[2]. And the rest of the world, essentially all of the Americas including the immensely plastic polluting central American rivers, Australia, and all of Europe only contribute 10% of ocean plastic pollution.
> And the rest of the world, essentially all of the Americas including the immensely plastic polluting central American rivers, Australia, and all of Europe only contribute 10% of ocean plastic pollution.
That's probably not entirely fair, given that the west exports their recycling overseas.
> Since then Southeast Asia has become the new destination for Australia’s recycled plastics, with 80-87% going to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Other countries have also begun to accept Australia’s plastics, including the Philippines and Myanmar.
> The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. But last year, China put the kibosh on imports of the world's waste. The policy, called National Sword, freaked out people in the U.S. — a huge market for plastic waste had just dried up.
It was a pretty open secret that it frequently just wound up dumped by unscrupulous companies that claimed to be processing it.
Could you explain what rule it is you think people are too stupid to follow?
Since you bring up safe ecology; do you think it is plausible that the source of those 1.5 Billion masks is the same 9 rivers that make up 90% of all plastic ocean pollution, 7 of them being Asia and 2 in Africa?
> Could you explain what rule it is you think people are too stupid to follow?
I see face masks everywhere, even in places where you have a trash can every 20-30 meters.
How hard is it to put the mask in the trash can or in your pocket? It takes no space in a pocket and you can put it in a plastic bag for an extra safety.
I'm not sure what people expected to happen when we started producing billions of disposable masks and distributing them to everyone instead of just medical staff that have to follow disposal procedures. This shit happens with literally all of our single-use disposable garbage. Any system that requires billions of individual people to follow rules that inconvenience them without any sort of enforcement or consequences that come back to them personally was doomed to fail from the start.
If we had just distributed reusable cloth masks and charged for them so people have an incentive to not lose them we could have avoided the bulk of this.
There might be issues with reusing masks (I haven't seen any data on this).
This is more like one of those problems you sort out later and worry about it less when it's happening. The one thing I'd propose is do what we can to not use synthetics in them so they'll at least biodegrade.
I actually agree with you on this. I can't blame people for just rolling out what we had as fast as possible and dealing with the consequences later. It's frustrating but undoubtedly a good call in the moment.
But I hope that we eventually get to the point where we have most people using reusable masks and that the disposable ones are biodegradable.
Sure, totally reasonable. Having a small percentage of people get them for free wouldn't really throw this scheme off when the goal is to reduce waste over the entire population.
What seems to be lacking in many articles of this type is a detailed explanation of the exact paths plastic takes to get into the ocean.
Some paths I've heard of include: ships dumping waste directly into the ocean; landfills that are improperly sealed; waste blown and/or spilled out of out of open containers, trucks, and barges; waste blown or washed (from where?) into storm drains and rivers; etc.. Moreover, most of the great pacific garbage patch apparently consists of fishing nets.
It seems like tracking the waste flow and disrupting some of those paths might be a good idea.
Many use those flimsy cheap ones that are only good for a day or two. Because they are lazy to remember where they put it,they just take a new one. Like plastic plates.
Whenever I go outside and see >50% people wearing disposable masks I wonder... Why? Did they only find out about the pandemic right now and it caught them off-guard?
I have had reusable masks since April. I assumed everyone was doing the same, but everytime I go outside I prove myself wrong. I don't get it.
Some companies (Southwest Airlines for example) will refuse service to you if you're wearing a non-standard mask. Wearing the disposable blue surgical masks is the best bet if you don't want to be randomly denied access to somewhere you're going.
- The cloth masks don't form a tight seal and leave two gaping holes on either side of my nose.
- The cloth masks don't have as fine a filter mesh and aren't as effective at filtering tiny particles.
That said, I don't go out that often, and my trips are limited in time, so I reuse a disposable N95/KN95 mask until I've worn it for as much as a total of 30-100 hours before I dispose of it. I also use reusable everything else wherever I can in my life, I just haven't found any actually good reusable masks that would pass e.g. NIOSH tests.
3M respirators with P100 filters have a comfortable silicone seal, aren’t very expensive, and actually prevent the wearer from infection.
We settled on a public policy where we are only as safe as the worst mask an infected person is wearing. I would have preferred an alternative policy where people who don’t want to get sick simply wear an effective mask.
I do encourage covering the exhale valve, though, just to be extra safe and considerate.
I have respirators and filters left over from home improvement projects - have you ever tried to communicate through those? Your voice takes on this indescribable warbly tone. I wouldn't want to try and accomplish any errands wearing one of those. Maybe if I were riding public transit and able to not speak to anyone...
I don't have a lot of daily errands; mostly just picking up coffee or food outside and to go. I don't talk to people for that (except to say thanks!), and don't wear the P100 because it's low risk.
Places I've worn the P100: an airplane, grocery store, train, Uber, medical lab for a test. I found the peace of mind alone was well worth the inconvenience in these scenarios.
I don't quite understand the policy argument. Can you explain the difference in the 2 policies?
The main policy issues I see are (a) unavailability of good masks, not ramping up mask production, not controlling hoarding with strict consequences (b) advocating for not wearing masks
I don't believe myself to be able to always manage fabric mask clean. Possibly dirt mask is worse than nothing, so I always wear disposable mask. Also I heard that non woven mask works better than fabric.
If everyone is wearing a mask, there are at least two masks between you and an infected person.
Masks don't provide 100% protection, but nothing does. However, masks are important, because they enable people to safely perform essential activities like grocery shopping, and most jobs.
We don't need to stop _every single transmission_, all that we need to do is make sure that each infected person doesn't infect more than one person on average. If each infected person infects two people, for example, that's a chain reaction of spread where everybody eventually gets the virus. However, if each person has a 50-50 chance of infecting somebody else, than over time infections will go down, and Covid will eventually be gone.
Wearing a cloth mask is not difficult, and is a very tiny tradeoff in favor of a significant decrease in transmission chance.
The data at this link has less than nothing to say about mask effectiveness.
One graph says, for example, that mask mandate areas in the US have slightly higher infection rates than non-mask mandate areas. But this is extremely expected - high infection rate is what prompts areas to mandate mask usage.
If I feel at risk (maybe because I observe people getting ill and dying), I comply. If I don't feel at risk, I don't care about complying.
Also, why no Asian countries on the international charts? That would be inconvenient for the point, hm?
Their new case rates have risen to the point that they've lost control of the spread with current measures, so their current level of masking isn't enough.
> they've lost control of the spread with current measures
They are reporting this as "lost control" even though their spread continues to be lower than any Western country has had since mid-March? That tells a lot.
Well, I live in CA and the CA graph is missing a number of critical marks, including the point right before the spike where CA dialed back a number of regulations, allowed indoor dining, etc.
Missing such important information - the specific information that goes against the page's agenda - calls the entire thing into question. What else is it intentionally not showing?
Obviously even simple cloth masks help: notice how they get wet when you wear them? That moisture is your exhaled water droplets, the carriers of virusses, that don't end up in other people's faces!
Also, do you think surgeons wear masks for fashion reasons?
The mask discussion is absurd. A totally minor inconvenience vs. decreased virus exhaling, how can this be a topic for discussion?
Compliance is the fifth chart down, and about 2/3 of the way down is a graph of new daily cases per million between mandated mask locations and those without any mandate.
>but nothing does. However, masks are important, because they enable people to safely perform essential activities like grocery shopping, and most jobs.
fortunately that the chance of getting sick from covid from doing those activities without mask are very very low.
infection is not useful metric because only small percentage actually cause sickness.
Are you insinuating that any improvement is not worth pursuing? Let's look at this a different way:
I have COVID and I'm contagious. I don't know that, of course, so I go to the grocery store. The same grocery store you're shopping it. We cross paths in the cereal aisle.
As callous as it sounds, I don’t think doing things for “any improvement” means it is worth doing. Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. Are you going to wear a mask for the rest of your life in public and private (your household matters too) because you could catch the flu or someone could catch it from you? Are you going to stay out of motor vehicles because they could injure you or someone else?
People have become so extreme in their views that every single life matters that they forget how our 2019 way of life still had significant risk that nobody batted an eye at.
> If you are sick, you should rest at home, just like with any other illness.
That's not what was asked. Covid has an up to two week asymptomatic period, there's a high chance that someone around you when you go out is infected and doesn't know. Would you rather them be wearing a mask or not?
2020 is coming to a close. In a couple of weeks we will have the final tally for the year. This is good because we can then compare it to other years in total. I suggest you check the all cause excess mortality figure. It's already been projected to be essentially the same. This is a really good metric to evaluate the threat level.
'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.'
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...
I’m all for data driven decisions. We just need to be more careful to dig into the details of the data. A simple excess mortality figure may not be relevant. Both covid and the lockdowns could have caused increased or decreased mortalities in other areas.
Eg if there was zero excess mortality, that alone doesn’t prove much either way.
I wonder if we would have noticed this before modern hospitals and record keeping. I suspect it would have spread much slower, maybe over a decade. In a village of 1,000, there might be 5 deaths that would have been written off as a bad flu, or whatever people used to call getting sick like that.
If people think a mask offers them more protection than it really does, they might engage in riskier behavior.
When I see people out walking around the neighborhood with masks on, I really wonder what they're trying to accomplish. You're not going to get covid walking outdoors passing within 6 feet of someone for 5 seconds.
These days, my theory is more people get infected at home than out in public.
Judgement is important of course. I wear masks around people but not when I’m driving or outdoors by myself. I think for a lot of people, it’s just easier not to put it on and take it off. For me for instance if I’m out hiking I just put it on and leave it on. Where as my partner will remove it when there is no one around and put it back on when someone is coming close by. I see the same thing with people driving short distances.
People getting infected at home may be a large vector, but the virus got in the home some how in the first place. It’s just easier to spread from that point onwards once it’s in.
New York State recently reported that 74% of infections spread between Sept and Nov 2000 took place during household social gatherings (based upon contact tracing data).
No its because of Brownian Diffusion. Counter intuitively masks block particles smaller than 0.3 microns (such as virus’s) more easily than particles at around 0.3 microns in size.
It is particles that are around 0.3 microns in size that filters have the most difficulty blocking. N95 particles block 95% of particles of 0.3 microns in size. N99 Masks block 99% of particles at 0.3 microns.
As I understand it smaller particles get ‘stuck’ in the maze of fibres and are statistically unlikely to find there way through the mask. The best analogy I can think of is a spec of dust finding its way into a centre of a huge labarynth that is vibrating randomly in all directions (and coated in honey). Some respirator masks also contain anti viral coatings and are electrostaticaly charged.
Interesting. Is it that particles smaller than 0.3 microns have more dynamic and random motion? I mean, why is it that particles smaller than 0.3 microns are likely to be "stuck" where as at 0.3 microns they aren't?
I realized the original comment was about surgical masks.. I was commenting about the filtering properties of multi-layered polypropylene masks. I'm afraid its a bit beyond my Science / Engineering / Maths skills at the moment to try and explain it any better.. but maybe this link will help? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00022470.1980.10...
You are spreading false information. Reusable masks do "work." Masks lose effectiveness over time and should be changed regularly, but it is not true that "correct" usage involves changing them "numerous times a day."
There are two major factors that, as I understand it, drive the use of disposable masks in clinical settings. First is that healthcare workers see many sick people a day and they are worried about surface transmission. This is the main reason why they need to change their masks so often. The rest of us, who are moving through the world without looking directly into the mouths of sick people, have fewer foreign moisture on our masks. The second is that masks do become less effective over time, but the relative import of mask effectiveness should be judged proportionally to risk of the situation. Again, clinical workers are in a higher risk situation, so they change masks more often. The utility for the general public is lower.
Cloth masks were called into question early in the pandemic due to a 2015 study indicating they spread disease[1]. This was in a medical setting and, as I understand it (I am a layman) it was because of poor mask sanitation (i.e. using masks for many days without cleaning). My understanding is that using a cloth mask for a day is better than no mask. Of course it would be better to change it more often, but the relative risk is low.
Since then we have done a number of studies on cloth masks in the population and those studies have shown that cloth masks are effective[2]. It is true that "better" masks protect better, but that protection is almost always trumped by compliance. The mask you will wear is 100% better than the mask you won't wear. So health experts have focused on that.
The medical community has done a shit job of communicating this, but that's no reason to say things that don't seem to be true.
No matter which of those two mask types are employed, a relevant May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the CDC found that face masks had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.
"In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks".
"Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids (36). There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza."
"Proper use of face masks is essential because improper use might increase the risk for transmission."
That's probably quite important if you are trying to control pandemic influenza, but SARS-COV-2 isn't influenza. Different pathogens have different characteristics, and thus different responses to protective measures. AFAIK, most influenzas are much more prone to airborne transmission than SARS-COV-2, where the main concern is droplet transmission (though some airborne transmission seems to occur), against which masks that are ineffective against airborne transmission can be quite effective.
You wouldn't judge the value of condoms in preventing the spread of AIDS by studies of how effective they were in preventing the spread of the flu, either.
As I said, I'm a layman, but several things jump out to me.
The first thing I think of is that the meta-study you linked is for influenza. Obviously covid and influenza are similar but I think there are important differences (we did not, for instance, have as many cases of influenza in any of the last fifty years as we have of covid this year). In particular, I know that the asymptomatic transmission of covid is unusual and is not something that happens in influenza[0].
The studies that support mask wearing in my link are on mask mandates (though there are also case studies that suggest masks have been effective). I believe that mandating masks reduces transmission of the virus and I don't think it's necessary to reconcile that fact with the fact that masks don't reduce the spread of influenza.
The version of the study you linked is formatted oddly and the tables are on another page. A pdf of their article is easier to read, I think [3]. From Table 2 (and the discussion around it) I take that they are hoping to catalog open questions and are not seeking to make a recommendation about proper procedure. Therefore I think it's perfectly in keeping with Jingyi Xiao, et. al. to recommend wearing masks based on the covid-specific studies while recognizing we have no evidence that masks prevent influenza.
[0] While you can transmit influenza when you're not showing symptoms, my understanding is that covid is different enough that we shouldn't compare them. That could be wrong and if you have anything to contribute I'd be interested to see it.
I coul get into the epidemiology and biology of a pathogen that stays on surfaces for days.
But for simplicity sake I'll just say this.
I wouldn't want my surgeon walking in to give me surgery, with a mask he just used from another operation.
Corona virus doesn't become any less deadly or contagious outside of a medical institution.
Also falsely accusing someone of spreading false information Should be like falsely accusing someone of rape. The accuser should go to jail or get banned if they're wrong.
Exactly, which is why I pointed out that healthcare workers frequently change masks for reasons related to their environment. It's also, of course, why medical workers wore surgical masks before covid.
PPE worn outside of clinical settings already exist in a lower risk situation and so it's reasonable to accept lower standards for it.
You mean standards like applying a device directly onto your respiratory system that's been potentially exposed for long periods of time to a virus that stays on surfaces for days?
These aren't lower standards these are freaking negative standards.
The virus doesn't become less deadly or less contagious outside of medical institutions.
There's a slight difference on what is required by a medical professional and by someone just commuting. Sure, one could always do better, but reusable masks are adequate.
Maybe adequate for applying a plague vector directly to your face, a plague vector that's been constantly potentially exposed to a virus that stays on surfaces for days.
Sure they're adequate for that.
There's a reason medical professionals change their PPE.
Corona virus doesn't magically become less deadly or less contagious outside of medical institutions.
>>The report used a global production estimate of 52 billion masks being manufactured in 2020, a conservative loss rate of 3%, and the average weight of 3 to 4 grams for a single-use polypropylene surgical face mask to arrive at the estimate.
People throw away trash (empty soda bottles, candy wraps etc) a lot easier than they'd throw away a device meant to protect their (and others) health. The real number has to be waaay below 1%.
Surgical masks are disposable for a reason, they eventually get dirty, damp, and smelly. They can't ordinarily be cleaned, so they go in the trash. It's not at all weird if a single-digit percentage point of a disposable item doesn't make it into a proper landfill.
> They enter oceans when they are littered, when waste management systems are inadequate or non-existent, or when these systems become overwhelmed due to increased volumes of waste.
I was arguing that because of the first reason (litter) face masks are thrown into nature way less compared to other plastics in general. It's unfortunately relatively common to just throw away plastic bottles after use, as well as when eating candy. Those are the two most common pieces of litter I see everywhere. Go have a look at a pile of litter somewhere and try to estimate the percentage of masks among the plastic. That was the point I was trying to make.
For the two latter reasons (mismanagement of waste) the end result would probably be more or less the same regardless of the type.
Ultimately the real percentage of facemasks depends on the ratio between these "means of loss". And even though from my (western) perspective trash doesn't end up in the sea when thrown away, there are countries like India and other developing or poor countries that might make the littering statistic insignificant. On the other hand they are also unlikely to use masks to the same extent as in the western world...
The paper cites a study that estimates 3% of global annual plastic waste ends up in the ocean and goes with that figure. This seems to be much better researched than your reasoning it was simply made up.
Maybe the takeaway we should try to get out of this is that, with so many people in the world, behavioral solutions -- like social distancing -- are overall superior to thing-based solutions (like masks).
I tried to start a blog about this idea. I probably tried to start more than one.
But with the hysteria in the air, I felt like I was going to attract a lynch mob for trying to critique the practice of turning to masks instead of looking for something better than masks as The Answer. So that idea of mine never really went anywhere.
People who say that masks aren’t the answer frankly mystify me.
If you were to tell a child “there is a disease that is spread from our breath. What do you think a good solution would be?” I would be dollars to donuts that their answer would be “what about a mask?”
The answer is so obvious that even a child could come up with it. And it takes an adult to convince themselves otherwise. Even science says that masks are effective.
I live with a serious, incurable respiratory condition. I have many years of experience of managing it by first and foremost not exposing myself to germs rather than cavalierly exposing myself and hoping a little cloth over my face will somehow fix it.
But based on this comment and all the downvotes, it seems the decision to not pursue a blog in earnest promoting the idea "That maybe we can find a better-er answer" was the correct decision as a means to protect myself from people who don't want a better answer, they just want a dog to kick.
I'm trying to say something like "Instead of promoting condoms and prophylactic drugs for HIV and other diseases while saying casual sex is fine, we could suggest (alternatives like) celibacy and monogamy as better solutions."
But I imagine that would also be just as hated on. Can't tell anyone "Maybe keeping it in your pants sometimes when not doing so could kill you is a better answer."
Edit:
TLDR: Maybe adults should aspire to more sophisticated answers than ones even a five year old could come up with rather than attacking other adults as idiots for (supposedly) "not seeing something so obvious even a child could dream it up as a solution."
Your situation is atypical. So masks may not be a good solution for you. But for society in general, masks are the best solution. No amount of maskless social distancing can keep you safe but still be able to socialize with others. 6’ is not a number that was derived from science. When investigated, scientists said it was more like 20’.
But having masks and learning how to wear them properly allows people to engage in almost normal social gatherings. This is based on the fractional levels of infections in countries with extremely high compliance like Korea and Japan.
Masks are effective in a hospital setting with trained persons that know how to properly wear one and replace/clean. Wearing the same cloth mask every day while you grocery shop does nothing but make you feel better.
I’ve been using the same pre pandemic 3M P100 industrial respirator with a retrofitted exhalation valve filter for months. It fits with a perfect seal and doesn’t get uncomfortable or warm during extended wear.
Hopefully public health experts and governments will back consumer friendly, low-profile reusable respirator designs. There’s no reasonable reason for there to be a shortage at this point, after all this time, and even sending a few to every household with a link to an instructional video would cost a tiny fraction of the past and future direct and indirect economic consequences stemming from lack of optimal PPE for the general public and essential workers alike.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.