Will too much maskerbating make me blind?

(Slap that booster mask on your face RIGHT NOW)

As much of the world descends into irrational medical fascism with medically-pointless vaccine mandates, let us spare a thought for that other great irrational and medically-pointless imposition; masks.

Masks, as we know, were a wonderfully safe and effective method of controlling the virus. They worked everywhere they were introduced. It was like magic. The rising case numbers were immediately reversed and driven mercilessly down by mandating masks. Masks worked so well it’s hard to believe we even needed a vaccine at all! (I really shouldn’t have to add this, but doubtless there are some too befuddled to recognise extreme sarcasm).

Once seen to be slightly odd, even perverse, maskerbating in public became the virtuous thing to do. Encouraged by governments everywhere, we became avid maskerbaters. And what a difference it made!

Have a look at Israel. Not content with being some of the world’s most zealous maskerbaters they progressed to becoming the world’s leading proponent of useless pricks (at one stage they were the highest, or 2nd highest, vaccinated country in the world with the highest rate of covid cases in the world - quite some achievement). But here’s a graph showing just how beautifully masks worked to control the outbreak in Israel - before the vaccines came along and saved us all.

The same kind of picture is seen across the world. The effect of maskerbating simply cannot be seen in the data. One of my favourite charts sums it all up in a nutshell, but I’ll leave you, dear reader, to follow through on the logic of why I think this chart is so important, for all sorts of reasons.

Now call me old-fashioned, but when someone claims something has a significant effect, I like to be able to see that in the data. Terribly misguided of me, I know. But if I’m having to do all sorts of fancy statistical shenanigans to merely see an effect, it is, pretty much by definition, insignificant.

Perhaps we weren’t wearing enough of the bloody things

Thankfully in the UK we were allowed to claim exemption. Unlike the spectacularly stupid governments elsewhere who mandated the things outside with no exemptions. It really is hard to comprehend the level of scientific and medical stupidity such mandates imply - but of course mask mandates, like vaccine mandates, have never been about health per se have they?

Earlier this year I had to visit an opticians to get some new spectacles. Mask exemption at the ready, I was greeted with sternly disapproving looks when I politely refused their offer of a mask. In the end I had to sit there holding a mask a couple of inches from my face. Of course, I just couldn’t stop giggling. I don’t think I’ll be going back to that opticians again.

But how were we convinced in the first place to become such ardent and willing public maskerbaters?

On the face of it, masks, like lockdowns, ought to work. At least that’s what our naïve intuition would suggest to us. But neither masks, nor lockdowns, have done much to control the virus - the virus diddeth as the virus was wonteth to do (virus gonna virus), quite independently of our naïve intuitions.

Let’s see if we can improve on our intuition a bit and see whether it makes sense, a priori, that masks should have an impact on the progression of the outbreak of an aerosolized respiratory virus.

The most critical thing to remember is the following; we have to breathe. If we slap something on our face that stops us breathing in - we’re going to die. If we slap something on our face that stops us breathing out - we’re going to die. I hope I’m not surprising anyone with these salient facts.

Having established this, we now have to ask how this happens when we wear a mask; does the air go through, or around the mask?

A simple experiment gives us the answer here. Put one of those surgical masks on and try to blow out a candle. It can be done, but only by exerting a considerable amount of extra pressure. This tells us, that in normal circumstances, these masks are acting as a barrier. The air is not going through the mask. We don’t tend to turn blue in the face, keel over, and die from lack of oxygen when wearing a surgical mask - so the conclusion is that the air is going in and out primarily at the sides.

Masks are a bit like the Maginot Line - the invaders simply go round it.

But barriers can still act as filters. Maybe those virions are hitting the rear surface of the mask and sticking there - so that the air going out the sides is wonderfully virion-free. Have a look at the top picture of someone vaping - and remember that vape (about the same size as aerosols) is pretty sticky stuff.

This brings us to the next critical property; to be effective a mask has to capture and keep a sufficient number of virions. Sufficient enough to make a difference - but more on that in a moment. Maybe virions travelling via aerosols have vastly different properties to sticky vape vapour, but somehow I very much doubt it. It is just not sensible to assume that a mask is keeping a sufficient number of virions to actually make any appreciable difference. Sure, the mask seems to prevent the aerosols going forward - but anyone at your sides or behind you - they’re right in the firing line!

Here we come to another one of those conceptual issues. I think it’s too tempting to think of these virions being fired from our diseased respiratory tracts like little bullets. All we need to do is to sit behind a Perspex screen and those little bullets of viral woe will ping off and we’ll be safe. Or at least that appears to be the thinking behind those utterly ludicrous screens. Another of the many expensive and wholly useless measures we’ve gleefully taken to.

These things are not bullets - they’re little. Very little. They’re going to go everywhere - blown about willy-nilly by air currents. Once again I urge you to watch someone vaping and see how far the vapour travels, and for how long. That’s what your breath is doing - you just can’t see it. How close do you need to be to a smoker before you can smell the cigarettes?

The other conceptual hurdle we need to overcome is that of something I call linear thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that says if I reduce X by 10% it means that Y reduces by 10%. Sometimes this is true, but it’s not automatically true. The thinking seems to have been that if masks reduce viral load in the atmosphere by 10% this translates to a 10% reduction in infection, or infection rate, for example.

Even if masks reduced atmospheric viral load by 10% per breath - which I’m very confident they don’t - this does not mean they have a similar benefit in terms of preventing infection. My strong suspicion is that the effect, if any, is going to be highly non-linear. There will some sort of threshold density for airborne virions beyond which the probability of infection increases sharply.

If an infected person in a room without a mask takes 10 minutes to breathe enough out to reach that threshold, then our wildly optimistic 10% effective mask will increase that time to about 11 minutes.

The upshot of all this is that there is no good a priori reason why masks should work at all - at least not the typical surgical masks. And let’s not forget, the preponderance of scientific evidence in the form of randomized control trials says they don’t work

This pandemic has been one of excess. Excess fear, excess panic, excess governmental intervention. The answer has always been more, more, more. Lockdowns, masks, sanitizer, one-way systems - didn’t work the first time? What’s needed is more. Like the advert for a dubious porn film, the call has always been longer, harder, stronger.

More masks, more lockdowns, more vaccines in the form of boosters - at some point we’re going to realize that more is not always better. Sweden realized this early on and pretty much stuck to pre-covid science (also known simply as “science”) by not going batshit crazy. They kept calm and carried on - and the results speak for themselves.

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