Bruddah IZ
DA
yeah, yeah. blue pill, red pill, pink pill, whatevah. Let’s go back to thinking.
Speed of breath in terms of meters per second, not breaths per minute.
That is, how fast is your breath travelling once it is 5 inches from your face? (and what does that imply about the distance it travels in the first 3 seconds after you exhale?)
An asthmatic thinking about speed of breath is thinking about breaths per minute. That’s an important question for personal comfort, but does not affect the velocity I’m talking about.
A simple test is to wet your finger and put it in front of your face. Your breath will cool it when you talk- but not if you have a mask on. The mask is slowing the velocity of your exhalation.
No one can answer your “Masks work, right?” question. You are asking for a boolean answer to a non-boolean question. It’s no more meaningful than asking whether a goalie blocks goals- and insisting that the only possible answers are “yes” and “no”.
Masks reduce the probability of transmission. That’s all. They do not come close to eliminating transmission.
The argument for masks, distance, and moving things outside has nothing to do with eliminating transmission. If you try to think of it in those terms, you will never get your head around it.
All of these measures work by reducing transmission. The goal isn’t zero. Zero isn’t even possible. The goal is to keep cutting transmission in half until it is less than one.
This is why public health officials can‘t just let you go away and do your thing. What good does it do if 70% of us are busy cutting our transmission, while 30% of you keep spreading disease? The disease will continue to spread, because, no matter what the rest of us do, your 30% is enough to keep transmission above 1.
How about natural immunity?