Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets

There has been a strong anti-science component in the US for literally centuries. These advances have been despite the sentiment. In addition, it isn't like other countries weren't going to space or weren't working on it (just like now). Tech has been mirrored elsewhere for a long time, but an American education might lead you to believe differently (I know mine didn't really mention that things like cars were being developed elsewhere - they just mention the first American to make things).

If you want a fine example of this, look at the push against modern medicine. Folks were eshewing "European-style medicine" for quite some time.

The US Took a really, really long time to eliminate lead from paint and gasoline, comparatively, even though we knew about the harm.

We knew things about climate change before WWII, and the denial then was pretty strong. People were scoffing about Earth Day when I was a child - I'm 42 now.

Anti-maskers were about in the 1910's with the Spanish flu. The anti-vax movement has been around since.. well, around the time we started to have vaccines. Yes, folks lined up for them, but not everyone.

It is a whole heck of a lot easier to be vocal about it now, though, and easier to reach others to try to convince them.

A couple of reasons for this spring to mind immediately. Firstly, governments don't want people using the most effective masks because there's barely enough of them to supply hospitals. Secondly, the push for masking has absolutely nothing to do with effectiveness. For instance, people keep pointing to things like the 1918 flu epidemic as proof we've always known masks worked, but as far as I can tell those masks were made of gauze and therefore likely as bad as or worse than the worst mask in the study. And there was an article going around pointing to this study of the effect of reducing the dose of flu virus people were exposed to as proof masks worked better than expected: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342672/ Notice how, at the part of the curve where reducing the amount of virus had the most effect, it took a tenfold reduction or so to reduce the number of people showing symptoms or testing positive by about 30%? On its face that seems kind of bad for the idea of using random non-medical face coverings with much worse filteration, but that's not how it's been spun.

Also, I think a lot of this has to do with what people feel will work based on it having a good narrative attached. For example, there's this fairly widespread idea that valved masks are not OK and worse than random cotton face coverings which I think has even been enshrined as an actual legal requirement in a few places despite clearly not matching up with the test results here. Presumably this is because it feels like deliberately letting your own breath out past the filter via valves is intentionally exposing others, even though anyone who wears an ordinary non-fitted face mask can easily notice that exhalation blows out around the edge of the mask anyway - often with really annoying results for glasses wearers. A bunch of British news organisations even accused our government of telling people to wear "useless" maasks and endangering the public for showing a valved mask in their advice: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-f...

Potentially a good thing to keep in mind for the upcoming ski season if people think their fleece face coverings will be effective.

The number of droplets is just one variable. Slowing down their speed is another. Since droplets are heavy and fall down fast that dry aresols, just having transparent face shield might give protection to others.

I was rewatching Stranger Things last night and Hopper made a comment about how a missing child brings out the crazies (his words, for those somehow not in the know, it's a show set in the 80s, no internet, no mobile phones).

I'm starting to suspect that the media, police, government in all its forms, just used to filter them all out. File their reports and letters in the wastebin.

I do wonder whether we've now just given those people an ability to talk to the whole world via Twitter/Facebook/etc., who aren't filtering them out.

So perhaps the narrative was always there, but pre-internet was easily filtered.