First of all, they don’t work. Second of all, they are detrimental to your health.
I recently updated my Bangladesh study mask article to add two new resources of interest.
- A paper published in JAMA in 2019 showed that surgical masks and N95 masks were completely ineffective against the flu. They both offered the same amount of protection, i.e., none. This is of course why nobody wears them to stop a virus. In fact, the surgical mask actually performed slightly better than the N95 mask in the study. How can that be? It’s obvious: both masks offered no protection whatsoever so it was a wash and the differences were simply random.
2. This tweet by Robin Monotti summarizes a new study done in Germany showing that masks cause unsafe levels of CO2 with devastating health consequences that the CDC doesn’t want anyone to know about. Read more.