Some of us are old enough to remember the Charlie Brown cartoon and Lucy’s continual heartless pulling the football away from Charlie’s kick. But another iconic character was “Pigpen” — the little boy who could hardly be seen through the cloud of dust and dirt that enveloped him.
Not to be insulting, but Pigpen is in fact YOU — and everyone — when it comes to airborne viruses!
Some facts:
The current consensus estimate is that there are 10^31 virus particles of all types on earth. That’s 10 raised to the 31st or 10,000 billion billion billion. Most people have no way to comprehend the scale of such a number but one way to visualize it is if God had a virus vacuum cleaner whose hose was perfectly packed with all of Earth’s virus particles it would be at least 4” in diameter and stretch from the Earth to the Sun!
On average, every second sees 1000 virus particles precipitate out of the air on every square foot of the earth! The idea that you can dodge between viruses is straight up insane not to put too fine a point on it.
One study concluded that just in accessible bodily fluids, even healthy people have an average of 5 types of viruses! Never mind what might be found by something closer to a vivisection (thanks, but no thanks everyone studied said ;)
On an Antarctic base mission about 50 years ago, half of the dozen or so participants suffered an outbreak of colds 4 MONTHS into the mission! Where did that virus come from? And also, it’s interesting that not everyone became symptomatically sick at least…
Prior to the emergence of the SARS-2 virus, there were already 4 known coronavirus types that caused between 10-30% of of the 1 BILLION cold infections in the US each year1. That’s 100-300 MILLION cold infections!2 This was of course something that everyone just took in stride with few being worried that a cold would be more than an irritant … except there is a study cited by Sebastian Rushworth that in the oldest and frailest that rhinoviruses (the most prevalent cold causing virus) can kill at a higher rate than the flu!
Viruses. Are. Completely. Pervasive.
You might now be warming to the topic of how well masks can really work — especially for an airborne virus as C19 has finally been slyly admitted to be by the CDC — when you absorb a fact set like this. After digesting even just this list it starts to become apparent that the TV is giving us at best a pre-school level view of the virome!
A final fact is that the SARS-2 virus itself is +/-100 nanometers (0.1 micrometer) in size in its pure aerosol form and new studies are saying the most SARS-2 viral load is covered by particles less than 2.5 micrometers.
Time for a 2 minute video:
As you might be suspecting by now the individual virus is about the size of that smallest circle on the wall or about the size of a dog on the sidewalk — and something 2.5 micrometers is about 3-4 floors in height … against a hair’s DIAMETER being the size of the … full … height … of … the… Empire … State … Building!
Random pieces of cloth with random weaves average out to being like trying to stop mosquitoes with a chain link fence once you understand this!
And now you know why trash bins full of masks are not treated with utmost caution as sources of viral outbreaks — they don’t have any unusual concentrations of virus! Bacteria maybe, but I won’t go down that depressing road…
Hence we find that first of all, there is no correlation between the stringency of various US state’s lockdown measures (of which masking is claimed to be an important component) and their death rates. @YouyangGu has discovered that such a chart is a “shotgun blast” with no meaningful R2 (correlation) value (first chart below).
And as a consequence (though you will never see it on XiNN) we can put up charts all day that look like this one with “reckless” Texas vs the gloriously locked down California:
And before you convince yourself that we can solve this by training 2 year olds to wear N95 masks you might want to take a look at the Bavarian N95 experiment’s results to date:
Not off to an auspicious start shall we say?
The bottom line here is that as a mask material moves toward being less porous in an attempt to succeed in filtering such tiny particles it approaches asymptotically being the equivalent of covering your mouth with a plastic bag. And in such a case you either suffocate or the air starts moving unfiltered through the gaps at the edge of the mask! HVAC duct designers are well acquainted with this phenomenon and call it “static air pressure”. But most people can easily understand this as “the path of least resistance”.
Emily demonstrates nicely by blowing out the match in a the manner the moronic Bill Nye is trying to hide from you (tweet is protected so you have to make do with an image):
See you on the flip side Pigpen … if your cloud of viruses doesn’t become too opaque!
It might seem odd at first that a country of 330 million people like the US could suffer 1 billion cold infections each year. The answer of course is that the young can have multiple cold infections a year — hence the phrase “snot nosed kid” ;)
And you wonder why there are a lot of SARS-2 infections if it has heavily displaced the existing cold causing coronaviruses as the Syndromictrends.com site shows? Go to the right of their page and select line mode and then use the filter icon to select only coronaviruses to see another version of the viral competition I pointed out in “The (Rileyesque) Glasgow Virus Study”