A piece in the New England Journal of Medicine looks at whether face masks actually help produce population immunity by
reducing the viral load a person is exposed to (not stopping it completely)
leading to a lot of new infections, most of whom are people having mild or asymptomatic illness
then leading to T-cell (possibly antibody) immunity
The mask means you get a much milder illness than you would otherwise. I wonder if the “casedemic” we are seeing is as a result of large scale mask wearing - lots of new cases of mild or asymptomatic people?
I watched the rest of the Lee Merritt video and started a post in response on that thread but didn’t manage to finish it. As you highlighted, one of Dr Merritt’s trains of thought I felt was weaker was her angle on masks. Talking about how many microns is a Covid particle ignores, as you pointed out, the reality of their transportation by droplets. Her endorsement of the “awesome” physicist Denis Rancourt leads to another of these cases in ‘science’ where physics is only applied to real life situations after the subject in question has been fatally oversimplified by unwarranted, ill-considered and even unstated assumptions, thereby violating a key principle of the scientific method, which I would paraphrase as “Don’t leave a gaping hole in your argument”. The assumption in question being that “having the virus” or “testing positive for the virus” means the same however many particles there are in your body.
A variation of this gaping hole is the inattention to the issue of what is the typical viral load that actually leads to disease (and the resulting binary nature of the outcome of a covid test). The ‘physics’ argument that a mask will not stop a sars2 particle is correct in isolation, but one particle, or a sufficiently small amount of particles, will be overwhelmed by the immune system despite showing up in a test.
Ironically, the intriguing possibility raised by the article that masks, by virtue of their fallability, contribute to a controlled development of herd immunity is bolstered by the awesome physics arguments . It also may answer the apparent paradox of why people in countries that went big on masks fared far better do not simply emerge with weakened immune systems.
Haha. Reminds of a phrase I heard in my first year physics: “imagine a spherical cow”
Indeed
Great points in the post. Agree with all. But surely the gaping hole we should be focused on is the one between the threads of a face mask that let’s individual virus particles to waltz through.
I certainly feel like I have a lot to think about between Ivor and this theory. Surly this is what scientists ought to be trying to clarify? We have two plausible but competing theories. Where the hell is the SAGE group to work out which is the real one???
This level of blind confusion didn’t happen purely by accident I think…
I’ve read the article. Without rereading it and pretending to be a scientist, there just seems to me too many assumptions without proper justification to take it seriously. And with the Lancet completely discredited, and the New England Journals own former editor admitting to big pharma pressure, anything they say, needs real proof before I’ll accept it
Yes, it’s not really a research paper- more of an interesting discussion. But it does flag some interesting results, which are scientific studies, that are worth further investigation.
This paragraph:
In an outbreak on a closed Argentinian cruise ship, for example, where passengers were provided with surgical masks and staff with N95 masks, the rate of asymptomatic infection was 81% (as compared with 20% in earlier cruise ship outbreaks without universal masking). In two recent outbreaks in U.S. food-processing plants, where all workers were issued masks each day and were required to wear them, the proportion of asymptomatic infections among the more than 500 people who became infected was 95%, with only 5% in each outbreak experiencing mild-to-moderate symptoms.3 Case-fatality rates in countries with mandatory or enforced population-wide masking have remained low, even with resurgences of cases after lockdowns were lifted.
Seems to show there is some evidence of a link between mask wearing and mild or asymptomatic infections. That could be an extremely important result. You are 100% right that this is not proof, though. Far from it! We urgently need a series of proper studies to work all this out. The question is, if these ideas might be true, what’s the harm in wearing the mask while we work it out? The one thing that all the countries I mentioned with low death rates (bar NZ maybe?) have in common is widespread mask usage. Could it be that they are quietly building up immunity to the virus without a vaccine, and without horrendous suffering and death, just by the simple method outlined in the above article?
If so (and I do mean if), that is a huge lesson that we in the neoliberal west, completely failed on.
. It also may answer the apparent paradox of why people in countries that went big on masks fared far better do not simply emerge with weakened immune systems.
