“Wearing a proper mask significantly reduces both the chance of breathing those droplets, and the chance of spreading them to others.”
I keep asking, when the moisture dries out of the droplets, won’t the attached viruses that collect on the mask be easier to breathe in? It is like trying to stop a bb with a chain link fence.
I have worn masks around dust, and when the mask gets moisturized from your breath, it start to collect debris on the surface and makes breathing more difficult. You breathe harder, sucking in more [virus].
Then, their are your eyes wide open when you walk into a cloud of droplets that the person six feet in front of you just left hanging. The fastest way for a virus to enter your body is through the eyes.
An experiment shows that an N95 mask will stop a virus two inches when worn. The rest are measured in feet. I believe it said the type of mask you make for yourself as per instructions of the Surgeon General is four feet.
My understanding is that the virus itself cannot remain intact without a liquid enclosure. We wear N95 masks at work, and what we do is rotate them and leave the just-worn ones to dry in the sun. It’s not as good as replacing them each time, but we ordered our N95 masks in January and there hasn’t been any supply of them since then .