I heard masks stop bacteria but not viruses. Any microbiologists here who can confirm this? I would assume it’s true as when you breathe in a virus that is only 20 nanometers long it can easily pass through the fibers, a mask is not solid.
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It doesn’t take an expert to see that the problem isn’t that the fabric of an everyday mask cannot filter viruses. The masks are far from air tight. You can’t breathe thru the fabric itself, so you are inhaling and around the edges of the mask. That’s why glasses fog up.
You don’t need to filter the viruses themselves because they can’t live on their own. In dry air, their proteins denature immediately and they become inactive (unable to cause infection). SARS-CoV-2 is primarily transmitted via respiratory droplets. Initial droplet sizing is ~80um. A cloth mask does just fine filtering most of that. Is it air-tight? No. Does it severely reduce both the volume of respiratory droplets released by an infected person and the distance the remaining droplets travel? Absolutely.
Check out Fig 6-9 here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7301882/
Yes! That’s another thing, it’s ridiculous because people are inhaling from the edges of the mask as well so any Coronavirus floating around there can easily be inhaled. I would really like to know the stats of the amount of people who contracted the virus who wore masks but I’m sure they media will never report it. Think about it: All the people wearing masks today yet they still claim thousands are getting this virus, well how is that possible if they are wearing masks? The masks are useless then.