I’ve done similar from time to time. And I’d point out that many times you can’t tell if there is a passenger in someone else’s car just at a glance. . The Uber drivers, for example, are required to wear masks even if they are driving a minivan and the guy is all the way in the back. Don’t sweat the negative responses you’re receiving.
I’m going to presume folks are not aware of virus mechanisms.
They are about 90 nanometers in diameter and this is a great deal smaller than the aperture of masks. So the mask won’t stop a free floating virus. But. Viruses are nearly never free floating. They are generally attached to some respiratory droplet, which is larger than a mask aperture.
But the important thing here is mechanism. The english phrasing we hear is very deceptive and essentially wrong. Like . . . you get a virus in your nose and inhale and that virus will go hunting lung cells to attack, cut an opening in a cell membrane and convert the machinery of that cell from its original purpose to a new purpose of making 100s of copies of the virus.
Well, no. It’s all very numerical. The virus doesn’t hunt. It doesn’t attack. It’s not alive. It gets inhaled and most likely it gets exhaled. It is just as likely to be exhaled around the edge of a mask as it was to get inhaled around the edge of a mask.
But as I said, it’s numerical. One virus probably gets exhaled. And if not exhaled it doesn’t hunt anything. It floats in the air of your lungs and maybe it bumps into a lung cell and gets ensnared by the spike proteins on its surface. Then normal respiration rubs those spikes against the cell membrane and that’s how it gets inside. It doesn’t cut its way in. It’s not alive.
And so, you can see how numerical is how it all works. If you get fewer virus particles on droplets into your lungs, you have lower chance of a massive ensnarement on many lung cells taking place.
And a way to get fewer is to have some filtration around your mouth and nose . . . in the form of a mask.