Unmasking the Truth About Masks
There is an insidious truth about covering our faces with all variation and manner of masks that the media doesn’t like to acknowledge, but nevertheless is an absolute, undeniable, and irrefutable empirical truth. These masks cannot nor will not prevent someone from contracting coronavirus COVID-19, and the reasons for this are quite simple. The cells of this virus, or any virus, are far too small for any manner of mechanical filtration to prevent its passage through the filter medium. In order to understand this absolute truth better, we must consider the rudiments of respiratory protection- and we need look no further than the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health- NIOSH.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, should not be confused with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is part of the Department of Labor. As we all know, OSHA regulates the provision for occupational safety and personal protective equipment (PPE) in the workplace, primarily dealing with hazards we can see… falling objects (why some must wear hard hats), flying objects (safety glasses and face shields), corrosive substances (protective gloves and clothing), working from heights (safety belts and harnesses), etc. NIOSH, on the other hand, deals with more insidious workplace hazards- hazards not so easily seen with the naked eye, but are very real, nevertheless. NIOSH establishes threshold limit values (TLVs) for virtually any contaminate in the workplace, as well as thresholds for allowable workplace noise. Both are based upon an average 8-hour workday, five days a week.
If, say, a given noise level in the workplace is above 90 decibels, hearing protection is then required by OSHA. If a specific airborne contaminate in a given workplace is higher than the TLV established by NIOSH, then respiratory protection is required by OSHA. Whereas the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes the Noise Reduction Rating (NRR) on each noise-attenuating earplug and earmuff approved to reduce harmful noise exposure, NIOSH assigns a Testing and Certification (TC) approval number to each respirator approved for specific hazards and specific concentration of those hazards. These approvals are fragile in that they assume the respirator is being worn properly, that the wearer has been quantitatively or qualitatively fit-tested on the device, that the wearer has received required training in the use and limitations of the respirator, and that nothing (a long moustache or any beard) interferes with the peripheral seal of the device being worn. Any one of these variables, falling short of these assumptions, voids the NIOSH approval and renders respiratory protection impossible.
Yet such variables are not the only reasons masks will not protect the wearer of contracting coronavirus COVID-19.
All airborne contaminants, for the purpose of air filtering/air purifying respirators approved by NIOSH, are classified into five categories, ranging in size and constitution, from largest to smallest: dusts (most of which we can see), mists (where dust particles attach to water droplets in the air), fumes (created by heating metals), organic vapors (present in nail polish, paint and gasoline), and acid gasses (such as carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide). As the particular size of these hazards’ units drop, or a specific hazard contains poor warning properties (as in the case of carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide), so increases the requirement for air-supplied respirators as opposed to air-filtering or air-purifying respirators, which is why insulation installers wear NIOSH-approved dust masks and fire-fighters entering burning buildings wear self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA).
Viruses are so very small that no air-filtering or air-purifying respirator can begin to be effective in preventing their passage through any breathable medium, whether the device be a NIOSH-approved respirator (for another hazard), a nuisance dust mask or, for that matter, a bandana tied around the face- none, period. To understand further, if one were to imagine that a single particle of dust was the size of our solar system, a virus would be the comparative size of our moon. At best, wearing such masks might only contain the bodily fluids expectorated in a cough or a sneeze by the wearer, within the mask, but that is not an absolute, either. So, the efficacy of wearing such masks basically amounts to wishful thinking, at best.
State governors, like Virginia’s Ralph Northam (D-VA), who are now mandating the wearing of masks in public are overstepping the recommendations of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, simply because mandates are compulsory while recommendations are voluntary. While wearing masks can partially inhibit the spread of the virus by those infected with it, they provide no protection to the wearer. So, in the case of Northam, who strolled the Virginia Beach boardwalk on Saturday the 23rd of May- neither practicing social distancing nor even wearing a mask, all the while having “selfies” taken with complete strangers also not wearing masks, is now requiring Virginians to wear masks in public spaces, effective Friday the 29th. Go figure. It’s not the first time this governor has made a horse’s ass of himself (remember his medical school yearbook photo wearing blackface?) and it won’t be the last time either, until he leaves office in January of 2022, which can’t get here soon enough for those Virginians who happen to cherish individual liberty and personal freedom.
Perhaps, what requiring the wearing of masks, and enforcing requirements for personal distancing, really amounts to is, in the end, a test of wills- a struggle between the limited authority of the government and the governed who put them in office. Eventually the courts will declare such initiatives, however well-intentioned, to be unconstitutional but that won’t happen before Election Day, which is really what all of this has come to be about…
“Can we make the public so miserable that they will blame it all on Trump?”
Just ask a Democrat.
-Drew Nickell, 28 May 2020
© 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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