Masks?

 The NY Times provided a zero evidenced based article on the use of masks. Now let's review the points:

First the author states:

If you stop to have an extended conversation with someone who isn’t vaccinated, masks are recommended. Even outdoors, your risk of breathing someone else’s air increases the longer and closer you stand to them. One of the few documented cases of outdoor transmission happened in China early in the pandemic, when a 27-year-old man stopped to chat outside with a friend who had just returned from Wuhan, where the virus originated. Seven days later, he had his first symptoms of Covid-19.

One must be truly indoctrinated to believe this Wuhan reference. It is baseless and sourced from a highly unreliable basis. And there is no scientific basis in some peer reviewed journal detailing this effect. It is at best anecdotal and at worst propaganda.

Now let's see where we are:

1. 50% of the population now has immunity. Great!

2. Allegedly, and I use this even cautiously, the virus spreads by aerosols. I worked on aerosols some 55 years ago and was a bit of a specialist. Just what is an aerosol? It is a small particle that is less dense than air and has some initial velocity and is in a cloud. It floats and moves. But just how far? It depends. If you are some academic seeking fame you take a flash photo spitting out a mouth full of aerosolized liquid to get an impressive shot. Science? No, just PR. Frankly the science is still out.

3. Let's remember how the virus operates. If I am immunized then I cannot get the infection, my immune system stops it. However I may carry the virus in an inactivated state in my nasopharynx. The virus is dormant there at 94F because it needs 98F to get active. Thus if I were to cough or sneeze or shout I putatively could spread the virus. Thus if I were in a large room perhaps I could be a spreader. But there are a lot of ifs. Frankly we still do not really know.

4. Models just do not work. The author notes:

To understand just how low the risk of outdoor transmission is, researchers in Italy used mathematical models to calculate the amount of time it would take for a person to become infected outdoors in Milan. They imagined a grim scenario in which 10 percent of the population was infected with Covid-19. Their calculations showed that if a person avoided crowds, it would take, on average, 31.5 days of continuous outdoor exposure to inhale a dose of virus sufficient to transmit infection.

 I think by this time we should have no faith in models. Remember the University of London one where half the world died! The author concludes with:

assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said he recently was with a group of parents, including many vaccinated physicians, who met in a New Haven park to celebrate a child’s first birthday. “We’re all just standing around, everybody was masked, and then we started asking, ‘When’s the time we can be outside and take off our masks?’” Dr. ... said. “If people are vaccinated and you’re outdoors, masks are probably superfluous at this point.”

This should read: We really do not know! If I am vaccinated I am allegedly safe. If you are not, shame on you. It is kind of like seat belts. Not the mask, the vaccine.  

This is not science, it is social control.