The World Health Organization lied about masks. President Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and surgeon general lied about masks. Democratic and Republican lawmakers across the country lied about masks. All in all, it should come as no surprise that vast swaths of the public still distrust masks. And it’s a shame because it seems increasingly likely that if we all just wore masks, this whole pandemic shutdown could be over.
You don’t need more than a high school level of understanding of biology to understand that you can likely prevent the transmission of a respiratory disease by blocking your mouth and nose as you breathe and talk. French doctors from hundreds of years ago understood that they could probably mitigate the odds of them contracting the plague with a mask, so it’s rather astounding that the world’s leading health experts couldn’t figure out that wearing a mask probably could help and definitely couldn’t hurt.
Recommended Stories
A British study is just the latest to affirm what already seems likely. Scientists from Cambridge and Greenwich University found that even just half of the population wearing face masks all the time when with other people in public would reduce the coronavirus reproduction rate to less than one, meaning that every person with the coronavirus would infect fewer than one person. That would flatten and bend the curve toward zero.
And this comes after countless studies proving that mask-wearing confers a sort of herd immunity effect, providing some protection to people from getting the coronavirus and from asymptomatic people transmitting it. Even before scientists studied the coronavirus, studies on comparably sized bacteriophages indicated that even homemade cloth masks were extraordinarily effective at preventing transmission.
The evidence was always overwhelming. It’s why I, who have not taken a biology class in a decade and hardly ever write about science, felt comfortable affirmatively declaring that you should all wear masks while the CDC, the WHO, and Republicans and Democrats alike were saying you shouldn’t.
Just consider two Missouri hairstylists who just tested positive for the coronavirus and saw 140 clients, not one of whom contracted the virus. It’s fully possible that we could have had a two-week lockdown and then returned to life as usual if we all wore masks from the start. But the elites lied to us, and now we have a double-digit employment rate and 100,000 dead.
If you want everything to go back to normal, wear a mask. The science is clear.
