In an interview for 60 Minutes, CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook posed that question to Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech University professor specializing in aerosol science.
“They are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get COVID because it’s reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you,” Marr said about masks.
No mask is 100% effective. An N95, for example, is named as such because it is at least 95 percent efficient at blocking airborne particles when used properly. But even if a mask has an 80% efficiency, Marr said, it still offers meaningful protection.
“That greatly reduces the chance that I’m going to become infected,” Marr said.
Marr said research shows that high-quality masks can block particles that are the same size as those carrying the coronavirus. Masks work, Marr explained, as a filter, not as a sieve. Virus particles must weave around the layers of fibers, and as they do so, they may crash into those fibers and become trapped.
Marr likened it to running through a forest of trees. Walk slowly, and the surrounding is easy to navigate. But being forced through a forest at a high speed increases the likelihood of running into a tree.
“Masks, even cloth masks, do something,” she said.
Not that I expect most people to believe it at this point…
They’re reasoning backwards from a conclusion. And they think that’s the way you’re supposed to do it. They suck at keeping their excuses straight because they don’t know why that would matter.
From their perspective, we’re the idiots. We suck at keeping our conclusions straight. It’s like we’re not even trying. Yesterday we said a celebrity did something good, and today we said that celebrity did something bad. We can’t even make up our minds. Is that person evil or not? Actions can only be good because good people do them.
I desperately need everyone to understand - this is a stable worldview. They look around and see evidence they’re correct. They’re wrong, and sometimes that delusion has a body count. But if you start from the assumption that everyone’s just faking everything, confirmation is easy to find.
Confirmation is what humans do by default. We’re so good at maintaining beliefs, we had to invent science to prove ourselves wrong. Smart people are better at keeping stupid beliefs. They’re harder to trick, but once they’re there, they’re stuck.
These people are perfectly capable of being rational. That’s just not what they’re doing. It’s not a property. It’s a behavior. And it can be really fucking difficult to judge how someone is thinking based on observation alone.
My precursor to this explanation was the Yo Mama Hypothesis. In short, insulted kids heard “it’s a joke, calm down” and think that means “shut up and take it.” They memorize the ritual.
They’re not p-zombies. They’re not morons, either. They’re adherents to a simpler, more ingrained, and more satisfying way of experiencing reality. They’re not faking it, and they’re not about to be ousted from it by highlighting contradictions they do not view as relevant. This is just another internally-consistent way to explain what they see in the world.
Which is so much worse.