Chapter 14 in the R.M. Dolin book, “Truth and Trust in Crisis.”
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan [1]
As an engineer, I’m trained to approach problems divorced from personal bias, with a willingness to be persuaded and a responsibility to validate assertions and observations through hypothesis testing,[2] using experiments to assess the outcome of specific assertions. Hypothesis testing involves the following steps
- State your hypothesis.[3]
- Design an experiment to prove the hypothesis.
- Perform experiments and collect data.
- Analyze the data to support or refute the hypothesis.
- Present your results.
Throughout this crisis, we’ve heard “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy, and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, demand Americans wear facemasks, they’ve even gone to such extremes as to recommending you wear two facemasks while alone in your house or car. A Texas bureaucrat advocates wearing facemasks while having sex, which I can only assume is his way of spicing things up in the boudoir. At the urging of medical professionals, thirty-seven states have included facemask mandates in their imposed mandate cocktails. Under President Trump, mandates were left to individual states to decide but President Biden is federalizing mandates so they can be applied uniformly across the country.
Medical and government experts apparently don’t review research because a peer reviewed article published in the CDC Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases[4], found that facemasks don’t prevent the transmission of COVID. [5] But that’s not even the most irrational thing to emerge from our leaders; in New York, politicians and healthcare professionals, backed by complicit media, believe anger prevents infection. The mayor of New York City encourages rioting[6] while, along with his California counterparts, declares sinners shouldn’t be allowed to get right with God, or families feeling the need for fellowship can’t be allowed to gather around a backyard barbeque grill.[7]
When government mandates become so absurd they promote protesters gathering in large groups without facemasks, but threaten to arrest people who worship with facemasks, it begs the question, “What is the real reason for facemasks and do they accomplish their stated purpose?” When the government intentionally infects nursing home residents but restricts barbeques, how much trust can we give them to have our health as a concern when issuing policy edicts? To answer that, let’s consider the following factors in facemask efficacy,
- Facemask standards do not exist.
- Facemasks don’t seal around the face, so when you exhale unfiltered air escapes.
- Facemasks don’t cover the eyes, which is COVID’s most direct pathway into your body.
- People who wear facemasks are more likely to touch their faces in public than those who don’t.
Facemask Hypothesis Testing, Step 1: Formulate a hypothesis
H1: Wearing a facemask does not prevent COVID transmission.
We framed our hypothesis to be the opposite of assertions made by medical professionals, politicians, and the media. As an initial metric into proving H1, while researching this topic I found no evidence supporting a facemask’s ability to prevent COVID transmission but will provide peer reviewed evidence later that facemasks do not prevent transmission. To prove or disprove the hypothesis for ourselves, we must perform experiments.
Step 2: Design an Experiment
Experiments can be conducted to test the efficacy of facemasks by using items found in most homes. Table 12.1 lists the parameters needed for our hypothesis test[8],[9],[10],[11].
Table 14.1. Parameters for Facemask Hypothesis Test.
a
To put this dimensional data in perspective, the average porosity, or hole diameter, of a facemask is 290 microns, which is 2,320 times larger than the diameter of the COVID virus. To visualize this differential, imagine you have a large jar filled with marbles at the top of a playground slide that you’re about to tip over. The slide contains a random pattern of holes down its length with each hole is 2,320 times the diameter of the marbles. If a marble falls through one of the holes on the way down the slide, it’s analogous to a COVID virus escaping a facemask. If a marble makes it all the way to the bottom of the slide without falling through a hole, it’s analogous to a facemask stopping that virus’s transmission. If a marble is one centimeter in diameter, then each hole in the slide is 23.2 meters or 76 feet in diameter. Raise your hand if you think a 1 centimeter marble can slip through a 23 meter hole.
Step 3: Perform Experiments
Experiment 1: Use a fisherman’s net to capture sugar grains. In this experiment, the fisherman’s net represents a facemask and sugar grains a virus. The porosity of the fisherman’s net is approximately 3cm X 3cm, which equates to 30,000 microns per side. Granulated sugar is a crystal cube with an average size of 550 microns per side; this means a sugar grain is 54.5 times smaller than the net’s opening. Since the COVID virus is 2,320 times smaller than the average facemask pores, the fisherman’s net is 42.5 times more effective at capturing sugar grains than a facemask is at preventing COVID virus transmission.
Begin the experiment by precisely weighing 1 kilogram of sugar into a bowl. Hold the fisherman’s net over a second bowl and pour the sugar into the net. Record the number of sugar grains captured in the net. Since it’s difficult to count individual crystals, we can weigh the sugar that passes through the net and use the average weight of a sugar grain to approximate how many grains the net captured. Keep in mind as you discover the net doesn’t capture any sugar grains that our net is 43 times more effective at stopping sugar than a facemask is at stopping COVID transmission.
Experiment 2: Use the fisherman’s net to capture pieces of cereal. The same fisherman’s net is used in this experiment but with a larger medium. The average diameter of the cereal, say Captain Crunch, Fruit Loops, or Cheerios, is ~1.5 centimeters, or 15,000 microns. This means each opening in the net is 2 times larger than a piece of cereal making our net 1,160 times more effective at capturing cereal than a facemask is at keeping stopping COVID transmission.
To execute the experiment, pour a box of cereal into a bowl and weigh the contents. Next weigh 100 individual pieces of cereal and compute the average weight for a piece of cereal. Divide the weight of the cereal in the bowl by the average weight per piece to determine how many pieces of cereal your using in the experiment.
Hold the fisherman’s net over a large tray and pour the cereal from the bowl into the net. Record the number of cereal pieces the net captures. This number represents an overestimate of the number of COVID viruses a facemask can capture by a factor of 1,160, in other words, for every 1,160 pieces of cereal the fisherman’s net captures, a facemask would keep 1 COVID virus from being transmitted. Once you discover the fisherman’s net doesn’t capture any pieces of cereal, you get a feel for how effective facemasks are at preventing COVID transmission.
Step 4: Analyze Results
Repeat each experiment multiple times with different brands of sugar and different types of cereal. For each experiment, carefully record the results. For a properly designed and correctly executed experiment, you should observe consistent results each time you repeat the experiment, namely, that the fisherman’s net captures zero sugar grains and zero pieces of cereal.
Step 5: Formulate Conclusions
The fisherman’s net used in our experiment was 42.5 times more likely to capture sugar grains and 1,160 times more likely to capture cereal pieces than a facemask is at stopping COVID transmission. After repeated trials, the fisherman’s net stopped zero sugar grains and zero pieces of cereal. We therefore conclude from these experiments that if the fisherman’s net cannot prevent sugar grains or pieces of cereal from passing through, facemasks cannot stop COVID transmission. An important aspect of our experiment is that when the sugar and cereal were poured into the net, we applied no pressure to push the medium through the net. However, each time a person exhales while wearing a facemask, pressure is exerted on the COVID viruses as a function of how hard one breathes and how well the seal between the facemask and your face holds the pressure. Factoring in the effects of pressure and seal leakage further lowers the efficacy of a facemask’s ability to prevent COVID transmission, but since our experiments already demonstrate facemasks have zero ability to stop COVID transmission, accounting for pressure and leakage does not alter the outcome.
Based on our experimental trials we conclude facemasks provide no discernable ability to prevent COVID transmission, which begs the question concerning why government, media, and medical professions impose facemask mandates knowing they’re ineffective. While addressing that is a matter of psychology and Pavlovian manipulation outside of our scope, Dr. Anthony Fauci provides some interesting insight as he contends facemask are a psychological placebo, “wearing a mask is not 100% effective, [you wear it] to show respect for another person.” [12]
If our experiment and Dr. Fauci’s insights are not enough to convince you facemask are not mandated to prevent COVID transmission, perhaps the CDC can assuage your concerns.
“Here, we review the evidence based on the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical personal protective measures and environmental hygiene measures in non-healthcare settings and discuss their potential inclusion in pandemic plans. Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza. We similarly found limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning.”
Pages 970-972 of the paper: “In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs [randomized controlled trials] that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the community from literature published during 1946-July 27, 2018. In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks…
Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids… There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
In this review, we did not find evidence to support a protective effect of personal protective measures or environmental measures in reducing influenza transmission. We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility…”[13]
Based on the results of our experiments, extensive CDC trials, and Dr. Fauci’s insight, we can conclude that facemask efficacy is a false fallacy as they do not prevent COVID transmission. So once again our curiosity has left us with another unresolved riddle: “What’s the real reason for facemask mandates?” Once you solve that mystery, you’ll know everything you need to know about COVID.
[1] https://www.quotes.pub/q/one-of-the-saddest-lessons-of-history-is-this-if-weve-been-b-293860
[2] Hypothesis Testing | A Step-by-Step Guide with Easy Examples (scribbr.com)
[3] How to Write a Strong Hypothesis | Steps and Examples (scribbr.com)
[4] Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures – Volume 26, Number 5—May 2020 – Emerging Infectious Diseases journal – CDC
[5] Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures – Volume 26, Number 5—May 2020 – Emerging Infectious Diseases journal – CDC
[6] De Blasio Hints Rioting Is Okay, Going To Church Is Not During Pandemic – They’re ‘Not the Same’ – The Political Insider
[7] Coronavirus: Newsom warns against Fourth of July gatherings (mercurynews.com)
[8] Fact check: N95 filters are not too large to stop COVID-19 particles (usatoday.com)
[9] How Small is a Water Molecule? (yourhomewaterfilters.com)
[10] size of a grain of sugar – Search (bing.com)
[11] Optical microscopic study of surface morphology and filtering efficiency of face masks – PMC (nih.gov)
[12] Fauci says he wears a mask to be a symbol of what ‘you should be doing’ – CNNPolitics
[13] Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures – Volume 26, Number 5—May 2020 – Emerging Infectious Diseases journal – CDC
