Representative Marsh’s remarks concerning the Wearing of Masks and the spread of COVID, are riven with misinformation concerning the efficacy of mask-wearing. To begin with, as an ophthalmologist, Marsh ought to know that there are five orifices in one’s head through which COVID can gain entry to one’s body.
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Masks cover three. The two others are one’s eyes.
Masks, used in medical settings, exist primarily to prevent doctors and nurses from ejecting sputum into open wounds or onto patients’ bodies through sneezing, coughing, or normal breathing, and to also prevent sputum contamination of equipment in the patient’s treatment area.
Wearing masks in medical settings, something that Marsh ought to also know, as someone supposedly familiar with medical practices, requires self-sanitizing one’s hands prior to touching one’s mask, self-sanitizing one’s hands after touching one’s mask and before touching anything else, and then disposing of one’s mask after about 20 minutes of use and replacing it with a clean face covering.
The old mask should then be discarded and/or thoroughly washed before reuse. Mask-wearers who do not follow these protocols soon fill their masks with bacteria, germs, and viruses and in doing so become potential carriers of diseases to others.
If one bothers to watch mask-wearing practices in public spaces, virtually no one observes sanitary mask-wearing practices. It’s doubtful that Representative Marsh, in the course of his own mask-wearing practices, rigorously follows recommended sanitary protocols either.
Until March of 2020, it was universally recognized that the wearing of face-masks DOES NOT prevent the spread of disease. The World Health Organization (WHO), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and many other entities having to do with the promotion of disease- safe environments echoed exactly this view. The very boxes that contain legitimate masks prominently affirm this fact on the exterior of their mask containers.
So why is mask-wearing being popularized?
Mask-wearing is being promoted and popularized because epidemiologists, immunologists, and virologists, in medical settings, medical labs, think tanks, and the like, as well as policymakers in government, have all been flummoxed by the nature and spread of COVID.
From the beginning, all have made wildly contradictory statements having to do with every aspect of the virus, from cause, to cure, to effect. All have been incessantly beleaguered by sensationalist media and by a fearful public, to provide a solution, something, and anything at all, to quell panic and fear and to affirm, for public consumption, that there is indeed, a way to mitigate and perhaps even stop the spread of the virus. Consequently, they’ve shamelessly promoted the palliative of mask-wearing.
To demonstrate just how far-afield the medical community and political elites are now on the efficacy of mask-wearing vis-a-vis spreading or contracting COVID, a recent study, concluded last summer, of 6,000+ mask and non-mask wearers in Denmark, determined that there is no, material, statistical difference between either wearing a mask or not wearing a mask.
Representative Marsh proudly states that he wears an N95 Mask, reputedly the best offered on the market, to ensure that he and those around him will be safe. Given his medical background, he ought to know that N95 masks are NOT permitted in medical settings where ensuring sterility is paramount because the typical N95 venting system, while it may protect the wearer from inhaling viruses, does not protect those in proximity of the wearer from being contaminated by the wearer.
How would I know this?
Because I require scheduled medial infusions to mitigate the effect of rheumatoid arthritis, and because I suffer from interstitial lung disease, a byproduct of contracting rheumatoid arthritis, a serious comorbidity, I have my scheduled infusions performed at a cancer hospital where terminal patients are served, those, in other words, who are at the greatest risk at dying from contracting COVID-19.
Last spring, at my first infusion visit of the year, when I asked to be provided with an N95 mask, I was provided the reason I’ve given above as to why N95 masks were prohibited at the facility.
Because an N95 mask does not protect those around the wearer from whatever bacteria, germs, or viruses that might be exhaled by the wearer, Representative Marsh, wearing his N95 mask in the proximity of Speaker Hinch, would have protected Marsh, but not Hinch.
So much for Representative Marsh’s high-highfalutin, self-serving, expertise on mask-wearing.
First-rate sanitary practices are what hospitals primarily rely upon to limit the spread of disease. Proper supply-side ventilation of hospital spaces is necessary. Few interior spaces outside of hospitals would ever have the kind of sanitary ventilation setup that would be required in order to provide a hyper-clean, disease-free, atmosphere.
Such interior environments require rigorous attention to filtration and maintenance of germ-killing mechanisms. They often integrate UV disease-killing components. The utter impracticality of trying to set up all public and private interior environments to perform in a hyper sanitary way beggars consideration.
It’s difficult enough to get present householders and office maintenance crews to change filtration on their present air handling equipment in a timely way much less expect private and public building owners and managers to ramp up their air handling equipment and maintenance practices to surgery suite standards.
The world around us contains an infinite number of potential intersections where disease can be contracted as well as the spread between humans or from other living species. It would be quite impossible, as well as utterly irresponsible, except in the rarest of circumstances, to try to affix the blame for one person’s contracting a disease on account of the actions of another.
Exercising proper sanitary practices and the practicing self-distancing are the only measures that we can exercise that have any chance of mitigating the catching or the spreading of disease. We have to live with that stark fact.
