It’s that time again. No, I don’t mean New Year and resolutions: I mean mask time.
I can hear the universal groan. But if you want to spend winter without an irritating cough rattling through your chest day and night (you know, that cough doing the rounds in the office, or supermarket) or that gnawing whole body ache, where even your hair hurts — then wear a mask.
Oh, go do one. Seriously, coughs and colds are a part of the winter landscape. I’ll take the risk. Not least, because as we already know – masks make not the slightest difference to the spread of an airborne virus. Being a medic clearly doesn’t equate to intelligence or the ability to assess evidence. It’s also worth mentioning that these things help to build our immune system.
I always don one in crowded places but on a short flight back in the autumn, I forgot to bring one. The plane was packed with chesty coughers and, not surprisingly, a few days later, I was unwell with what turned out to be a four-week viral illness.
You would probably have got it anyway. Masks don’t prevent the spread of airborne viruses.
Now one of the UK’s leading experts, Sir Andrew Pollard, who is a professor of infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, is predicting ‘a rise in [Covid] infections in the population over the course of the next week’, driven by a highly infectious strain of the virus known as JN.1.
Blah, blah, blah ‘experts.’ I’m sick of experts. They are usually peddling an agenda for their own purposes. I’ve lived long enough to know that what we are experiencing is normal for this time of the year. I’ve also lived long enough to realise that as you get older, you get fewer of them as your immune system has seen most of them off already. When I was a child, I’d get more than one cold every winter. Now, I rarely get one. I had covid eighteen months ago. Nothing since. I am not afraid of this latest variant.
For despite the pandemic mask message confusion generated by the Government and its senior advisers (then Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harries, told Boris Johnson in a No 10 fireside chat video in March 2020 that wearing masks ‘was not a good idea’), the consensus is now clear: masks help prevent infection spread by droplets and viruses and bacteria transmitted by.
Ah, yes, the old ‘consensus’ bullshit. Science is not done by consensus. Not one properly conducted study has conclusively demonstrated that it makes a difference. And, frankly, getting it is the best remedy as it boosts the immune system.
A paper published in the BMJ in May 2020 on a retrospective study of 335 people found masks to be 79 per cent effective in reducing transmission from infected people to others.
Statistically insignificant.
They also stop you catching viruses — a study in the Journal of Medical Devices and Sensors in February 2021 found that ‘correctly wearing masks of all kinds… reduce[s] the overall risks of Covid-19 infection and enhance[s] general protection from coronavirus’.
Bullshit. Not one properly conducted study has supported this assertion.
So, the usual scaremongering clap-trap. I didn’t wear a mask before and I’m not about to start. If I catch a cold, I’ll drink plenty of fluids and take paracetamol. If it’s really bad, I might take to my bed for a day or two. I am not going to wear a fucking mask. I’m certainly not going to take any notice of this cherry-picking codswallop.
She’s getting ratioed in the comments, so the pendulum has swung on this one.
In the bad old days of social distancing and mask wearing, I was in the socially distanced queue at my local Boots, wearing a mask and standing behind a smoker. How did I know he was a smoker? Well, I could smell him. I believe smoke particles are in the order of 10 times bigger than viruses. If the mask couldn’t stop smoke particles it had no chance against a virus.
Masks were theatre, they were a visual sign of our compliance, nothing to do with stopping the virus.
Electricians use meter air quality, they will a sound alarm if the air in their work area is not safe. My brother in law, a long ago when he worked a construct site, he keeled over, unconscious because he had worked in a gas pocket (no mask those days), but it shows how important to carry a meter in certain work situations, especial work underground or in a tank farm full of all type lethal acids or chemicals. This provides how masks good works for your proof.
https://rumble.com/v2fsox2-union-electrician-trumps-a-phd-common-sense-mask-analysis.html
WTF? English please
Ripper has health issues that affect his writing.
I’ve noticed a few timorous people wearing masks in the supermarket. Perhaps they felt especially at risk because their immune system was compromised. Whatever. However most of them wore the mask over their mouth but under their nose, so not being worn “properly”.
So not impressed.
NB. You can still find places where iron railings were taken away for scrap to help the ‘war effort’. It is said that the scrap was of little or no use other than the propaganda effect on social cohesion and ‘doing something’. Perhaps we should all be wearing ‘railings against the virus’? (satire)
“I’m sick of experts”
If you see that word in any article, then you can skip the whole bullshit article.
The meaning of ‘expert’ is
Ex = has been
Spert = a drip under pressure
I’ve been in close contact with lots of sniffling relatives over the festive period and haven’t succumbed to any cold bugs. As you say, at 65 I’ve sampled a lifetimes worth of cold and flu bugs and seem to have built up a pretty good defence. I saw a couple wearing masks in Asda yesterday but overall most people seem to have abandoned them.
The only upsides I can see with mask wearing is it helps with need to interact with ugly people and also helps screw with the government facial recognition bullshit.
Stopping diseases? Naaah.
The main reason a surgeon wears a mask is to prevent his saliva droplets from infecting the patient, it affords him no protection at all.
Yes. As a general rule, politicians are an ugly bunch of bastards. So, just about the only good thing about the time of mask-wearing was having the likes of the toothy tyrant of New Zealand or the ghastly Nancy Pelosi in the US with most of their mush covered with a mask.
As far as the ‘benefits’ of wearing a mask are concerned, you’d probably find that tying a plastic bag over your head would protect you better from viruses than a mask. The downside of that, of course, is that you’d suffocate. But c’est la vie.
“You can still find places where iron railings were taken away for scrap to help the ‘war effort’. It is said that the scrap was of little or no use other than the propaganda effect on social cohesion and ‘doing something’.”
My father told me that the iron railings that had been ripped off all the house front gardens in his local town during the war were still piled up at the local scrap merchants yard for years after the war. They’d never even been shipped off anywhere let alone melted down. The scrap merchant did very well out it it though, he got to buy them all at a knock down price.