I am against any government mandates for wearing a mask. I am pro-freedom and pro-liberty, however, there is something about this mask wearing thing when it comes to this particular virus, COVID-19. Now remember though, your freedom to choose not to wear a mask also means a store owner has the freedom not to let you in, so it goes both ways.
I was skeptical about a mask’s efficacy at reducing COVID-19 spread until I saw what happened in Hong Kong, which promoted me to look into things a bit further. I am still agnostic about this whole mask-wearing thing, but here is some things I found that will help you make a more informed choice.
Hong Kong, a very densely populated area, with virtually no response from their government except for closing down schools, has fared rather well with this pandemic. In-spite the Hong Kong government, who has done very little in response to the pandemic in terms of lock-downs and social distancing mandates COVID-19 remains contained. At one point the government even tried to ban the wearing of masks, however, the people of Hong Kong, still almost unanimously wore masks. Given very little other measures were taken, it is hard not to correlate the wearing of masks to the reduced spread of the virus in Hong Kong.
On the other hand, we know that study after study on mask-wearing has shown poor results in preventing the spread of the flu. There has got to be something different about COVID-19.
The COVID-19 virus itself is much smaller than the mesh in most of the masks we wear, so it can easily get in and out of the mask. However, we know that COVID-19 likes to travel on water droplets expelled from your mouth or nose. Maybe COVID-19 needs larger water droplets to survive for long periods of time. Larger droplets are captured by the mask. This could mean that by wearing a mask, you prevent the most contagious droplets containing COVID-19 from getting out, and thus reducing the spread.
The second way the masks could work is that any droplets that do get through, now have less momentum. The droplets are carried by the air currents escaping your mouth or nose. By wearing a mask, you reduce the momentum of these air currents, meaning that the droplets that do get out, won’t travel as far.
Finally, we have this study, which compares the efficacy of viral spread by wearing a mask for the flu and for COVID-19. Face masks seem to not work very well for influenza. While being able to stop most of the influenza respiratory droplets, they didn’t stop any of the influenza aerosols, which is a primary mechanism for how it spreads. But Coronaviruses were different. Face masks stopped all detectable Corona respiratory droplets AND aerosols.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2
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