To Wear A Mask Or Not To Wear A Mask"

The 'Experts' Don't Seem To Agree

Masks .... yes or no?

Just Google 'safe to wear face masks' and you will find that in the world of medical experts there is no common consensus on this question.

A few examples:

"Dr. Jenny Harries, England's deputy chief medical officer, has warned that it was not a good idea for the public to wear facemasks as the virus can get trapped in the material and causes infection when the wearer breathes in."

"The CO2 will slowly build up in the mask over time. However, the level of CO2 likely to build up in the mask is mostly tolerable to people exposed to it. You might get a headache but you most likely [would] not suffer the symptoms observed at much higher levels of CO2."

“The average healthy person does not need to have a mask, and they shouldn’t be wearing masks,” says Dr. Eli Perencevich, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa’s College of Medicine, according to Forbes.

“There’s no evidence that wearing masks on healthy people will protect them,” Perencevich said, the publication reported. “They wear them incorrectly, and they can increase the risk of infection because they’re touching their face more often.”

Update (April 5): The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now recommended that people wear face masks in public, McClatchy News reports.

Health officials say it’s not because surgical masks are any more effective at protecting people from viruses — they’re not — but because wearing masks could help prevent infectious people who are asymptomatic from unintentionally spreading the COVID-19 virus.

The World Health Organization has not changed its position, which says marks are not needed in public for those who don’t already have coronavirus.

If nothing else, the variety of answers brings into question how much science drives decisions and opinions in the medical industry.

For example ventilators were what everyone was screaming for during the early stages of the pandemic. Then during the pandemic there were doctors coming out saying they found the ventilators caused more problems than they solved, with some doctors no longer using them at all.

From different quarters came reports that a large percentage of patients put on ventilators (intubated) in fact died with some of those deaths attributed to the intubation injury itself. Some reports claimed as high as 85% of inturbated patients died.

The health care system itself incentivises a covid diagnosis and further adds incentive to intubate a patient. The fee for intubation was reported as being in excess of $35,000.00 ..... win lose or draw, and a fraction of that for admitting a covid patient and a smaller fraction of that for a 'garden variety' ailment.