Masks

Wibbs wrote: »

I did some more digging on possible differences between how Asian and Western folks read faces differently and how this might be in play with mask wearing. Just based on my weirdo hunch about how our smileys can differ. EG happy western smiley :-) versus Happy Asian smiley (^_^) And lo and behold there's some interesting research on this.

Culture is a huge factor in determining whether we look someone in the eye or the kisser to interpret facial expressions, according to a new study.

For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth, says researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan.


So when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons such as smiley faces and sad faces, or .

“It took some time before I finally understood that they were faces,” he wrote in an e-mail. In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face ( ;_; ). “After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles,” he said.

Maybe this is partly why many in the west and not just here in Ireland have such an aversion to masks? We would feel adrift in reading other people's faces, but Asian cultures wouldn't? We'd also have the association of being masked with criminals too.

reg114 wrote: »

Five you say ?

1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/

2.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2

3.https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(08)01008-4/fulltext

4.https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/2/275/405108

5.https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1003205

The evidence of the benefit of wearing masks indoors or outdoors as a method of mitigating transmission of aerosolized viruses is incontrovertible. The efficacy of the mask depends on the materials used within the mask with medical grade masks clearly being far more efficient than a homemade mask. That being said any basic mask made with items from around the home would be more efficient at preventing the spread of the virus, than using no mask at all.

As an aside if you have a vacuum cleaner at home the bag inside the cleaner contains a hepa filter which has been proven to be as efficacious as a medical grade mask, as they are made of the same multiple layers of tightly woven fibres.

It also must be emphasised, a mask is primarily worn to reduce the transmission by an infected person to those who are non infected. This is crucial in the context of covid19 where infected patients possess a huge viral load in their nose and throats and are at risk of shedding everytime they exhale. Someone can be asymptomatic and be shedding as the breathe in the queue in tesco, if they are wearing even a homemade mask meade from a scarf or t shirt they will shed less to their immediate environment than they would if their mouth was uncovered.

Incidentally the term 'peer reviewed' simply means 'published', it is not a guarantee that the findings are factually correct. The overriding evidence regarding the efficacy of masks is not in question for the majority of immunologists and the medical profession as a whole.

Bob24 wrote: »

This probably is a discussion for another thread, but I can't agrees with that. Factually, a regular mask/respirator clearly covers a fairly smaller portion of someone's face than a niqab, and the person remains easier to recognise (see sample pictures below).

But at the end of the day I think only looking at how much of the face it is covering is missing the point anyway. I don't know about Austria but a key aspect of similar laws in other countries I am more familiar with is the purpose for wearing something which is covering your face. For exemple the exact same helmet can be legal if worn to ride a motorbike as it is required for safety reason, and illegal if worn while walking down the street as there is no safety requirement to wear it.

McGiver wrote: »

Also, for example Dutch numbers of antibodies present in blood donations sample of 10,000 people showed 3% antibodies in that sample. Given that Covid-19 has been shown not to readily generate antibodies then the percentage in general population who could be asymptomatic and spreading it could be even higher.
If we use the 3% value as a representative sample for the whole Dutch population of 17M, then Netherlands could have had already as many as 500k cases, whereas they officially recorded only 30k or so.

There may be a huge cohort of asymptomatic spreaders out there and the evidence for this is accumulating. If this hypothesis is confirmed then then the difference in terms of the spread/curve between Austria/Czechia and other countries is clearly mostly due to the masks.