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The use of face masks in Asia is more cultural practice than anything grounded in evidence.
As with many cultural practices, it might seem odd to someone from a different culture but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be respected*.
*Not saying you're not respecting it, just that some people are. I've just had to draft an email to ~30,000 people telling them to respect it and it's disappointing that we need to do that.
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These tend to refer to the medical blue face masks from hospitals, but what about N95 or N99 masks?
(I hear all about the touching face thing)
Fox
ChainBreaker
@benjam
Okay so, I thought about doing this last night but I'd had a couple of beers and thought I'd come at it a bit fresher.
Context: I'm not a Doctor but my other half is. Her specialist subject is Infectious Disease and Tropical Medicine in which she has an additional Masters from LSHTM. I am not a doctor but I happened to be a risk manager at a huge company during the SARS and Swine Flu outbreaks, so had to plan (in a small capacity) to mitigate those risks for 300k people. I'm not a doctor but I have also worked with people like Ben Goldacre to campaign for greater transparency in and build tools to expose disinformation in medical trials. But I'm not a doctor.
That said I spoke to my other half last night about this mask thing and: the benefits of them are negligible, practically zero for the kinds of masks that most wear. And almost exactly zero without the procedures that you would need to use in the home to avoid cross contamination. The guidance from organisations like the Mayo clinic concern medical-grade surgical masks primarily.
I say this because I read a little panic in this room and I hope this kind of rational thinking can help you. Like the wise @Rameye said, these masks still have value if you believe they do something, and that psychologically that is a positive. But please let's not pretend otherwise.
While I'm here:
LSHTM puts out an excellent podcast, you should listen to it: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pmEtPchcDhfud8R63vzDJ
Last weeks' 'more or less' on Radio 4 had a great section about Corvid-19, you can listen to it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000drn4
The death rate is currently 2% https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 @WornCleat but your 60% figure is as far as I know accurate.
Thanks.