Do masks really work?



A year into the pandemic, masks have become part of daily life. Want to use a face covering to broadcast your patriotism? Online stores sell masks with U.S. flags. Wondering how to pair your mask with your outfit? Magazines show how celebrities do just that at the big awards shows. (“These stars made a statement that was all about style and safety.”)To get more news about surgical mask stock, you can visit tnkme.com official website.

With vaccination rates climbing, it seems like we’re drawing nearer to the light at the end of the long pandemic tunnel. But it’s unlikely that widespread mask-wearing will go away any time soon. It’s still unknown whether vaccinated people can spread the virus to others, so public health experts stress that everybody, including those who have been inoculated, should continue to wear masks in community spaces.
Still, not everyone is sold on masks, and some states are rolling back mask mandates. We’ve been reviewing mask science since the start of the pandemic, and we’re persuaded that mask wearing is a good idea. But if you’re not, we wanted to address your questions head on.

Here’s the latest research on the efficacy of masks and answers to questions, from readers and our own team, on what we know and what we don’t about mask wearing.

Do masks really prevent you from getting the virus?
Masks are most effective as “source control,” which means preventing infected people from spreading the virus to other people.

Respiratory droplets with the virus are expelled into the air when infected people cough, talk, sneeze, or breathe. These droplets quickly evaporate and shrink to become tiny airborne particles.But if an infected person is wearing a mask, it will catch and contain the larger droplets in the humid space between the person’s mouth and the mask. In this environment, droplets take nearly a hundred times as long to transform into airborne particles. So masks reduce the spread of infectious particles.

Can’t the virus slip through cloth?
Yes, it’s true that face masks do not block some very fine particles in the air that may be transmitted by coughs or sneezes. That means if coronavirus particles are in the air, the masks aren’t a reliable way of preventing someone who’s wearing one from contracting the virus and getting COVID-19 (although there is some evidence that they are better than nothing).“Unless one wears a properly fitted respirator mask for all interactions outside of the household, masks cannot, by themselves, completely interrupt transmission,” said Babak Javid, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “Nonetheless, from what we know about the biology of the disease, and the biophysics of droplet and aerosol production, there is a strong rationale for why masks can have some effect in both protecting the wearer and as source control.”

Public health experts have based their guidance on a variety of scientific studies: systematic reviews, ecological studies and laboratory studies.

Systematic reviews are papers that pool existing research and try to answer a narrowly defined question using a larger data set than any of the studies had individually. According to scientific hierarchies of evidence, systematic reviews are generally thought to produce the most reliable evidence, and multiple reviews have indicated that masks stop the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases.

There have also been a wealth of ecological studies on masks and COVID-19. These studies analyze the effect that specific localized public health measures have on coronavirus case rates after they’re implemented. These papers have consistently found that mask mandates cause sharp declines in coronavirus case rates.Finally, scientists have studied the spread of coronavirus particles in laboratory settings and found that masks are effective at stopping them from dispersing into the air, suggesting that they also function that way in real world settings.