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Worried about your #neckgaiter and/or #buff you've been using as a mask cos of some headlines you've seen? I gotchu. Tl;dr that study did NOT say that all neck gaiters are worse than not wearing a mask. I'll elaborate in the thread: 1/x https://qz.com/1891253/can-you-wear-a-neck-gaiter-as-a-mask-against-covid-19/
2/x First, the study itself: You can find it here: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/07/sciadv.abd3083 published Friday, peer-reviewed and all that. It was NOT a paper testing different kinds of masks; it was showing that there may actually be another way to test masks.
3/x Why come up with another way? It's wonky: the big standard ways that groups like @niosh and the EU test masks—like N95 masks—require a lot of precise lab work. It's so hard to measure, a casual DIY mask maker can't do it at home, or even a small lab without the right gear)
3.5/x Here's one of the standards used in the US: 42 CFR PART 84 https://www.tsi.com/getmedia/53243666-aa99-4c0f-9ac9-eba0b0ffb4c1/AFT-002_2-42CFR84_Testing_Modes?ext=.pdf Christopher Zangmeister from @NIST told me that its ROUGHLY shooting a measured amount of air and microscopic grains of salt at a mask, and then measuring exactly how much went through.
4/x A group from Duke thought it would be great to have a cheaper way to evaluate masks. They came up w one using lasers! They had a speaker wear different kinds of masks and speak a sentence + measured the ways the laser light refracted around any particles (droplets) emitted
5/x They had one person say one sentence 10x/mask, with breaks for water/cleaning. The box was ~ a cubic foot (so v small space). And look at these error bars. They're big! That's all reason enough for skepticism. But there's one BIG reason...
6/X ...The authors didn't compare this new method with any existing method! Should they have? Maybe! But that wasn't really the point of their work. This was a proof-of-concept paper that got blown up. I'd hope they do a comparison of methods in the future.
7/x I've written before about the importance of knowing how to read science news, especially during a pandemic. That's still true now—remember that each new paper is part of an evolving process, and can't replace all of our existing knowledge. https://twitter.com/katherineefoley/status/1247194779655471106?s=20
8/8 It's conceivable that buffs break up larger droplets from wearers and turn them into smaller ones—which could potentially transmit Covid. But we just don't know that to be true yet. Anxious? Wear another kind of mask + maintain distance! https://qz.com/1891253/can-you-wear-a-neck-gaiter-as-a-mask-against-covid-19/
