“This is First of the Ninth, Air Cav son….airmobile!”-Colonel Kilgore, Apocalypse Now

29 February 2020 / 00:39 (UTC-07 Tango 06) 10 Esfand 1398/05 Rajab 1441/07 Wu-Yin(2nd) 4718

I was in a department store in eastern Idaho, looking at face masks.  I already knew that surgical masks are actually designed to protect a person who is being operated on from the germs in the doctors’ and nurses’ breath, and are not designed to do the reverse.  I wanted to check out the hardware section’s dust/paint masks and was surprised to find most of them were gone.  However, when I checked the labels on those remaining I discovered in the fine print that these masks not only won’t protect you from germs, they don’t even protect you from the harmful chemicals used in paints/glues or created in a construction environment; the small print on all the remaining masks stated “not for use in a NON-HARMFUL environment” (and NON-HARMFUL was in all-caps on the labels).  Basically the bottom-of-the-line industrial dust masks are primarily designed to ‘protect’ you from the smell of the chemicals you are using, but not the toxins.

I was also looking at air conditioning (cooling and/or heating) filters for your home.  Yes, there are house filters designed to capture viruses and bacteria, some even coming with electronic devices that wire-lessly connect to your smart phone to let you know when to change the filter,  but I had an epiphany about home air treatment filters that renders them ‘too little too late’.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka CDC) states that surgical masks should be used only as a “last resort”, when no other masks are available.  ‘Masks’ that are rated for protecting the wearer from airmobile microbes are known officially as respirators.

In the U.S. such respirators have a NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) rating.   Currently the only respirators rated to filter out the coronavirus (specifically SARS-CoViD) are those rated N-95.

The N in N-95 means Not resistant to oil.

Even knowing which respirator will work, the CDC and United Nation’s World Health Organization say that only healthcare workers dealing with infected people need to wear a respirator.  This is because infected people who end up in a hospital, or in quarantine, are in a confined, somewhat controllable, environment with close contact to other people. Hospitals are the worst place to be if you’re trying to avoid getting sick.

Those of us in the general public are in an open environment that really can’t be controlled, and when you are dealing with an airmobile disease, like CoViD-19 and influenza, there’s very little you can do.  For proof of that, for this season’s influenza the U.S. vaccine has been given a 45% effectiveness rating, meaning that the majority of people who got this year’s flu shot could still get sick.  There’s no vaccine for CoViD-19.

Even with hand washing, covering your mouth when you cough, all that is malarkey because it takes only one microscopic virus to make it inside your body to infect you. It’s estimated that one sneeze can expel 100-thousand infection-ous particles!  Sneezes are so powerful that putting your hand over your mouth, or burying your mouth in your elbow will not stop all those particles from spreading.

Even without sneezing, a 2013 study showed that regular breathing actually expels more germs than sneezing or coughing (perhaps that ‘s the only justifiable reason people should be wearing masks), it even called into doubt the concept of hand washing when dealing with airmobile germs.  In 2018, the  University of Maryland released a short video explaining how the study was done, and the results: (the audio on the video might not work, but there are captions)

This brings me to those more costly home air conditioning filters claiming to remove germs.  Your air conditioning (cooling and/or heating) system does not run all the time (unless you can afford to have it running all the time), and if you have a sick guest (whether they know they are sick or not, as is proving the case with CoViD-19) most likely they will have filled your living room with germs that you then breath in before your air conditioning system turns on.

Also, your air conditioning system cannot instantly suck the infected air through the filter, it takes several tens of minutes to fully circulate the air (depending on the size of your house/apartment).   This is why I call reliance on home air conditioning filters too-little-too-late.

NIOSH filter list

GOING VIRAL: COVID-19 DOUBLE WHAMMY; YOU CAN BE RE-INFECTED, NO IMMUNITY BUILD-UP!