Wear a Damn Mask!
In the midst of a pandemic with the amount of reach that COVID-19 has, the last thing that you want to see is something that lowers the chance of you getting it being politicized by idiots. Yet this is what we see with face masks and face coverings, because they're some sort of mark of oppression and a sign that our freedom of speech is being taken away. Keep in mind, as you read this article, that all of the bullshit that they use is based on feelings rather than science.
The kinds of people that believe in this bullshit fall in line with the same group of people gullible enough to blindly buy into this stuff. You have the conspiracy theorists, always looking to find a new way to stir up a false narrative, all for finding a new way to fleece off of other gullible people. Then you have the anti-vaccination movement, insisting that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu and that industrial grade bleach can cure you of COVID-19 in the same breath. Finally you have the Karens, bigoted idiots whose IQ leve matches where you set your thermostat, and who whine and complain when the littlest inconvenience happens to them. Together, this group of crazies do all that they can to ignore logic as they wage a concentrated effort to undermine face covering requirements made to cut down on the spread of COVID-19.
The claims that these individuals use to reject face mask laws aren't based on scientific data, but instead based on what a conspiracy site or a deceptively made video stated. They claim that wearing the mask will reactivate COVID-19 inside your body. They claim that we didn't need face coverings for the common cold or the flu. That wearing a mask starves you of oxygen and weakens your immune system. That wearing a face covering is supposed to be a symbol of oppression and some sort of attack on free speech. In reality, all of this whining and complaining boils down to the fact that they don't care about anyone except themselves, they refuse to do anything that they think even slightly inconveniences them, and that they believe they know more about diseases and viruses than a doctor who has dedicated their life to practicing medicine, because some mommy blog said not to trust doctors. With that in mind, I'll be going over each of these complaints made by the anti mask crowd, and why each of these reasons is full of shit.
First and foremost, it is scientifically impossible for a mask to reactivate an illness you're infected with. When your body us fighting an illness of any kind, the immune system in your body does everything in it's power to repel the illness out of your system. It is impossible for a mask to reactivate to reactivate a virus (or any illness, for that matter) outside your body because A) the virus is already in your immune system, there's no point to it entering your immune system again; and B) your immune system is already actively trying to prevent it from entering again. During the time that your body fights that illness, it generates antibodies that are specifically designed to go after that virus, and Memory T cells act like a sort of bouncers at a nightclub, preventing a person with a bad reputation from entering again. Once you've had that particular strand of an illness, your body ensures that it doesn't enter the body again.
Secondly, we have the claim that people didn't have to wear a mask in the past for a flu or a cold. That's because COVID-19 isn't either of those. It's a nasty son of a bitch, with respiratory issues and blood clots being only a couple of the issues popping up in severe cases. (Blood clots, you know, something that requires you to be on blood thinners for the rest of your life, otherwise they will kill you at damn near any time the blood clot feels like it.) Lose the genetic lottery, and your lungs will go from a healthy pink to looking like you've been smoking for twenty years. I don't know about you, but I don't want that shit anywhere near my bloodstream.
Next we have the complaint that when you are wearing a mask, it's starving you of oxygen and decreasing your immune system. This will be in two parts, because the bullshit has to be debunked separately:
- A) No, it fucking doesn't. Anyone stating that the OSHA said that masks deprive you of oxygen forget that the OSHA has recently reversed their judgement on masks. Not to mention that there have been plenty of academic studies to completely debunk the theory that it deprives you of oxygen.
Here's a practical test you can do in the comfort of your home. All it needs is a hand and your face. With one of your hands, have your index, middle, ring and little fingers together and bring it to your mouth and nose as if you were putting on a mask. Once your nose and mouth are covered, take your thumb and bring it over the tip of your nose. Try breathing through it for about a minute.
Basically, it's how a mask works. Tightening the fingers around the nose and mouth area simulates a mask with a tight seal, the inverse is true with loosening the fingers. If you did this properly, the air you exhale out has only one way to go - up, into the eye area. If you're wearing glasses, they should fog up a little.
Having worn a mask myself, I can state that aside from a minor fogging up of my glasses, it doesn't bother me that much at all. Even with people that suffer with asthma or other such respiratory issues, they wear a mask because the side effects of the virus are so well known.
- B) The fact that you have doctors and nurses who have worn masks for seven or more hours a day for decades is enough to disprove that bullshit excuse. Dentists, carpenters, painters, pest control workers, firefighters - these are also jobs where you have to wear face masks for extended periods of time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, you have restaurant workers, store workers, ridesharers, all wearing masks for hours on end. So if you are refusing to wear a mask for even ten minutes for shopping or fifteen minutes inside an Uber/Lyft ride, you're not speaking for a worthy cause, you're being an entitled prick.
Finally, we come to the asinine conclusion that wearing a mask is some symbol of oppression or a violation of free speech. Hate to break the truth to you, but nowhere in the forty words that make up the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights says anything stating that wearing a face covering violates your rights of any kind. And don't give me this bullshit that not wearing a mask is "freedom of expression", because that "freedom of expression" line is just an excuse so these idiots can find some way to weasel out of mask requirements. Nothing changes when you have the mask on, other than the fact that you're mitigating the spread of a dangerous virus. Hell, the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests last year had many thousands of residents wearing masks so that they wouldn't be identified by the facial recognition software that was installed in the city. I can place a safe bet that those making the mask look like a symbol of oppression have never actually been oppressed at any point in their lives.
Wearing a face mask should have never become this political statement that it is being made out to be. Multiple countries that have practiced mask wearing for some time now have seen a fraction of the infections and the deaths of other countries that blew off the virus until it was right on fucking top of them. These face coverings are to ensure that fewer people get infected, that the virus gets put under control, that the world can get back to some semblance of normalcy.
However, we have a collection of ignorant anti-intellectuals who only give a shit about themselves, who show off their ignorance each and every time that they complain to the counties about masks. These clueless dipshits more than likely failed high school science, yet we're supposed to trust them over medical professionals because some fake news site like Natural News or other such peddlers of bullshit conspiracies wrote something that lined up with their confirmation bias.
Fuck.
That.
Shit.
I will conclude this article by saying this. I have been keeping tabs on COVID-19 since the end of January, and I have researched the nasty shit that this virus is capable of. I don't want any of this shit in my system, as do a lot of those who are taking COVID-19 as a serious threat. Because of this, I'll be wearing a mask in public places until COVID-19 eventually gets under control. To be quite honest, I'd rather go through the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask that fogs up my glasses over having a ventilator hose stuffed down my fucking throat. Furthermore, I don't feel like playing the genetic lottery to test my luck.
Just wear a mask in public, for fuck's sake.
So until next time, in the immortal words of Edward R. Murrow, "Good night and good luck".
Links for this article:
Academic research on masks:
http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2020/06/19/new-academic-research-masks-can-dramatically-decrease-covid-19-deaths/
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200612172200.htm
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-masks-study/widespread-mask-wearing-could-prevent-covid-19-second-waves-study-idUSKBN23G37V
https://www.businessinsider.com/face-masks-social-distancing-curb-spread-coronavirus-research-2020-6
COVID-19 health complications:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/lifelong-lung-damage-the-serious-covid-19-complication-that-can-hit-people-in-their-20s
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/must-read-covid-19-long-term-effects-covid-19-survivors-could-suffer-chronic-medical-conditions-for-years
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/13/world/coronavirus-survivors-severe-health-effects-years/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-s-health-effects-can-last-long-after-virus-is-gone
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/875486356/first-known-u-s-lung-transplant-for-covid-19-patient-performed-in-chicago
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-survivors-experience-long-term-side-effects-once-they-recover/85-236e54b0-e26c-499b-9e09-a1e6fbd44e6c
Evidence that mask wearing doesn't deprive you of oxygen like conspiracy theorists are saying:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/27/fact-check-ohsa-didnt-say-cloth-masks-offer-no-covid-19-protection/3266817001/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/05/30/fact-check-wearing-face-mask-not-cause-hypoxia-hypercapnia/5260106002/
https://www.businessinsider.com/doctor-debunks-anti-masker-myths-do-face-masks-affect-breathing-2020-6
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/does-wearing-face-mask-increase-co2-levels
https://wgem.com/2020/06/26/local-doctor-shows-how-masks-dont-reduce-oxygen-levels/
Cases in regions that practice mask wearing:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/thailand/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-hong-kong-sar/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/viet-nam/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/malaysia/