Remember that I said this to you?

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

I’m certainly not perfect, but I won’t mislead you.  I stumbled upon this video and thought it might be enlightening that someone else thinks the same way.

This information is true because: HEPA filters will remove particles down to 0.3 µm in size (to usually 99.95% efficiency, depending upon the filter – here I have used data for nuclear grade filters).  The SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80 nm in diameter.  A few viruses out of a million might be intercepted by electrostatic force, but that’s essentially zero.

If the particle you’re trying to intercept is spittle, stay away from coughing people anyway.  But those particles drop by sedimentation, diffusiophoresis, etc.

You’ll have to forward to about five minutes in the video to get past the rambling. I think some inspired readers could add to all of this by linking video or citing URLs where Fauci now claims that the wearing of masks is merely a sign of respect.