Cloth Mask’s Effectiveness Against Airborne Infection Is Questionable
After going through over 100 research papers, here’s what I’ve found.
In August 2021, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said that cloth masks don’t prevent infection from SARS-CoV-2 (that causes Covid-19) in a YouTube video. But Youtube banished the video and suspended Mr. Paul for a week. I got this news from Joe Duncan, a veteran independent writer.
“The New York Times blasted Rand Paul for saying that too but I think he might actually be right here, considering the science I’ve seen,” he told me. “Surely, a cloth mask is better than nothing, but how much better? If it only results in, say, a 15% filtration of particles/aerosols, instructing people to get cloth masks is a really, really bad idea.”
With my curiosity piqued, I first googled the effectiveness of cloth masks against SARS-CoV-2, especially the more transmissible Delta variant. Due to the lack of concrete info, I went to PubMed, a biomedical literature database, and looked through over 100 indexed papers about cloth masks.
Face masks in brief
We commonly use three types of face masks: N95s, surgical masks, and cloth masks. (For simplicity, all masks mentioned hereon are face masks.)
