Coronavirus: Masks and Gloves are a Joke

If you are a humanities major, art major, socialist, communist, don't understand fractions, Facebook rocket scientist, can't understand "big words," hate technology but own a phone, etc. the image below is all you need to know.

You are going to die from Coronavirus.

So better throw yourself out the window right now...

On the other hand, if you passed high school algebra or are a construction worker that can understand fractions or a random redneck skip the above image and move on to the actual content below.

So let's think about viruses in general in terms of size:

A virus is unimaginably small.  I routinely work at a scale of around 5 µm so I am familiar with things at the size of blood cells.

To review the image above.  Most people can imagine the size of a human hair.  A cross section of the human hair is covered by about fifteen (15) red blood cells.

Each red blood cell is about twenty five (25) bacteria across.

And about ten (10) viruses fit across a single bacteria.  

A virus is around the twice the size of a gate on the iPhone 11 ARM processor:

Routinely people work in environments where they are trying not to EMIT viral particles into chip fab equipment:

And regardless of the equipment used viruses, among other things, spoil the fab manufacturing.  

Viruses are much larger than the gates masked onto the silicone.  So a virus on the mask spoils the exposure (exposure success ranges from 30% to 80%: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15219/early-tsmc-5nm-test-chip-yields-80-hvm-coming-in-h1-2020).

(Exposure masks are basically stencils with 7nm holes through which high energy photons pass to indicate where the chip structures are etched.)

These chip foundry guys really care about contamination and have for decades.

They do well, but at best you are looking at 20% of the viral contamination getting through.

Now whether or not you wear an "N95" mask (which presumes limiting viral particles to 5%) the rest of you is a viral magnet (notice they are wearing full body suits).

You can expect a virus density in the random real world of say 18,000 viral genome copies per cubic meter airborne "... total virus concentrations ranged from 5800 to 37 000 genome copies m^3." see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119883/.

So conservatively a Walmart with a 30' ceiling would have around 30,000 cubic meters of air with an estimate 500,000,000 (one half billion) airborne viruses.  If you "fit" into two cubic meters of space that means 36K viruses in the air around you at all times.

Your "N95" mask will let through about 1,800 viruses continuously.

Your clothing allow even more because even a 3,000 thread count per inch leaves "holes" of 8µm so 400 viruses can pass through each square hole between threads.

Effectively your clothing is totally transparent to the airborne virus load.

As you walk the viruses move through your clothing.

So why wear a mask?

As for surfaces, viruses are everywhere (see: https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-018-3150-5).  You can expect virtually every surface to have some viruses.

While a virus cannot pass through plastic they stick to it.

Basically you are wearing a "virus mop" that picks up viruses and transmits them to whatever else you touch - including you (see: https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/is-wearing-gloves-an-effective-defense-against-covid19).

And unless you really understand how to remove gloves all you are doing when taking them off is spreading them around.

So the bottom line?

Nothing you are doing in terms of gloves or masks makes a damn bit of difference.

If it did the semiconductor industry would have figured it out a decade ago when working a 20nm mask sizes.

But they don't have a magic bullet.

If they did they would be using it.