Thoughts on masks: Today I went to Ingle’s (no TP) and I wore a standard surgical mask because I’ve spent the last 5 days in the ER and, if I’m an asymptomatic carrier, I don’t want to accidentally kill off the butcher by breathing invisible death at him. But a lot of shoppers were looking at me like I was crazy so I want to send out some info on masks and how to use them.
Regular surgical masks are great for preventing droplets from leaving one person’s respiratory tract and entering another. Think of them as lung condoms and pretend that anytime you‘re within 6 feet of someone that you’re basically at a viral swinger party.
N95 masks are for aerosols. COVID can exist as an aerosol but not most of the time. We aerosolize it in the ER when we do airway procedures and we need N95 masks so that we don’t become healthcare’s version of kamikaze pilots when we’re trying to put someone on a ventilator.
SARSCOV2 lives on different surfaces for different amounts of time (see the link below). That means that you can reuse your masks after a certain amount of time. When this corona virus thing is over and millennials are the only ones left, one of the things they are going to wonder is why we threw away all the masks after using them once.
After you use a mask, surgical or N95, put it in a paper bag or a ventilated plastic bag. After 7 days, there aren’t any viruses on it and you can put it back on and use it again. This means that if you have 14 masks and 7 paper bags, that you have 2 masks a day forever.
We are doing this in the ER (as of today) and you should do it too. If you‘re hoarding masks, take 14 of them for each of your loved ones, use the plan above, and give the rest to your nearest hospital so that there are still some people alive in the ER when you fall down the ladder of your bomb shelter and break your hip on your steel safe full of toilet paper.
Attn trolls: this is a fb post not a scientific committee meeting. The information continued in this post is to help people with basic shit. You want to have a “well, actually” contest with me, then meet me at the ER and bring your best citations. I’ll be the one breathing heavily at you.
