Why the Japanese started wearing face masks: pollen related hayfever & pollution. Look at the difference in size of a pollen with a coronavirus particle.

⬆️ Relative size of a bacterium, large viruses, and small viruses. SARSCoV2 is a small virus, similar in size to HIV, 3rd from right in the image.

"Conclusion: The N95 filtering face piece respirators may not provide the expected protection level against small virions. Some surgical masks may let a significant fraction of airborne viruses penetrate through their filters, providing very low protection against aerosolized infectious agents in the size range of 10 to 80 nm. It should be noted that the surgical masks are primarily designed to protect the environment from the wearer, whereas the respirators are supposed to protect the wearer from the environment."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16490606/

2003: "N95 Masks Flying Off Shelves, but They Offer Scant Protection: Bad fits are deadly. 👉Contaminated air breathed from around the unfiltered edges instead of through the N95-rated material undermines the purpose of a mask👈."
https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/n95masks.html

Even N95 masks do not offer protection against small viruses for 2 reasons in the references above:
1. the small viruses within small aerosols pass through the mask fibers
2. the small viruses within aerosols pass around the edges of the mask, in all the gaps between mask and face, as these are a lot bigger than the aerosols, let alone the virus.

The nebulization factor has been proved with all mask types, and assumed with N95s but not proved since experiments did not have the tools to measure aerosols that small becoming even smaller. The problem with reducing the sizes of aerosols by breathing and therefore exhaling through a mask is that you are blowing into the air a larger proportion of fine aerosols that you would have without it. These finer aerosols are not heavy enough to fall due to gravity and therefore can linger in the air unless the air itself is changed. This is a problem in hospitals & care homes.

Are we really following the latest science, or a form of cultural inheritance from bygone days which deemed the air inside the body impure, and a piece of cloth an adequate religious purification initiation device?

Children's
Experiences
of the Pandemic [LOCKDOWN]

Welcome!

Thank You for your interest in our study and visiting our website. This study explores children’s perspectives, views and experiences of the pandemic [LOCKDOWNS] through their voice. Children express themselves, share their thoughts and emotions through art and play. This study will collect children’s art through pictures and stories submitted on a website dedicated to the project with demographic information and words, stories or thoughts associated with the art work for Dr. Nikki Martyn and her team to explore the impact of the pandemic [LOCKDOWNS] through the children’s expression of their experiences during this unique time.
https://www.childart.ca/art-work

Some of the children's artwork ⬇️

A virus attaches itself to an aerosol particle in order to be transported out of the human body and into the environment. The aerosol is composed mainly of evaporated water molecules with other human particles within them. Here it's worth noting that water molecules are among the smallest molecules there are, and aerosol particles are defined as solid and liquid particles suspended in a gas (air), with size range of 0.003 microns to 100 micron in diameter. The N95 filter indeed is claimed to be physically in the 0.3-0.5 micron size. Which means that by definition the smallest aerosols are 100 times smaller than the gaps in the mask fibers. The virus itself is around 0.1 micron, therefore 3 to 5 times smaller than the gaps in the mask filter itself. My conclusion is that the argument that small viruses only spread through large aerosols is misinformation: aerosols are clearly defined to be much smaller than even SARSCoV2 particles.

"most particles (87%) with influenza viral RNA were found to be smaller than 1 μm.

Further developments enabled detection of so-called fine versus coarse particles (ie, ≤5 μm vs >5 μm).

 Influenza viral RNA was detected in the exhaled breath of 34 (92%) of 37 adults.

 The fine particles contained 8·8-times (95% CI 4·1–19·0) more viral copies than did the coarse ones. Respiratory viruses have been found in both coughs (82% of participants) and exhaled breath (81% of participants).

Similarly, influenza virus was found in similar amounts in coughs (53% of participants) and breath (42% of participants).

Human rhinovirus was collected more frequently in exhaled breath than in cough aerosols using a filter method.

Findings from two studies with comparable particle size data showed that influenza virus in exhaled breath is contained in smaller particles than influenza virus in cough (figure 3).

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30323-4/fulltext