There is no strong medical consensus on whether face masks help outside of health care settings. However, there does seem to be evidence that they can have negative health effects for the wearer.
According to Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, children could spread COVID-19 more if they wear masks.
HM Government guidance for restaurants, pubs, bars and takeaway services, 24 June 2020:
“The evidence suggests that wearing a face covering does not protect you…evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak.”
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In a bad year for flu, we can lose 20,000-25,000 people. With a largely vaccinated population, there are likely to be about 30,000 Covid-related deaths over the next 12 months, an average of about 80 deaths every day. This is about half of one per cent of the deaths we would normally expect to happen in that period.
And not all of these will be additional deaths. In many cases, Covid will just substitute for another respiratory infection.
Dr Susan Hopkins, an epidemiologist consultant in infectious diseases and microbiology from Public Health England, has pointed to the possibility we will suffer a bad flu season in 2021/22 because the level of population immunity has been pushed down by Covid restrictions in 2020/21.
Face masks worn by the public are not regulated, and some fall short of standards of medical PPE. Certain types of masks which are readily available to the public during the coronavirus pandemic were found to cause dangerous levels of exposure to chemicals if worn for long enough. Analysis from the Hamburg Environmental Institute, which was obtained by Ecotextile News, revealed a plethora of face masks contained levels of formaldehyde and fluorocarbons.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1418012/face-masks-coronavirus-covid-19-guidelines-ppe-evg
Scientists have found evidence that some face masks which are on sale and being used by members of the general public are laced with toxic chemicals.
Preliminary tests have revealed traces of a variety of compounds which are heavily restricted for both health and environmental reasons.
This includes formaldehyde, a chemical known to cause watery eyes; a burning sensations in the eyes, nose, and throat; coughing; wheezing; and nausea.
Experts are concerned that the presence of these chemicals in masks which are being worn for prolonged periods of time could cause unintended health issues.
http://archive.today/2021.05.04-180613/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9426499/Scientists-evidence-toxic-chemicals-face-masks.html
Top German scientists have found that wearing certain types of face masks for long periods of time could result in potentially hazardous chemicals and harmful microplastics being inhaled deep into human lungs.
Professor Michael Braungart, director at the Hamburg Environmental Institute and co-founder of the world-renowned Cradle to Cradle environmental standard has told Ecotextile News that mask wearers unwittingly run the risk of breathing in carcinogens, allergens and tiny synthetic microfibres by wearing both textile and nonwoven surgical masks for long periods of time.
His recent findings have been backed up by another leading industry textile chemist Dr. Dieter Sedlak, managing director and co-founder of Modern Testing Services Augsburg, Germany in partnership with Modern Testing Services Global, Hong Kong who found elevated concentrations of hazardous fluorocarbons, formaldehyde and other potentially carcinogenic substances on surgical face masks: “I can only say 100 per cent that I have similar concerns to Prof. Braungart.”
Face masks in the classroom are causing physical harm to children, ministers have been warned amid reports of breathing difficulties, headaches and dizziness.
Children around the country are suffering from a range of side effects including light headedness, fatigue and facial rashes, according to a symptom tracker launched by the parent campaign group UsForThem.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/16/face-masks-class-causing-physical-harm-children/
No pupil or student should be denied education on the grounds that they are not wearing a face covering.
Scientists are trying to work out why coronavirus cases in India are falling when at one point it looked like the country might overtake the US as the worst-hit nation.
In September the country was reporting some 100,00 new cases per day, but that went into decline in October and is now sitting at around 10,000 per day – leaving experts struggling to explain why.
While the Indian government has been keen to put the apparent success down to its mask-wearing and social distancing laws, few believe these measures alone are responsible for the dip.
Instead, experts believe it may be down to the fact that India’s largest cities have reached herd immunity, meaning the virus has moved to rural areas where it spreads slower and where cases and deaths are far less likely to be tested and logged.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/gb/kensington/w8-7/minute-weather-forecast/323272
We wanted to know whether and when babies might discover the importance of a talker’s mouth. So, in one study in my lab, we showed videos of talking faces to babies of different ages and tracked their attention by using an eye-tracking device. We discovered that babies begin lip-reading at around 8 months of age. Crucially, the onset of lip-reading at this age corresponds with the onset of canonical babbling, suggesting that babies begin lip-reading because they become interested in speech and language. By lip-reading, babies now gain access to visual speech cues which, as Janet Werker and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia have shown, are clearly perceptible to them. So, the lip-reading now enables babies to see the visible speech cues that they need to figure out which face goes with which voice. Of course, babies cannot access visible speech cues if others are wearing masks.
How important were the economic lockdowns in the spring of 2020 in curbing the COVID-19 pandemic and how important was lockdown as compared to voluntary changes in behavior? In the spring, the overall social response to the COVID-19 pandemic consisted of a mix of voluntary and government mandated behavioral changes. Voluntary behavioral changes occurred on the basis of information, such as the number of people infected and the number of COVID-19-deaths, and on the basis of the signal value associated with the official lockdown combined with appeals to the population to change its behavior. Mandated behavioral changes took place as a result of the banning of certain activities deemed non-essential. Studies which differentiate between the two types of behavioral change find that, on average, mandated behavioral changes accounts for only 9% (median: 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioral changes. The remaining 91% (median: 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioral changes. This is excluding the effect of curfew and facemasks, which were not employed in all countries.
A new study, involving over 25,000 school-aged children, shows that masks are harming schoolchildren physically, psychologically, and behaviorally, revealing 24 distinct health issues associated with wearing masks.
The health issues and impairments observed in this study were found to affect 68% of masked children who are forced to wear a face covering for an average of 4.5 hours per day. The study also includes 17,854 health complaints submitted by parents.
Some of the health issues found in the study include: increased headaches (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), drowsiness or fatigue (37%), malaise (42%), and nearly a third of children experience more sleep issues than they had previously and a quarter of children developed new fears.
Though these results are concerning, the study also found that 29.7% of children experienced shortness of breath, 26.4% experienced dizziness, and hundreds of the participants experiencing accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness, and short-term impairment of consciousness.
Professor Cossart said that could take as little as 15 or 20 minutes, after which the mask would need to be changed. But those warnings haven’t stopped people snapping up the masks, with retailers reporting they are having trouble keeping up with demand.
[John Bell from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia] agreed with Professor Cossart’s assessment regarding the effectiveness of the masks.
“I think they’re of marginal benefit,” he said. “In a way they give some comfort to people who think they’re doing as much as they can do to prevent the infection.”
Ivor Cummins aka the Fat Emperor – gives James the lowdown on why you can’t trust anything our governments tell us about Covid-19. If you want the facts on Coronavirus – how deadly is it? do lockdowns and masks work? how does it compare with previous pandemics? – you’ve come to the right place
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Narratives about complaints in children and adolescents caused by wearing a mask are accumulating. There is, to date, no registry for side effects of masks.
By 26.10.2020 the registry had been used by 20,353 people. In this publication we report the results from the parents, who entered data on a total of 25,930 children. The average wearing time of the mask was 270 minutes per day. Impairments caused by wearing the mask were reported by 68% of the parents. These included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%) impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).
The unprecedented measures of universal lockdowns, tight institutional lockdowns of care homes, universal masking of the general population, obsession with surfaces and hands, and the accelerated vaccine deployment are contrary to known science, and contrary to recent leading studies. There has been government recklessness by action and negligence by omission. Institutional measures have been needed for a long time to stem corruption in both medicine and public health policy.
Wearing a used mask could be more dangerous than not wearing one at all when it comes to warding off COVID-19, a new study has found.
They found that wearing a mask “significantly slows down” airflow, reducing a mask’s efficacy and making a person more susceptible to inhaling aerosols into the nose — where SARS-CoV-2 likes to lurk.
https://nypost.com/2020/12/16/wearing-a-used-mask-could-worse-than-no-mask-amid-covid-19-study/
“It is natural to think that wearing a mask, no matter new or old, should always be better than nothing. Our results show that this belief is only true for particles larger than 5 micrometers, but not for fine particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers,” said author Jinxiang Xi.
The researchers found that wearing a mask with low (less than 30%) filtration efficiency can be worse than without.
By plunging London into a Tier Three lockdown, the Government is going to do terrible harm to the city, the entire national economy, and to millions of lives.
No one can predict the number of people who will lose jobs, suffer poor mental health or who will have life-saving operations postponed until too late.
All we can say with any certainty is that all these things will happen, and not to a few isolated people. The harms caused by these new restrictions, like those caused by the previous over-reactions, will be immense.
In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19. 1.8 per cent of those wearing masks caught Covid, compared to 2.1 per cent of the control group. As a result, it seems that any effect masks have on preventing the spread of the disease in the community is small.
…there is a troubling lack of robust evidence on face masks and Covid-19…The only studies which have shown masks to be effective at stopping airborne diseases have been ‘observational’…But observational studies are prone to recall bias: in the heat of a pandemic, not very many people will recall if and when they used masks and at what distance they kept from others.