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From: "Stuart, Ralph" <Ralph.Stuart**At_Symbol_Here**KEENE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Masks and Social Distancing
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:35:18 +0000
Reply-To: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>
Message-ID: 8DEF0BB1-96EB-4F02-AAAE-0A21DD131DF4**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu
In-Reply-To <803F551A-7FAA-4611-80EF-6D0AD3CDECF5**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com>
> There's a reason ear-loop masks are not NIOSH certified.
Among other things.
One of the things I have learned from the discussion around the covid response options this year is how willing people are to change their technical lanes without checking for traffic in that lane (i.e. looking at the literature in the new field) or signaling (by checking in with people with field experience). Medical doctors, chemists and physicists are making PPE and ventilation recommendations based on technical intuition written into spreadsheets that are too complicated for anyone else to review. Some of them throw in disclaimers to not take their advice seriously, but these disclaimers are quickly stripped out by the social media they use to think out loud about their work.
I heard a recent discussion on the This Week in Virology podcast about how their much their medical literature has been polluted by pre-prints that are rushed to print too quickly to be based on physical evidence or peer reviewed. I think that we're seeing the same thing in the PPE and ventilation discussions that are way ahead of the evidence necessary to weed out the speculation from the science. I suspect that most of these stories are based on confirmation bias rather than a body of evidence related to the covid pandemic, which is still less than a year old.
When we water down a PPE discussion to a fancy looking simulated video, it's very likely to be at least misleading and possibly counter productive. My guess is that human use factors will outweigh the specific design characteristics of any mask. For example, to share a rumor, I have heard that there is a study out there that demonstrated that medical staff who wear N95 are at greater risk for spreading the virus because they handle contaminated masks more than people who wear surgical masks. I wonder if anyone else has seen this study, which confirms my bias about the importance of human factors in PPE selection and use.
- Ralph
Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Environmental Safety Manager
Keene State College
603 358-2859
ralph.stuart**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu
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