Limited population and masks: probably because of limited grant/budget.
People do study protection of the wearer. But demonstrating protection against disease is much more involved: you either need to deliberately try to infect people in a lab (hopefully with some more benign virus), or to track a lot of people for a long time, and that has problems like "how well and how often did they wear a mask?", aka "did the mask fail or did they not wear a mask at the wrong time?"
Note that this study was simply measuring virus particles escaping the mask, not lowered infection rates or something, and the reverse of that -- how many particle get into a mask -- is done all the time; it's how N95s are certified and how employees are fit tested for them in the workplace.
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Date: 2024-08-14 05:01 pm (UTC)Limited population and masks: probably because of limited grant/budget.
People do study protection of the wearer. But demonstrating protection against disease is much more involved: you either need to deliberately try to infect people in a lab (hopefully with some more benign virus), or to track a lot of people for a long time, and that has problems like "how well and how often did they wear a mask?", aka "did the mask fail or did they not wear a mask at the wrong time?"
Note that this study was simply measuring virus particles escaping the mask, not lowered infection rates or something, and the reverse of that -- how many particle get into a mask -- is done all the time; it's how N95s are certified and how employees are fit tested for them in the workplace.