No one should wear a mask. Ever.

Our healthcare professionals need the masks. Please don’t go out and buy all the masks.

Unless, of course, you’re sick. Then you should definitely wear a mask.

But there are many people who don’t know they are sick. Those people should also wear masks.

The only masks rated for viral protection are the N-95 respirator masks. All other masks are useless.

That is, also, if you don’t have an N-95 respirator mask, then you should wear a folded shirt, or bandanna as a mask, because those work in other ways too.

Some protection is better than no protection.

Ok, so everyone needs to wear masks. It’s mandatory.

But you can get CO2 poisoning if you wear a mask too long. So we shouldn’t wear masks.

If masks worked, why did they let all those prisoners out of prison? Why didn’t they just give them masks?

If masks don’t protect you from viral particles, then why wear them?

Masks make you touch your face more.

Masks can get moist, gathering up more viral particles that can then transfer to your hands and then you’ll pass even more viruses around.

Masks can increase the number of COVID-19 cases out there.

Masks can make people more contagious.

And on, and on, and on, and on…

This article isn’t to inform you about what type of masks work and which ones don’t, although I will briefly discuss those topics. This article will mainly focus on our ability to think critically.

Let’s look at some of the questions above, and do a little critical thinking to see which ones are valid, and which ones aren’t. Most of the time, when we just use our heads a little bit, the answers come naturally, and that’s what I want to focus on today.

1.) No one should wear a mask. Ever.

The CDC in the beginning put out word that we didn’t need to wear masks. Then later on, they flipped the script and decided that wearing masks was a good idea, and then many local businesses and government decided to enforce that as mandatory behavior.

But why did they say to not wear masks, and then say we should?

Is it a conspiracy theory? Deep government plan to make us compliant? Is it an experiment to see just how far they can push the American people so they can further take more liberties throughout this crisis?

No.

They. Changed. Their. Minds.

At first they thought no masks, then later on had more data to use, and decided to change their minds and say yes masks. It’s not that hard a concept.

We do it all the time. We think one thing, then more data presents itself, and we find out that we were wrong about that one thing, and change it to another thing.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

For some strange reason, we have created a society of absolutes, black and whites, left and rights, and an all-or-nothing way of thinking. We aren’t allowed to say something 10 years ago and then say something different 10 years later without being ridiculed and made a spectacle of.

I personally change my mind all the time. And I am constantly having to battle with having to explain to others why I said one thing yesterday and another thing today.

I said the thing, did some more research, and found out that what I said was incorrect. There’s no deception behind it. There’s no manipulation. There’s no bad intention. I was literally just wrong, and that should be ok.

They were wrong. They said no masks, now they say masks. Done and done.

2.) Wearing a mask can make you sick and cause CO2 poisoning.

I’ll be quick with this one. So millions upon millions of Asians, Europeans, and Indians, as well as medical workers who especially need to be on top of their game wear masks all the time, and for some reason we can’t deduce that this statement is a pile of rubbish?

You don’t even need to Google this to know that wearing a mask won’t kill you, and it won’t cause you to have lung problems or CO2 poisoning. Unless Americans have different lungs than literally everyone else in the world, it’s easy to debunk this myth.

3.) Only a mask with viral filtration will work, and everything else is useless.

This one seems to be the hardest one for many people to grasp.

“It doesn’t filter viruses, so why wear one?”

To understand why a face covering is inherently better than nothing at all, we have to look at a few factors.

a.) How is a virus spread?

If you’re contagious:

Snot, spittle, spit, sneezing, coughing, breathing moist air, touching your mouth and face then touching other objects with your contaminated hands.

If you’re not sick

Breathing in snot, spittle, spit, walking through a cough, sneeze, or particles suspended in moist air, or touching things that a contaminated person touched with their contaminated hands after touching their contaminated face.

b.) How do we keep a virus from spreading?

Here’s the critical thinking part…

Not coughing, sneezing, touching things with contaminated hands, and not breathing in those coughs, sneezes, or touching those contaminated things.

So where do masks come into play here? Easy – They inhibit this from happening. Are they a perfect tool? No, of course not. But let’s stop thinking in absolutes, and do just a little bit of thinking for ourselves.

If someone coughs or sneezes without a mask, those particles can spew out a pretty far distance, and then hang in the air for quite some time and other people can walk through that cloud and breath in those particles.

We don’t need to be a scientist, virologist, or a doctor to know that viruses are extremely small, and can hang in the air a bit, attaching to spit and other molecules until they fall and settle onto whatever surfaces they touch.

Just look at someone smoking or vaping and you’ll understand this phenomenon. When stuff blows out of your mouth, it doesn’t rush to the earth like a lead weight. It blows out, and around, and hangs around a while.

Why we need 300 videos showing us this is beyond me. Just a little bit of thinking would tell you that putting something in front of your face and coughing, sneezing, or blowing into it will in fact, catch many of those particles, cause them to slow down, and not spread as far or linger around as long.

So even though a mask might not filter out all viral particles, it will catch the droplets and spit and moist air they cling to, and slow the spread.

Notice I didn’t say “stop the spread”.

Thinking in absolutes will dilute the mind.

4.) Masks make you touch your face more.

Ok, then don’t. Make a conscious effort and don’t touch your face.

5.) Shirts and bandannas will get moist and cause more transfer to your hands while you are touching your face more.

Please see above answer. Also, masks are not meant to be worn all day long. They are asking us to wear masks for a short time when going into public places.

Yes, if you wear a mask for 2 hours it’ll get wet and gross. So don’t do that. And don’t touch the mask if it’s wet and gross. Issue moot.

Why there are articles discussing the difference between a bandanna, a cloth mask, and an N-95 respirator is beyond me. Any normal person understands the difference, and doesn’t need an explanation.

If cloth masks were good at viral protection, then you’d see virologist in laboratories wearing them instead of these:

So use a little critical thinking and understand that we aren’t wearing masks to filter out viral particles. We’re wearing them to help contain the spread through touching our faces, our hands, covering our coughs and sneezes, and slowing down the contagion in any way we can.

Why is this such a hot topic?

So why can’t we just wear masks? If by using just a tiny bit of critical thinking we can deduce that they will obviously help slow the spread of a disease that we can still honestly say we know very little about, then why such polarization in wearing one?

We say “wear a mask, it could help save lives” and people still want to find every reason in the book to not only not wear one, but will actually take time out of their day to go protest the fact that they refuse to wear one.

Why this phenomenon of non-critical thinkers who want to constantly battle any semblance of rational thought?

Why is it necessary to enact laws and rules to make people comply, when in fact, if they took as much time out of their day to Google a few things and possibly think about this issue rationally as they do trying to protest and fight the power they’d realize that we wouldn’t need those laws if we stopped acting irrationally and quite frankly, like little children.

If I knew that wearing a mask might save my mother’s life, even just by a little bit, then I’d wear it. So why is this such a hard concept for us Americans to understand?

Imagine for me this:

There’s a world where there is this global pandemic. And everyone said unanimously that we don’t know what it is, we don’t know how deadly it is, we don’t understand it quite fully just yet, so let’s do a few things that could help contain it while we figure this out.

• Let’s wear masks for a little, because we know they help.

• Let’s not touch our faces while we wear them.

• Let’s not wear them for 10 hours a day and if they get gross and wet and nasty, let’s change them out or clean them.

There would have to be no laws forcing people to wear them, because we just would, because it’s the right thing to do.

No liberties would be taken away because there would be no one enforcing a non-law that doesn’t exist in the first place because we have a society of critically thinking individuals who don’t need articles like this telling them why a mask might help out some during a pandemic.

There wouldn’t have to be hundreds of videos showing that when you sneeze, stuff flies out of your mouth and onto surfaces around you, and if you have something covering your face, it lessens that effect.

Masks aren’t convenient by any means, but our individual convenience does not supersede another’s ability to survive a pandemic.

And to all those who say “I don’t like wearing masks because they are itchy” and “I feel claustrophobic when I wear one” and “my body my choice”, I say one thing to you.

SUCK IT UP.