There’s a popular misconception about wearing masks. That if you do, you’ll be protected against the coronavirus no matter what. But that’s not necessarily true. They just greatly reduce your chances of getting infected and suffering from severe illness. Especially, if everyone else is wearing one too. In that regard, masks are a lot like condoms. They aren’t guaranteed to work 100% of the time but they will be effective the vast majority of the time and you’ll be glad you’re using one more often than not.
However, new research seems to indicate that masks can actually protect us at a much higher rate, essentially acting as a crude vaccine that provides actual immunity. But it’s a Catch-22. Because in order for that immunity to kick in we’d first have to make sure that our masks betray us, and sneak just a little bit of COVID-19 in.
In theory, by exposing ourselves to just a little bit of the coronavirus (like the kind of exposure that mask wearing may provide) we’ll become asymptomatic carriers (if we get sick at all) thereby enabling our bodies to create the necessary antibodies needed to stave off a much larger exposure to the virus in the future.
As Elemental on Medium puts it:
“…we started noticing that in any setting where masking was done, there’d be a lot of asymptomatic infection. In cruise ships, food processing plants — people got sick, they started masking, they didn’t get sick anymore. It really seemed to drive up the rate of asymptomatic infection from 40% as a standard to 81% on a cruise ship, 95% in jails, and 95% in food processing plants when they started giving masks routinely.
In our article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that came out three or four weeks ago, we tried to put together all the evidence for why that would be. And, essentially, masks reduce your viral inoculum (the amount of virus a person is exposed to). It’s very well known in science that the lower viral inoculum you get, the less sick you get. So putting it all together, it seems like masks increase rates of asymptomatic infection by decreasing viral inoculum.
Then, over the last month, we’ve been getting these amazing studies about asymptomatic infection leading to really strong T cell immunity. This isn’t shocking because it’s actually probably the process by which you get asymptomatic infections — the lower viral inoculum allows you to have a really strong and organized adaptive immune response. And we’ve been seeing cases go up in places that have opened up, like San Francisco, but the case fatality rate has been so low in cities that mask compliantly. So are we actually getting immunity by getting cases with our masks but not getting fatalities?”
It sure is possible. And it would match up with my own observations. Over the last few months it sure has seemed like there were a lot more asymptomatic cases than severe illness cases. At least when it came to instances in the sports world where players missed time after testing positive despite some even claiming that they had been quarantining and taking precautions. So what gives? Did the virus mutate and there’s a less deadly strain going on now? Or is the severity going down because of mask wearing?!
When the pandemic first started there were people (crazy people mind you) who suggested that we should just infect everyone and get it over with since it’s likely inevitable that everyone would get it eventually anyway. Obviously, that’s a horrible idea because of how many people would die or get severely sick doing that.
But what if we could expose everyone to very small doses of the virus (while they wear a mask) and let everyone get an asymptomatic version of COVID? Wouldn’t that give us the effect of vaccination without having to produce an actual vaccine and without risking any lives or severe illness?
That’s probably a bad idea too. There’s still much we don’t know about COVID-19. Just because you’re asymptomatic doesn’t mean you won’t have some issues, minor or otherwise, either directly or indirectly, tied to being infected. And of course if you’re asymptomatic and don’t know it you could unwittingly spread it to others who aren’t wearing a mask and wind up killing them. Not to mention the chance that some people would still get severely sick or die from exposure to the virus even with a mask on.
But, all in all, here’s the bottom line: wear a mask! It’ll greatly improve your chances of never getting sick, reduce the severity of your illness if you do sick, and possibly even act as a vaccine if you wind up getting an asymptomatic version of COVID-19.
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