by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Let’s look at physics and mathematics folks.

We’ll start with a single cough or sneeze.

Everyone “knows” that if you cover a cough or sneeze, and you should do it into your sleeve instead of your hand, this will reduce the risk of someone else getting a virus you may have, right?

Wrong.

It doesn’t.  So says the science!  This is a myth, just like it is a myth that you can wear a mask and reduce transmission.

Wait — you say!  YUCK; that’s obvious that it helps.

Well, no.

Here’s why.

You sneeze and a huge loogie comes out your nose.  Yuck!  Nasty!  Mucus, full of germs.

It goes, if uncovered…… downward, on the floor.

And harms nobody.

It’s disgusting, but that’s it.  You should still do it anyway because it’s disgusting not to, but you won’t stop a virus by doing so.

What?  If I stop the loogie then how come that doesn’t do anything?

Because in addition to the loogie out come a bunch of large drops, each also laden with virus.  Maybe a few hundred drops.  Yuck!  Thus covering or physically blocking those will reduce transmission to other people, right?

Wrong again, statistically speaking.

Why?

Because in that same forceful exhale are an enormous number of sub-micron water droplets that are formed as the saturated vapor in your lungs (100% RH in expired air) cools slightly as it travels up from the lungs to the trachea and out the mouth or nose and comes into contact with the ambient air (well, unless it’s over 98.6F in the air where you are anyway!)

Remember your basic physics:  As any saturated vapor cools it condenses.  Any saturated vapor that cools by even a tiny amount will condense — that is, coalesce the individual vapor molecules into larger aggregates.

Ordinary “tidal volume” (that is, the amount of air you move in a resting condition with each inhalation) is about 500ml.  For a cough or sneeze it is much larger; the maximum volume of air that can be inspired in adult human lungs typically is in the range of 4-6L, or eight to 12 times the “at rest” breathing amount.

When we breathe normally we produce very few or no large droplets.  When we sing, play a wind instrument, yell, scream, cough or sneeze we produce a fairly large number of them.

But none of this matters at all, statistically, because with each breath we produce millions of small condensate drops, and all of them which do not aggregate beyond the pore size of the medium in a mask will go right through said mask in either direction, most of those condensed molecules are produced between the lungs and either before or just after exit from the body due to condensation of the 100% RH water vapor and each of them, if you are infected with a virus, carries enough virons to infect another person.

We’ve all “seen our breath” outside when it’s cold.

That’s aggregation and condensation to a great enough degree that the aggregates are visible; there are thousands to millions more said aggregates that are too small to see and when it’s not cold outside none of them aggregate and condense sufficiently to be visible but they are all still there.

This is why physics says that masks don’t work against viruses and exactly zero RCTs show that they do.

Never mind the repeated attempts to do so including in 1918, which did nothing to prevent the spread.

Every single person that has ever “seen their breath” in the winter months knows, if they think about it for 30 seconds, why masks can’t work and don’t.

They can’t work because blocking 1,000 pretty-large droplets sounds like it’s great except hundreds of thousands or even millions of condensed water vapor molecule clusters were also expelled, they have enough virons on them to infect another person and very nearly zero of those are caught by the mask in either direction.  Worse, every one of those, unless condensed out or breathed in by someone else can remain in the air for hours since they are small enough to remain within the purview of brownian motion of air molecules; that is, they “float” so to speak because the energy of said molecular vibration and ordinary air currents, even indoors, is large compared to the pull of gravity toward the ground and thus they remain suspended in the air.

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