The Truth About Face Masks | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears here courtesy of the Beaufort Observer, and written by William Moore.

    I have a valued friend who wrote this note as a result of being fed up with the face mask controversy. His name is Harry Knight and having spent a great deal of his life working as an engineer in the nuclear industry I put a great deal of faith in what he is saying. With his permission to share, he is explaining the truth on the effectiveness of face masks. Harry wrote:

    Ok, I'm sure this post is going to get a ton of negative blow back but enough is enough. I'm starting to see way too many people, whose opinions I value and respect, starting to make too many statements about healthy people wearing homemade masks outdoors

    For those that know me, you already know this but for those that don't I'm a 3-decade nuclear industry professional with over 20 years of that being directly responsible for managing the health and safety of personnel dealing with micro-particles that are 100% deadly, 100% of the time. This includes managing the DOE's Naval Spent Highly Enriched Fuel Research facility. I'm an actual subject matter expert on contamination control.

    I'm seeing too much - wear a mask, it makes people feel safer. Great, feeling safe is not being safe. I'm also seeing too much of the wear a mask it stops water droplets which is how this is spread. Well that is true except you don't hear the follow-on part. When that droplet gets on a cloth mask it immediately spreads and then dries out releasing the virus. Using anything other than an N95 mask will not help that

    If you're a healthy person, wearing a homemade mask outdoors to protect against a virus is the equivalent of building a chain link fence to stop the mosquitoes. Yes, it is exactly that stupid and we need to stop that non-sense. We need to start focusing on protecting the vulnerable not some one size fits all solutions. There has rightly been a lot of angst about the 100k+ deaths so far. Well, over half those deaths have occurred in care facilities, if we had focused on protecting those vulnerable people I'd guess most of them wouldn't have been impacted. We are focusing on the wrong things

    Now for all you angry actual "Medical Experts" and wanna be Medical Experts getting ready to pound out a response on your keyboards, re-read the second paragraph. I'm not debating nor discussing this with you, I'm telling you!

    Want to know why hospitals are the cause of "super bugs" and why healthy people visiting a hospital get sick? Because "Medical Expert" does not translate to Contamination Control Expert and we need to stop treating them as if they do (You know the - "We are following the medical experts advice" line we keep hearing, its BS) Medical Experts have a long and demonstrable terrible history with contamination control.