Quote Originally Posted by Irving View Post
Can we stop with the bad arguments about touching masks ruining them? If the point of the mask is to reduce the spray from ones breath or a cough or sneeze or whatever, it doesn't matter if you touch it and it gets "dirty," it's still reducing the output. You could wipe dog poop on your mask and it'd still reduce how much of your cough gets out.
And the missing point there too, is this is a respiratory infection, not a digestive one. Sure, touching a "contaminated mask" could get stuff on your fingers, and then you could touch a doorknob, and then if someone licked that doorknob....

....They still probably wouldn't get a SARS-COV2 infection, because it's vector isn't surface contact to begin with, and the body of science confirms that. You could lick a doorknob with the virus on it and you're probably not going to get sick. Breath a droplet of it straight into your lungs though, and you're f%$ked as far as the virus using you for a host. (obv. a minority are asymptomatic, anyway).

If this were Norovirus, the argument that masks are irrelevant because people touch them would be quite valid, because it's vector IS primarily surface contact.

As others' have pointed out, I don't think anyone is really arguing "YAY GOVERNMENT CONTROL" on the forum at all - haven't seen that. So I think we're mostly on the same page, but there's a sizable group that is getting sick of the bad arguments though, e.g. no different than the email chains of yesteryear or the Facebook shares of whatever "proof" MS Paint photo someone made in their basement.