Mask downsides

What are the actual downsides of masks? Are the people who say they “can’t breathe” in masks just faking it? Maybe not.

This paper from Germany (2020-12-21) reports that wearing a mask affected physical exertion.

• The airway resistance was twice as high with a surgical mask as without;
• Heart rate was elevated heart rate somewhat (160.1 beats per minute vs. 154.5 bpm);
• Constant-load tests “resulted in a significantly different ventilation” (77.1/minute vs. 82.4/minute). (I do not know what that measures.)

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Children

Speech

A number of people have voiced concerns that children need to be able to see mouths in order to learn how to speak. I would like to point out that blind children learn to talk just fine.

This paper (2021-03-21) reports that two-year-olds were able to understand words spoken through opaque face masks just as well as through no mask. However, the toddlers had a harder time understanding words which were spoken through a transparent face shield! (I’m guessing the face shield muffles the sound?)

Emotion

Some people have said that children who don’t see faces won’t be able to learn to judge emotions as well. This study (2020-12-23) reports that children are accurately able to judge emotions when the lower part of the face is blocked (with a mask) or the upper part is blocked (with sunglasses).

Perceived downsides

The above talks about research on actual harms. There are also things people think are problems. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.

This thread (2024-10-13) about this blog post (2024-10-03) brings up a number of hypotheses about why health care workers do not mask, including:

• This response to the thread says that masks make it more difficult to make an emotional connection, which is professionally important to doctors. Like, if their “customer satisfaction” scores aren’t high enough, they can get fired their contract might not be renewed.
• In this article (2024-10-01), the new head of the NIH suggests that health care workers (including herself) don’t mask because it is traumatic — a reminder of a highly traumatic time.
  • This blog post finds this attitude offensive and ableist.
    • The author posits that health care workers don’t want to accept that disability — Long COVID — could happen to them, so resist accepting a marker — wearing a mask — which is associated with the disabled.
    • The author points out that people don’t stop wearing seatbelts because they were in a traumatic car accident. (I suggest that these imagined people would have been wearing seatbelts as a matter of course before the imagined car crash, so the seatbelt wouldn’t be as strongly associated with the imagined car crash as masks are with the pandemic.)
• This response reports that some health care workers worry about CO2 buildup and/or inhaling hazardous microfibres from the mask. However, this paper (2021-06-05) from China says that — in general — you get less crap from your mask than it filters out from the ambient air.
• This response suggests that masks make communication more difficult, especially when working with the hearing impaired. The author also points out that some patients get hostile upon seeing a mask, and take it out on the health care worker.