I mean surely it’s the same air going into their lungs regardless of the face mask? It’s not like an infectious disease spread by human contact where wearing a mask will reduce you getting the particles, it’s literally the air. So what’s really the point ?
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“Air” isn’t a defined substance or a strict scientific term. It’s just a general term we use for the collection of gases and substances that occupy the space floating around us. Typically it’s about 78% nitrogen gas, 20% oxygen gas, and then a bunch of other stuff in small amounts, including gases like CO2 (carbon dioxide), small particles like dust (which is a lot of dead skin cells), suspended liquids like water (humidity) and maybe even airborne pathogens like a COVID virus particle.
In polluted areas, that “other stuff” might be small particles of burnt material, or small droplets of water containing harmful chemicals (similar to “acid rain”). The masks are intended to prevent you from breathing in these things while still letting nitrogen gas, oxygen gas, and other substances through. The primary way it does this is to make the holes really small – a molecule of oxygen gas can fit through a *much* smaller hole than a droplet of dirty water or even a small particle of burnt plant matter. So this mask protects you from those particles floating around.
It’s true that even an N95 mask won’t protect you from *everything*. If the air around you suddenly gets filled with chlorine gas, those molecules aren’t much bigger than oxygen gas (comparatively speaking), so it won’t protect you from that. Also, in the early days of COVID, the first advice was *not* to buy masks because the virus itself was small enough to get through. However, they learned that individual virus particles weren’t spreading the disease as much as droplets containing tons of virus particles, and those droplets *could* be filtered out by even PM2.5 masks (bigger holes than N95 masks).
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