South Burlington, VT
Quoted from wamoc:Then instead of using the expected conclusion that the materials had a large part to do with it, they jumped to the conclusion that it was the style that caused it to be worse than nothing.
The article jumped to no such conclusion. The news media, on the other hand...
Here's (what I consider to be) the conclusion in question from the article (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/07/sciadv.abd3083):
We noticed that speaking through some masks (particularly the neck fleece) seemed to disperse the largest droplets into a multitude of smaller droplets (see Supplementary Fig. S5), which explains the apparent increase in droplet count relative to no mask in that case. Considering that smaller particles are airborne longer than large droplets (larger droplets sink faster), the use of such a mask might be counterproductive.
Note that the legend for Fig. S5 (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2020/08/07/sciadv.abd3083.DC1/abd3083_SM.pdf) specifically states "...the decrease of large and the increase of smaller particles numbers for the neck fleece". If you were correct, I'd expect this to say "neck gaiter" or similar. Please read the article before deciding what you think about its conclusions.
