Do Masks Work? Viral immunologist Dr. Byram Bridle performs a simple experiment to see.

“As a scientist, I’m going to present the facts and let people draw their own conclusions… With a lot of respiratory pathogens, they get transmitted through large water droplets, especially when we cough and sneeze. Now the primary mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is through aerosols.

There are three sizes of water droplets that can come out of your lungs. Large droplets … that are over 60 microns. They have this trajectory under gravity where they quickly fall to the ground. Then there’s small water droplets that are between 10 and 60 microns in diameter. And then there’s what we call ‘droplet nuclei,’ which are smaller than 10 microns. So when we talk about aerosols, we’re talking about these droplet nuclei and small droplets.

If you want to visualize it, when you go out in cold air in the middle of winter when you can see your breath, that’s the aerosols. That’s the aerosol condensing in the air. And it doesn’t just drop to the ground…

Scientific studies before this pandemic have shown that low-cost masks — so we’re talking about surgical masks and the cloth masks we’re wearing … have pore sizes that range between 80 and 500 microns in size. The diameter of the virus is 1 micron. The largest possible small droplet for an aerosol is 62 microns in diameter. So let’s put that in perspective. The smallest pore size is 80, so that means the largest droplet with the virus can pass right through.”