Interesting. Thanks gothitjulie. So what other people said about him, piling other stuff onto his statement to the meeting, is proved wrong. And other experts claim what he said is wrong. Does that mean his view shouldn’t be heard? I certainly don’t believe Covid is no worse than flu, but I do believe wearing face masks is pointless. Shouldn’t people be given the option to think and reason? Or are we all expected to believe the government’s experts are always right?
His view was heard & then embellished by others, & his qualification claims also appear rather flaky. It’s fine him having a viewpoint, but it’s been embellished, then challenged, as it must be.
Now the face masks, early on in the pandemic there were many viewpoints & of course no data other than for previous studies done on other bacterial & viral spread, one on influenza from around 2015 comes to mind. Even now we have no precise data on how masks affect the spread of COVID-19 as these studies take longer than the virus has been in circulation. So, we have all that old data on old diseases (during the Spanish Flu epidemic people wore masks, white cotton ones that were tied behind the head & boiled to sterilise them, finding data on that that meets modern scrutiny is difficult) & we can only extrapolate from that what we think we know about COVID-19, but the basic principles on masks, particulates, charged particles, etc., are based on the fundamental physical properies. The idea is that someone else wearing a mask protects you if they have an asymptomatic COVID-19 infection, breaking the transmission, not that your wearing a mask to protect you directly helps so much (maybe 5%?).
There’s some basic ideas about basic cloth masks here – https://masks4all.co/
Personally I wouldn’t use a simple cotton mask, I sandwich non-woven interfacing into any I’ve made and I use antibacterial coatings on the outer cotton layers (I’m not keen on breeding streptococcus on a mask).