Re: Maybe I have missed the point
"Ordinary masks don't stop the virus, are worse than useless after half an hour when they've become damp, and encourage people to touch their face more often, which is counter-productive."
Yes! A warm humid environment is great for bacteria and viruses. If you aren't accustomed to wearing a mask and have been trained for it, your face will get irritated and you WILL touch your mask. If you have any infectious agent on your hands, you are effectively smearing it on the mask. The final issue is the size of the virus compared to the pore size of the mask. Viruses are much smaller than we can really understand on an intuitive basis. If you can breath through a mask that just covers your nose and mouth, the pores are bigger than a virus or you would be laboring to get air through the mask. The seriously equipped health person is wearing a positive pressure breathing system that uses an air pump to drawn air through a very fine filter sometimes along with a germicidal lamp inside so that one can breathe normally and the air being vented around the mask is keeping contaminants from landing on the face.
One of the downsides of hand sanitizer is that it also kills off the body's natural anti-microbials. Repeatedly soaking your hands in alcohol is not a good idea. If there is a specific reason for using it on occasion, that's ok, but as a prophylactic, soap and water and 30 secs are as effective and easier on the skin. Dried/chapped hands will be subject to cracking obviating your protective coating.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
