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Customers have pretty much ditched face masks in my part of Auckland but naturally, the minions still wear them. Health and safety. This was my conversation with the Sergeant Schultz at the entrance to my local supermarket two weeks ago:
Schultz (not smiling): “Good morning”
Me (smiling): “Good morning”
Schultz (still not smiling): “Please use the hand sanitiser”
Me (smiling): “Don’t need to, I keep it in the car and just used it”
Schultz (commandingly): “Please scan the QR code”
Me (positively beaming): “Can’t, I don’t have the app”
Schultz (signalling at the clipboard on the table): “Can you please sign in?”
Me (no longer smiling): “No!”
Resounding silence from the unsmiling Schultz so I proceed inside, happy I chose the better option to signing in as “Minnie Mouse”, “Jacinda Mania” or “Herr Hitler”.
My new social norms are distancing, fastidiously using hand sanitizer in the car and religiously washing my hands arriving home. It must be working as not so much as a sniffle or cold has laid me low this year.
I am not alone in abandoning the face mask and this week there is no Schultz lying in wait beside the QR stand or table with its clipboard pages fluttering forlornly in the breeze. Protest against the ever changing ‘clown rules’ was silent and sure.
Notably, the majority of customers have ditched face masks but supermarket staff still wear them of course, fiddling when the mask inevitably slips down. “Don’t touch the mask!” I want to shout, “You’re better off not wearing it”, but I say nothing while worrying about what happens to a brain that gets insufficient oxygen or too much carbon dioxide.
Supermarkets, Bunnings, Mitre 10, the Warehouse and McDee’s staff are masked to the eyeballs. Staff in the specialty stores, such as Bed Bath and Beyond and the Bendon outlet, like most of their customers, don’t bother. I can’t afford to sacrifice my precious brain cells and I worry about the minions who have no choice.
I bump into an old friend in Bed Bath and Beyond. Her husband passed late last year and I haven’t seen her for ages. A nurse in another life, she slips her mask off her face and drops it around her neck. We hug. Social distancing is a non-event and I am equally pleased to see her and catch up. We talk about our grandchildren, our hope for the future.
McDees has hand sanitizer in the entrance way that someone forgot, or couldn’t be arsed topping up. Having handled the door on the way in I whack it furiously. It gives me nothing but I’m not about to eat without sanitising first.
The minion mopping the floor less than an arm span away from me doesn’t look up when I repeatedly, and very loudly, whack the hand sanitiser dispenser. She’s wearing a wretched mask that’s clearly destroyed brain cells. I give up and venture to another stand that reluctantly dispenses a small dribble after a jolly good thumping. The masked minion keeps mopping, her head down avoiding eye contact. I worry about her oxygen depleted brain cells.
The 2020 Tour of France finished this week and social distancing didn’t factor at all when riders nudged wheels and shoulders in the peloton and turkeyed spectacularly over speed barriers and into monuments. The daily ride ended with a masked female and male flanking each classification winner on the podium. A much loved sport sunk to the depths of virtue signalling nonsense! Why is there a young man on the podium at all? Bring back a pair of beaming gorgeous young women and spare us this politically correct posturing with colour matched face masks committing a matchy-matchy fashion faux pas.
Possibly I am a relic of the Covid Queen and her sidekicks’ edict back in March (when they didn’t have enough masks to go around) that masks aren’t necessary. Four months later and voila, masks are mandatory on public transport.
What’s the truth about the effects of depleted oxygen and raised CO2 levels on our brains while wearing masks?
“Carbon dioxide is a natural by-product of the body’s respiration process, something we all breathe in and out every day.
How harmful can it be? In rare cases, it can actually be pretty dangerous, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
They say that inhaling high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be life-threatening. Hypercapnia (carbon dioxide toxicity) can also cause headache, vertigo, double vision, inability to concentrate, tinnitus (hearing a noise, like a ringing or buzzing, that’s not caused by an outside source), seizures, or suffocation due to displacement of air.
But the emphasis here should be on high levels. “It has to be a pretty high concentration to be capable of causing harm,” Bill Carroll, PhD, an adjunct professor of chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington, tells Health. “CO2 is present in the atmosphere at a level of about 0.04%. It is dangerous in an atmosphere when it is greater than about 10%.”
Carroll doubts that any cloth face covering would ever fit against the face so tight that someone would pass out from a lack of oxygen. “You’d take it off because it’s uncomfortable well before that happens,” he says.
So what about the poor sods obliged to wear masks all day long. Do they get to take off the mask if they become light headed or panic?
“John Xu, a research scientist at Stanford University, is developing a modified N95 mask with his colleagues that includes a small box worn at the waist with a tube extending to the mask. The box, through an electrochemical process, produces pure oxygen to compensate for the loss of oxygen caused by the mask. The researchers started their project with the assumption that an N95 mask reduces oxygen intake by anywhere from 5 percent to 20 percent.”
Hartford Health Centre says masks are not a health risk but an N95 mask could possibly cause hypoxia and hypercapnia. John Xu is right to be concerned.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention representative told Reuters that carbon dioxide, indeed, will collect between the mask and face but not in dangerous amounts and certainly not enough to cause hypercapnia.
A mask is designed to trap viral droplets, much larger than tiny carbon dioxide particles. A mask, either N95 or cloth, cannot trap all carbon dioxide particles — they either go through the mask or escape along the mask’s perimeter.
On the basis that masks don’t kill off brain cells, how effective are they at protecting us from the virus?
The American Lung Association says “the reason for wearing a facial covering is to help protect others from you when you cough, sneeze or even talk and spray viral droplets into the air.
“Many people who become infected can unknowingly spread the COVID-19 virus because they have few or no symptoms. So wearing a mask is showing respect for others and is your way of helping lessen the spread of the disease.”
I can breathe easier knowing the minions aren’t depleting their brain cells wearing disposable face masks. There must be another reason for their stupidity.
A surgical mask may be effective in protecting the wearer (in some studies, up to 95% reduction in symptomatic infection) and others. It does slow down, but does not absolutely prevent, the dispersion of exhaled contaminants by the wearer, hence the important social distancing guideline.
Be kind and wear a mask to protect others — but I bet you knew that already from the source of all truth didn’t you?
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