If you've ever watched the fine misted spray in the sunlight from someone having a good sneeze....even simply reducing the velocity and volume of particles coming out of them via the mask is a benefit.
On that note, I believe I saw someone at the store today walking around with an oxygen deprivation mask. Athletes wear them while they run or weight train to simulate training at high altitudes, adapting to and learning to perform on less oxygen, so when they're getting full oxygen they're super charged. Weighted training clothes, basically.
Anyways, I was wondering how long it would take me to see that. I'm pretty sure though any filtering that thing might do will be purely by accident.....
The old couple here think the US has devolved into active Chinese hunts with Asian-descent citizens being killed in the streets. They took the call for Americans to return home (since flights might shut down for a while) as a clue of the impending Sino-American war.
Well, you can cheerfully reply that some dumb asses here think the Chinese manufactured the virus and unleashed it on their own people to kill the elderly and do some population culling, then let it slip out in the rest of the world to undermine other nations in preparation for the Sino-American War.
.....On second thought, maybe don't say any of that.
More sane views are absolute confusion on how such a powerful country can mess things up so much.
I think the thing is, and I kinda predicted this.....the Chinese think the American government acts like the Chinese government. That if the American government tells us to "do something" that we'll do it because the reasoned heads of state clearly think it's the right thing to do and we're all good citizens.
When in fact, the minute anyone was told to do anything, a good number of Americans did the exact opposite, because "Freedom." And Trump explicitly did not provide any guidance or leadership or direction to any of the states, like a national Covid containment policy everyone had to follow, either "out of respect for states rights" or literally doing nothing to undermine people's faith in government so he can say we need even less of it. (Which frees up tax payer money to, I dunno, fire directly into the stock market with a giant money cannon. Or maybe build another 2 miles of that stupid fucking wall.)
I always used to wonder about seeing Asian folks wearing surgical masks in news footage, or seeing immigrants here in my town walking around in surgical masks during your average flu season and finding it odd. Reality is though Asia has dealt with these kinds of things many times in its past. Covid is exceptional but the awareness of the spread of disease is typical for Asia, or at least in particular, China. Here in the US though, we've never taken it that seriously. We've never really had to in most of the population's living memory. Many underestimated its impact and spread and lethality.
So when they wonder how it could fall apart, it's the combination of no national policy of containment, every state doing its own thing, setting its own rules, relying on its own resources (because we don't need government, remember? Everything is better when the states just sort it out themselves), and American individualism where people STILL RIGHT NOW are doing things like hanging out in groups of 5 or more, going to places where many other people are, and so forth.