Category: Misc

In the UK people have been talking about lifting lockdown, with the mandatory wearing of masks in public places. My gut feel is that our government is libertarian in nature, so won’t go near that. They might advise, but I doubt they’ll mandate. “Experts” seem split on whether they are effective or not (the masks, not the government. Everybody is pretty unanimous about the government!) I think it is a case of choose an expert who fits in with what you already think. So one of the questions I have had on my list of things I really need to do, (and sooner rather than later) has been to evaluate the question of just how much use a facemask would be.

I started off, I must admit, thinking: particles small, gaps in the mesh of facemask fibres big, so really did not see the point in wearing one. But I might be changing my mind.

My plan this morning was to find out the size of your average COVID-19 particle, then to research the denier scale, previously encoutered only in the context of women’s tights! My gut feel was that gaps between fibres would be enormous in comparison to the size of this virus.

I ran out of time (I needed to call people) so I never got to find out about Denier. For all I know, it could be the wrong thing entirely. I did have some success, though. My very first hit yielded me a virus size of 0.02 microns. A micron is just 10^-6m. That’s actually quite large – okay, well, it’s small, but it is more than a million times bigger than an atom, say, which comes in at roughly 10^-15m. Something like my water filter claims to trap particles of that kind of size. If only I could breathe through my water filter, I’d drown instead 😆

Actually the graph that came with that number was interesting. They might have already done the work for me. I don’t own the copyright on any of this, so will just link to their graph and cross my fingers that it stays good.

So the material used to make a surgical mask will filter out 89% of particles which are the same size as COVID. Now, I have no idea who the authors are, how reputable they are, but I thought the image represented a useful start point for later. They at least read as pretty serious.

The thing I picked up from this is that even just a (presumably knitted, common-or-garden) scarf might halve the flow of covid-sized particles. So maybe I will be changing my mind after all about masks.

Probably, more to come on this one.

I read a couple of posts yesterday, and have been speaking to several people over the last few weeks, who mentioned about how the isolation due to lockdown is driving them crazy.

My wife doesn’t like it for the same reason. She explained to me, It’s not that I’d go out anyway, but just the feeling that there is somebody there saying “you can’t do that”.

I can kinda see that. But it is never something I felt. To be honest, I have never really felt as though I am locked down.

Now, this is not to say that I have been out partying every night. At the start of all of this, I decided that my best ploy was to understand the virus, as best I can. From that point, I have been happy to stay indoors. But I feel that I have made that decision for myself. I don’t feel like a politician made it for me. In fact, looking at the timeline, I was isolating for a full two weeks before BoJo!

I’m quite convinced that this is a factor, at least, in our respective mental health. I don’t feel any imprisonment whatever, I am quite happy that I can walk down the lane outside my house, to go for a walk, as often as I feel like, and not meet anybody. After all, it is the not meeting anybody here which is important. As it happens, most days I have just stayed at home, or gone into the garden, but this is not because I feel somebody is standing over me saying no.

In a similar vein, I have decided that, whenever BoJo opens the shops, it will still be unsafe. He never wanted to shut anything in the first place, so his instinct will be to re-open asap. So, my decision is that whenever things open, I will stay locked down for another six weeks. Even then, I’ll only come out if the numbers look good. Six weeks? Because that should be long enough to start seeing new spikes. But again, my decision. So, BoJo might be firing the start pistol, but I’m the one deciding when to go.

I don’t know. Maybe I am the worst kind of idiot, the guy who wants to understand everything for himself instead of just doing what he is told. But the stakes are my life or death, let’s not forget. Am I really going to entrust that to some guy I never even met? Not to mention that in the UK at any rate, the politicians have distinguished themselves just in terms of one thing – their irrelevance.

I’m kinda reminded of that old quote attributed to FDR: Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds. If one day you read about me getting banged up in jail, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.