Despite the vast amounts of research that has gone into the effectiveness of wearing a mask for reducing the spread of disease — that is, after all, why surgeons and dentists, among many others, have worn them for hours on end for decades — the efforts of the anti-mask movement in America have swayed far too many people.
And indeed, there has been some confusion about whether or not people should be wearing masks, and if so, in what situations they’re necessary. Much of that stems from efforts early on in the COVID-19 pandemic to conserve PPE for use by frontline healthcare workers.
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But the science is clearly on the side of wearing masks and who better to break down the reasons why than Bill Nye The Science Guy?
In a viral TikTok vid, Bill Nye addressed some of the myths being spread by anti-maskers.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this but…masks work. Wear one,” he wrote with his post.
And, very basically, Bill showed that wearing masks is effective at reducing the spread of disease.
He started with a map of the United States with areas where mask use has been prevalent highlighted in red.
He then overlaid another map of the U.S. with areas where masks are not being worn.
“The black ink shows where people are getting sick with coronavirus. I hope you can see, the fewer the masks, the more the sick,” he explained.
Then Bill poked a big hole in one of the myths going around.
“There’s a perception that the virus can travel through the fibers of a mask, like this red dot,” he said, poking a red-tipped stick through the hole in a pasta strainer to demonstrate.
However, that’s not how viruses spread, he explained.
Viruses don’t travel alone as tiny, microscopic entities when they spread, Bill explained.
“No, they travel in little droplets of spit and snot. And the fibers [of the mask] are a tangle,” he said.
To demonstrate how the masks tangle those droplets, he produced a board with different sizes of pegs in it.
The balls he dropped into it representing the droplets of spittle that would contain the virus couldn’t pass through the pegs, instead becoming trapped.
“So when the droplet gets into the fibers of the mask, it gets trapped. This is not that hard to understand, everybody. That’s why we have rules about wearing a mask,” he said.
Which brought Bill to a relevant point about rules and their role in a free society.
“Now, you know about rules. You pay taxes on the whole road, but you only get to drive on one side at a time,” he said, demonstrating the consequences of not doing so by making a couple of toy cars crash and explode.
“So everyone, please, wear a mask,” he concluded.
This isn’t the first time Bill has made a plea on TikTok to get people to wear masks in public.
In the summer, he made a TikTok vid showing that masks are indeed effective as they prevent people from being able to blow out a candle. That video racked up more than 778,000 likes and almost four million views.
This vid has been an even bigger hit.
In a matter of days, it’s already managed to grab more than 13 million views and 3.9 million likes.
Watch the full video right here.
