The potential drastic and undesirable effects found in multidisciplinary areas illustrate the general scope of global decisions on masks in general public in the light of combating the pandemic. According to the literature found, there are clear, scientifically recorded adverse effects for the mask wearer, both on a psychological and on a social and physical level.
Neither higher level institutions such as the WHO or the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) nor national ones, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, GA, USA (CDC) or the German RKI, substantiate with sound scientific data a positive effect of masks in the public (in terms of a reduced rate of spread of COVID-19 in the population) [2,4,5].
Contrary to the scientifically established standard of evidence-based medicine, national and international health authorities have issued their theoretical assessments on the masks in public places, even though the compulsory wearing of masks gives a deceptive feeling of safety [5,112,143].
From an infection epidemiological point of view, masks in everyday use offer the risk of self-contamination by the wearer from both inside and outside, including via contaminated hands [5,16,88]. In addition, masks are soaked by exhaled air, which potentially accumulates infectious agents from the nasopharynx and also from the ambient air on the outside and inside of the mask. In particular, serious infection-causing bacteria and fungi should be mentioned here [86,88,89], but also viruses [87].
The unusual increase in the detection of rhinoviruses in the sentinel studies of the German RKI from 2020 [90] could be an indication of this phenomenon. Clarification through further investigations would therefore be desirable.
Masks, when used by the general public, are considered by scientists to pose a risk of infection because the standardized hygiene rules of hospitals cannot be followed by the general public [5]. On top of that, mask wearers (surgical, N95, fabric masks) exhale relatively smaller particles (size 0.3 to 0.5 μm) than mask-less people and the louder speech under masks further amplifies this increased fine aerosol production by the mask wearer (nebulizer effect) [98].
The history of modern times shows that already in the influenza pandemics of 1918–1919, 1957–58, 1968, 2002, in SARS 2004–2005 as well as with the influenza in 2009, masks in everyday use could not achieve the hoped-for success in the fight against viral infection scenarios [67,144]. The experiences led to scientific studies describing as early as 2009 that masks do not show any significant effect with regard to viruses in an everyday scenario [129,145].
Even later, scientists and institutions rated the masks as unsuitable to protect the user safely from viral respiratory infections [137,146,147]. Even in hospital use, surgical masks lack strong evidence of protection against viruses [67].
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