Tim Carter: Examine the efficacy of non-medical grade masks

To The Daily Sun,

“You don’t have to make a fuss about it. Wear a mask,” muttered the polite young man at the Tilton Staples store who had just handed me a receipt for my UPS shipment. No doubt he was following company policy and didn’t want to lose his job.

The truth is he offered me a useless non-medical paper mask in light of supposedly the most serious medical crisis of your lifetime and mine.

Let’s have a frank discussion about these masks that you’re probably wearing along with hundreds of thousands of others. Invoking my best Hercule Poirot accent and wit I implore, “Madam or monsieur, let’s exercise your little gray cells and see what we detect.”

Oh, wait. You were about to play your Dr. Fauci card weren’t you? How can you trust the advice of a man that wears one of those multi-colored hats with the drooping points? First he said to wear a mask, then not to, then wear one. Then he laughingly condoned having sex with an online stranger during this wretched pandemic. Let’s move on.

Are you wearing a mask because others have convinced you it’s the right thing to do? After all, you’ve never seen so many wear masks before, right?

Have you bothered to look at the labels on the boxes of paper masks? Does your box label say they’re for non-medical usage? You better look!

When you bought your mask fabric at Hobby Lobby, did you buy medical-grade fabric? Oh, that’s right, they don’t sell that.

Is your store-bought cloth mask medical-grade? Why no, it’s not. In fact, hold it up to a bright light. See all those tiny holes, the ones big enough to pass a piece of your hair through?

How big is the COVID-19 virus particle? Would you be stunned to discover you can fit 900 of them side-by-side on the width of one of your hairs? Do you still feel that fabric mask of yours is going to save your life?

Why didn’t you wear a mask last January before the pandemic when you went out shopping? Why not all the years before? After all, each winter you were around people with the flu or you were infected with the flu. Did you not care about killing frail old people at the grocery? Were you not afraid of dying? I’m talking about the seasonal flu that has a 99.99 percent survival rate.

Do you know the survival rate of COVID-19? It’s 99.96 percent. What does the survival rate have to be to get you to throw away all those silly masks? 99.97? 99.98? 99.985?

Listen. Stop being played. Start thinking for yourself. Ask yourself this: Why is it safe to sit just 17.2 inches away from someone on an airplane, but COVID-19 is so dangerous the independent bookstore, toy store, and gift shop must close? Please, start using your tiny gray cells and stop wearing that silly useless face diaper.

Tim Carter

Meredith