Your Mask is Not Your Immune System

Wear your mask, stand 6 feet apart, don’t interact with large groups of people. We’ve all heard this narrative for the last 7 months. Day after day, headline after headline, we see that people keep contracting Covid-19. You can blame the politicians on the lack of response, you can pray for a vaccine that you hope will be effective and safe and distributed evenly throughout the world. But the truth is that no one knows how this is going to go. We don’t know how effective therapeutics are going to be, we’re all just sitting at home on zoom hoping that other people in white lab coats will get us out of this mess.

Let’s break this current narrative down:

Our top mask guidelines from the CDC suggest using N95 respirators for no longer than an 8 hour window. Until it no longer provides significant protection. In case you missed what N95 means, it means that 95% of particles are inhibited entering the mask if they are the size range of equal to or greater than 80 nm. Meaning 5% of particles still get through on a mask less than 8 hours old. Those Kn95 masks you have hanging from your rearview mirror, the ones you bought on Amazon from China, those are up to 70% defective. As a matter of fact the FDA banned them for use back in April. In case anyone is wondering about the particle size of Sars Covid-19 its 60-140 nm. So if its in aerosol form its getting through your N95 in a “significant” amount according to the CDC.

I’m giving you all this context not to condemn or discourage any practice that makes you feel safe. But it might be a good idea to look beyond the mask. The narrative should switch to “masks and“. Masks and vitamin D, masks and vitamin C, use this as an invitation to take personal responsibility for your own health. If you have health as a baseline, than the extra protection is just that, extra. The reason you will never hear this from the CDC is because the economics just isn’t there. They make nothing from you being healthy, meaning the things that you can do to stack the deck in your favor are very inexpensive.

Let’s dive into actionable steps:

Vitamin D: A vitamin D study out of Spain found that 80% of Covid-19 patients had vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin C: High dose vitamin C study meaning 5,000 mg or more have been shown to provide antiviral benefit.

Colostrum: A study found that bovine colostrum was at least 3x more effective against the flu than a flu vaccine.

Doing just these simple things can dramatically reduce your risk of infection even after exposure. Yes the truth is you will get exposed and some point, but it’s up to you on how want to manage outcome. So trust, trust the “science” to get a magical breakthrough, but above all please trust yourself more.