It should be noted that a previous CDC study found mask requirements for students had little effect on COVID-19 incidence in Georgia schools, while improved ventilation, such as opening a window, reduced cases more than mask mandates for staff and teachers.10
A profoundly important study was conducted by German physician Dr. Zacharias Fögen to find out whether mandatory mask use influenced the COVID-19 case fatality rate in Kansas from August 1, 2020, to October 15, 2020.11 He chose the state of Kansas because, while it issued a mask mandate, counties were allowed to either opt in or out of it.
His analysis revealed that counties with a mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without a mask mandate. “These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention,” he concluded.
That threat, he explained, may be something called the “Foegen effect” — the idea that deep re-inhalation of droplets and virions caught on facemasks might make COVID-19 infection more likely or more severe.
“The fundamentals of this effect are easily demonstrated when wearing a facemask and glasses at the same time by pulling the upper edge of the mask over the lower edge of the glasses. Droplets appear on the mask when breathing out and disappear when breathing in.”
“In the “Foegen effect,” the virions spread (because of their smaller size) deeper into the respiratory tract. They bypass the bronchi and are inhaled deep into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis, which would be typical of a virus infection.
Furthermore, these virions bypass the multilayer squamous epithelial wall that they cannot pass into in vitro and most likely cannot pass into in vivo. Therefore, the only probable way for the virions to enter the blood vessels is through the alveoli.”12
Fögen explained that wearing masks could end up increasing your overall viral load because, instead of exhaling virions from your respiratory tract and ridding your body of them, those virions are caught in the mask and returned. This might also have the effect of increasing the number of virions that pass through the mask, such that it becomes more than the number that would have been shed without a mask.
“There are real and significant dangers of respiratory infection, oral health deterioration and of lung injury, such as pneumothorax, owing to moisture buildup and also exposure to potentially harmful levels of an asphyxiant gas (carbon dioxide [CO2]) which can cause serious injury to health,” the authors explained.18
Normally, the CO2 then dissipates into the air around you before you take another breath. In the open air, carbon dioxide typically exists at about 400 parts per million (ppm), or 0.04% by volume.
The German Federal Environmental Office set a limit of CO2 for closed rooms of 2,000 ppm, or 0.2% by volume. If you’re wearing a facemask, the CO2 cannot escape as it usually does and instead becomes trapped in the mask. In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers analyzed the CO2 content of inhaled air among children wearing two types of masks, as well as wearing no mask.19
While no significant difference in CO2 was found between the two types of masks, there was a significant elevation when wearing masks compared to not wearing them. CO2 in inhaled air under surgical and filtering facepiece masks came in between 13,120 ppm and 13,910 ppm, “which is higher than what is already deemed unacceptable by the German Federal Environmental Office by a factor of 6,” the researchers noted.20
Also important, this level was reached after only three minutes, while children wear masks at school for a mean of 270 minutes at a time. Even the child who had the lowest measured CO2 level had a measurement three-fold greater than the closed room CO2 limit of 0.2%. However, younger children appeared to have the highest CO2 values; a level of 25,000 ppm was measured from a 7-year-old wearing a facemask.21
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