MaskedVillain

Cleo helps run Masked Villain and takes it very seriously. We also have a bunch of new fabric. Holler!

WHAT’S UP I HEARD FOLKS WEAR MASKS NOW

Some of y’all may be aware that there’s a little bit of a pandemic going on. The world has changed dramatically since COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 3/11/2020, having since killed over 229,330 people globally at the time of this post. More than 62,200 of the victims have died in the U.S. alone as of 4/30/2020 with the body count rising by the hour. In less than 2.5 months, COVID-19 has claimed more American lives than the total killed in the Vietnam War, an actual death-based shooting-bombing-stabbing war that lasted a lot longer than a few months.

Look. You’re certainly familiar with the current situation already, so we’re not going to post a thesis on it here. It’s bad. Really bad. And in the U.S., at least, it’s going to continue killing citizens or even get worse before it gets better due to a whole lot of factors best discussed elsewhere.

Though it feels hopeless, scary, and just plain bad right now, every person can and should do what they can to help stem the spread of this viral bastard: wash your hands often, practice social distancing, avoid crowded places, and wear a face mask.

YEAH BUT *I* DON’T GOT THE CORONAVIRUS

Wearing a mask protects the wearer as well as literally everyone else. Obviously it’s a good idea to prevent as many virus-carrying particles out of your body, and a properly made and fitted mask does just that. Additionally, it keeps the wearer, who may be infected despite showing no symptoms, from releasing their spit/snot/fluids into the air. The gross little cloud of “I was raised in a barn” shot into the air floats around, all geared up to be sucked into a pair of lungs, coat surfaces so it can hitch a ride into one of your orifices, or otherwise get inside you and work it’s magic. It’s estimated that one infected person will spread it at least three others, and given the bag of tricks it has to propagate itself it’s not hard to see how and why it infects a population so quickly.

See, COVID-19 is a tiny little jackass roughly 15nm (nanometers) in size. To put that in perspective, take a millimeter (5/127th of an inch) and divide it by 1,000. That’s a micrometer (about 0.000039 inches). Small, right? Now divide that micrometer by 1,000. THAT is a nanometer: one thousandth of one thousandth of 0.000039 inches. Filtering something that small from the air you breathe is really, really hard to do, but far from impossible. Medical grade PPE can do so with amazing efficiency, but that doesn’t do much good if it’s not being worn. Doctors, nurses and medical personnel are on the literal frontlines in this, yet are severely short on PPE. They get dibs, because they need that level of protection. Period.

The CDC, WHO, NIH and such recommend that all citizens wear some sort of face mask while in public. Since a trip to Kroger isn’t as likely to expose someone to the virus as a trip to a hospital ICU ward, a much simpler kind of mask can help dramatically reduce the odds of contracting it. Still, there are standards to follow: the mask must be made of materials that are effective and obtainable to the general public, assembled well and worn properly.

So, with a nationwide shortage of PPE that’s gotten so bad that even professional healthcare workers are forced to either wear a single-use mask or, well, go without one and resign themselves to a very slow method of su***de, it’s up to the public at large to find or make their own.

Or get one from Masked Villain, which is way easier. And cooler. And free.

That’s enough rambling, we’ll come back to this. In the meantime, send us a message if you’re barefaced and vulnerable, and we’ll send you a mask.