Respirators are so effective that United Kingdom research has indicated their use by the public would have dropped the rate of COVID transmission by an estimated factor of 9, compared with 0.6 for surgical masks. A factor of 9 is enough to put SARS-COV-2 into exponential decay, meaning the virus would have been highly suppressed for as long as respirator use continued. The exponential math of viral spread also means that perfect masking compliance would not have been required to achieve suppression.
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