It's a common picture these days: Most people wear FFP2 masks, but bend the nasal clip so high and so tightly over the nose that it doesn't sit against the ala, but rather leaves a cavity above the nose for breathing.

You almost cancel the effect of the mask.

And according to the latest findings of a study by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, this is extremely high if the seat is correctly positioned.

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for the “educational worlds”.

  • Follow I follow

As MPI institute director Eberhard Bodenschatz reports in the "Proceedings" of the American National Academy of Sciences, the risk of infection with a correctly worn FFP2 mask is only 0.1 percent if an infected person and a healthy person spend twenty minutes at a short distance at the same time Encounter interior.

"A mask can be perfectly adapted to the shape of the face if you bend its metal bracket into a rounded W before putting it on," says Bodenschatz, and then the contagious aerosol particles can no longer get past the mask and glasses no longer fog up.

With a badly fitting mask, on the other hand, the risk of infection, according to calculations by the Göttingen researchers, is around four percent. With a surgical mask, a good fit is enough to reduce the risk of infection to a maximum of ten percent. An FFP2 mask that seals the nose and cheeks tightly, however, protects 75 times better than a well-fitting surgical mask.

The researchers calculated the risk of infection by combining respiratory particle sizes, exhalation physics, various mask types and the risk of inhaling coronaviruses. Droplets that people spread while breathing, speaking or even more so when singing dry in the air and become lighter. As a result, they stay in the air longer and also have a higher virus concentration than the droplets immediately after they exit the oral cavity. The opposite happens when you breathe in: “The particles absorb water again, grow like a drop in a cloud and therefore more easily get stuck in the airways,” is how the researchers describe the process.

"In daily life the actual probability of infection is certainly ten to a hundred times smaller," Bodenschatz is quoted in a communication from the institute. Because the breathing air that flows out at the edges of the mask is diluted. However, the researchers wanted to calculate the risk as conservatively as possible. "If even the greatest theoretical risk is small under these conditions, you are on the safe side under real conditions," says Bodenschatz.

The results of the study showed that the compulsory masking requirement in schools, which was adopted by the Prime Minister's Conference in Berlin last week, “is generally a good idea,” as Bodenschatz says. Up to now there have been frequently changing and different regulations for wearing masks in schools in the federal states. Primary schools in particular were often exempted from the mask requirement, whose pupils had high incidences because they could not yet be vaccinated.

Even if a new survey by the Yougov opinion research institute on behalf of the German Press Agency suggests that two thirds of the population are in favor of a general compulsory corona vaccination, the dispute over it is noticeably intensifying.

At the end of last year, in a survey by the same polling institute, only 33 percent were in favor.

The candidate for the CDU chairmanship, Norbert Röttgen, said that opponents of the corona vaccinations divided society much more than government measures such as mandatory vaccination.

"The split in that it is still left to a minority to trigger a huge wave of infections that affects and restricts the entire population, weighs much more heavily," he told the "editorial network Germany" and announced that he would vote for compulsory vaccination.

The Bonn medical ethicist Christiane Woopen considers a general vaccination requirement "very difficult to justify".

In the current pandemic situation, she pleaded for a tiered vaccination requirement that could also include older people over the age of 60 on “Deutschlandfunk”.

First of all, from their point of view, there must be a facility-related vaccination requirement for certain occupational groups “in hospitals, nursing homes, perhaps in the places where people with disabilities or mental illnesses are cared for”.

The reason for compulsory vaccination could not be that one wanted to protect people from illness, it was about avoiding a public emergency.