The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - World Experts Explain How Masks Can Defeat Covid-19

Episode Date: May 23, 2020

World Experts Explain How Masks Can Defeat Covid-19

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, the comedy cellar, and we're going to do a special show today about something which has been on my mind a lot, which is masks and what they can do to help us get out of this COVID predicament. Of course, we're here as always with Mr. Dan Natterman. Hello, Daniel. How do you do? Is that a green screen or are you actually cracking something? I'm not. I assume this is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It certainly looks like that, but I'm on the Upper East Side.

Oh, it looked tropical to me. All right. It's kind of tropical. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that Mount St. Helens or something? Anyway, Perry Lashenbrand, who, the author of, I can't even say the title of her book. Anyway, so I saw an article at the, what's the name of the website? The Tony Blair organizational website about the importance of masks for exiting lockdowns. And I immediately wanted to get a hold of the people who were involved in this. So we have Ryan Wayne, who is an advisor to Tony Blair,

who for Perry Ellis' sake was a former prime minister of worked extensively on COVID-19 response, including looking at the role masks can play, setting out a strategy for mask testing. Prior to politics, he held a senior position within the ad industry,

like advertisement industry? Yeah, ad word like mad men, but a really crap version. And Dakai, I don't know if this is a stage direction I'm supposed to say this, but this is a two-word mononym.

No, you don't have to say that. His title is a professor of computer science and engineering, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, distinguished research scholar, international computer science, is to Berkeley. He's involved in AI and machine learning and named a founding fellow

in the Association for Computational Linguistics for Breakthroughs that led to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Translate, board member of the Future Society, named inaugural member in 2019 by Google to its AI Ethics Council. Holy, that's an incredible resume. The bubble over his head is like, how did I get myself into this? But okay. So look, I've been saying for a long time on this show that given what we know about growth, just using compound interest as an analogy, that anything that could have helped slightly a hundred days ago would have had drastic consequences by now. And that led me to start looking into masks. And what I found was a lot of literature which

suggested that masks alone could bring the R-naught below zero and could actually get us out of this situation and could have avoided it, but could get us out of it. So let's start on my screen, you're left to right. So Dakai, tell us about that. And then Ryan can add in. Go ahead. So, you know, I'm actually both in Hong Kong and at Berkeley regularly outside of these weird coronavirus times, I'm going back and forth. And so one of the things that hit me very early on was this dissonance between the way that Hong Kong was treating it and the way that the U.S. was treating it. In Hong Kong, already in January, people started masking up. People started paying attention to the WHO warnings already in late December. And our university was to start the spring semester February 1st.

Throughout January, it was already discussing heavily, planning, what if we don't open physically? What if we have to go online, delay the start of semester? We did all of that. We've never opened up. None of the schools in Hong Kong have opened up until literally today, they're going to start a half-time approach to getting the kids back into the schools. We have had to date four deaths in Hong Kong, the entire time. We have had only a couple hundred local transmission cases. The vast majority of cases that we have had have been people coming in from Europe, from the U.S., from other parts. And this is in Hong Kong, where we have far more people coming in from mainland China and, you know, even Wuhan in the early days. And so it really started worrying me. By February, in the discussion groups about the coronavirus that, you know,

all of us are in 15 different groups about that, you know, I found myself having to say over and over, why is the conversation in the Western media not even talking about masking? You know, there was this conversation about physical distancing, social distancing, which regions were doing contact tracing, which regions were doing testing. And it wasn't even on the radar. It wasn't even brought up.

You go to the, you know, the WHO data, the Johns Hopkins data and so forth. They have columns for everything except for masking. And so after the fifth time I had to push this into the group, I was like, where is this unconscious bias coming from that we're not even talking about this? Because, you know, it's not just Hong Kong. It is 100% of the countries that have been successful in suppressing the virus exponential spread or driving it down from early exponential spreads, for example, South Korea. 100% correlation of the countries and regions

that have actually implemented universal masking, either as a culture or as a policy and success. And- 100%, 100%. 100%, so our study is showing that. And if you look at the converse, it's about 100% of the countries that have not had that kind of policy where after the initial outbreak, they've gone exponential with the spread. So, no, correlation is not causation. But we don't have any more than that for social distancing either.

We don't have exact numbers on the efficacy of testing and tracing either. Nobody is saying, oh, we shouldn't do any of these things until we have 100% scientific proof, which, of course, isn't going to happen for another six months. And according to our modeling, and we've introduced two new models in our work, we are rapidly running out of time. If you don't start masking up by about day 50 and have the majority of your population masked up, 80, 90%, then it becomes too late. If only half your population masks up, it has basically no significant effect at all because of the exponential spread that you were talking about, Noam.

If you wait until about day 75, it's also too late because you've let it spread too far. And, you know, so this is not countrywide. The U.S. has gotten hit in different places at different stages. New York obviously, unfortunately, got hit early and hard. It's way past day 50 for New York. But for many parts of the country that are maybe more spread out, there is still time for people to get masked up. And this is super urgent.

So Ryan, do you want to add something to that? Or should I ask, can I follow up question on that? Ask a follow up question. So isn't it, we're way past day 50, but isn't it also always still day one in the sense of prospectively the cases that are out there already will resolve one way or another. And among all the people who haven't gotten it yet, we're still at day one for the next, you know, 50 days.

So what would be the effect of all masks now? Absolutely. Because New York has... I'm sorry. I was going to ask that for Ryan. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Ryan. Yeah. Sorry. Could you say that again? I had to think of it. Well, what I was saying is that Dakai was talking about we're way past day 50 here, but I'm saying in another sense, we're always at day one because there's the next future of the people who have not yet caught the virus. So what is your take on what the effect

of masking up today would be? Yeah. So it's important actually to keep reminding ourselves that whilst every day we don't do something, we are running out of time, that shouldn't stop us introducing measures even now. And I think what we did with our paper was really try and make a plea to the UK government to reconsider masks culturally. So some of the points that DKI makes where it just wasn't even on the government's radar at all

to use masks. But then also trying to shift the lens, if you like, through which masks are viewed in terms of the roles they can play. This is where I think it answers your question in terms of what can happen now. When we talk about masks, we don't mean masks to protect the wearer. This is a really important point. We want to see masks wearing to protect people outside of the wearer.

And so what we mean by that is the masks form a transmission, a barrier, to the droplets of infected people. And therefore they prevent other people getting infected as opposed to the individual themselves. So to the Kai's point, it makes absolute sense then to roll out masks to as many people as possible. We basically want mass population coverage of these so that no one is transmitting the virus to anyone else. So relating to your question, if we introduce it now, sure, there's a significant number of infected people. Now,

lockdowns played a part in reducing that. But those who are infected, they're forced or mandated to wear a mask. It's going to reduce the number of people that they can then infect. I'm going right back to what you said at the beginning. That is going to have a positive, pretty dramatic impact, actually, on the R rate, which is the thing that we're all trying to grapple with and pull down. So, okay. So let me, so for instance, just because I find that people pay attention more when I put stuff up on the screen. Oh, you,

apparel disabled screen sharing for some reason. Okay. Can I ask to Kai, I mean, so this 50 day thing, are you saying that it's too late? Are you contradicting Ryan in that regard, with regard to New York, that it's too late to wear masks? Right. No, this is absolutely an important qualification. So in the models that we built, these were assuming scenarios where you just, you didn't do anything. And comparing that with situations where you actually put on masks at different levels, what New York did was that New York actually clamped down really hard. And because of that, all of those NPIs, all of those non-pharmaceutical interventions helped to start containing it again. So exactly as Noam was saying, now New York is driving local transmission back down. And so that effectively brings us back to

an earlier stage. Now, of course, a much higher percentage of the population probably has already been infected. We'll know for sure the numbers only much later. But because of that, it is once again important, especially as we start lifting lockdown measures, to mask up because we've pushed the timeline back a little bit before day 50. The day 50 is if you are not doing very much of anything, right? And obviously New York has been doing a lot. So it is absolutely critical to mask up as we start lifting down the measures and then to do the testing and the tracing really hard so that if we start experiencing second waves, as many other countries and regions that have been trying to lift lockdowns have

experienced, then we have to sort of crack down a little bit harder on that until we drive it down again. So there may be successive spikes and then everybody sort of has to say, okay, let's back off a little bit and then try again a little bit. Wearing masks is the best way to help to increase our odds as we try and attempt to do that. I want to come back to contact tracing in a second, actually. There's a headline here from Vanity Fair. You can see it, right? 80%, if 80% of Americans wore masks, a new study would say infections would plummet. Now, when I hear that, I'm like, well, there's no such thing as plummeting. Plummeting is a

direction and the direction either continues down to zero or it continues, you know, to herd immunity. So when I see plummet, I see the end of the light at the end of the tunnel or it continues you know to herd immunity so when i when i see plummet i see the end of the light at the end of the tunnel um as it continues is that headline accurate in your estimation whoever wants to answer that i mean you just look at hong kong uh sorry right shall we take turn i mean um hong kong we actually have experienced that plummet we went 23 days recently in a row with no local transmissions. That's plummeting. Incredible. So I'll show you, and I'll just show you. So there's like this new, something came out. I saw it on Marginal. You guys check

out Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen's side from time to time. So he had this new paper, critical levels of mask efficiency and mask of Adoption of Theoretically Extinguished Respiratory Virus. There was this study that I think you guys had this same graph here, this yellow to blue thing. I'd seen that like two or three weeks ago, this came out, if not more. And essentially it says basically if 80% of the people wear masks and the masks are 80% efficient, or even less than that, looks like 70 and 70 or something, that you know is there and write a paper telling us how to get out of this dilemma. You know, saying, you know, your plan for ending the coronavirus. And like my plan would be as follows. If I could do it, I'd say everybody in New York City is going to wear a mask inside, out, or outside, inside or outside, no matter what. We're not going to have cops with tape measures, figuring out how far apart you are.

We're not going to have people separating and then the cop comes back and then you, and the cop comes over, you move apart. And then as soon as the cop goes away then you, I mean, the cop comes over, you move apart. Then as soon as the cop goes away, you, Jesus Christ, I'm butchering my language here. Let me relax. We're not going to have cops walking over, telling you to separate. Then you separate. Then as soon as the cop comes back, you huddle back together again. It needs to be like a thousand dollar fine, treated as serious as reckless driving or whatever it is. Everybody wears a mask or you stay home. Then we open up and then we see how it goes. And if we see that it's going well, then we can begin to relax each restriction one by one, according to what we think would do the least, have the least impact. So maybe people outside in the park no longer have to wear a mask. And one by one, until we find out what works, and that's the plan.

Because right now, nobody's actually offered up a plan to New York of how to do it. We see data, masks work, this work, that works. But I think they need to be spoon-fed a plan that will go around. So the leaders say, oh, this guy, Dakai and Ryan have the plan here. And they modeled it and it works. And then pressure builds to adopt that plan. And before you know it, you guys can be winning a Nobel Prize.

What's that say? So this was our plan. Because of your virtual background. Okay, now we can see it. So this was our white paper, universal masking to restart society. background. Okay, now we can see it. So this was our white paper, Universal Masking to Restart Society and Save Lives. It's available from our project resources page, which you can get to from my URL. My URL is just dek.ai, and there's a bright red banner to the COVID-19 project. We do believe that universal

masking is a very strong component of that entire picture. We're not saying not to do the contact tracing, not to do the testing or the physical distancing. We should do that. But universal masking has been used successfully in every region that has been able to do the sorts of things that Hong Kong has done. I mean, obviously, I read that because that's what made me want to get you guys on. But it's quite, this is not a criticism, it's just, it's quite long and academic, and it's not going to grab the everyday audience. And I like if there was some way in like two paragraphs to just like bullet points to get this out. If CNN covered this one night, you'd see tremendous pressure.

Like if you guys could get on CNN or one of these shows, because I think you have the answer here. Now, what do you think of the Dwarven plan for reopening New York? I like it. I like it. I think we should do a little bit of a joint cameo on CNN and we'll take the world by storm. One of the key things is this. So I get excited with my background in advertising and now in politics about that little Venn diagram. So when politics meets advertising, that space in the middle, that's when stuff starts to happen. So exactly what you're talking about, how can we get this down into a very simple one-page document

that people see and say, okay, here's the five things that we need to do. And right at the top of that list is mask and mask wearing. The problem we found in the UK is that as soon as you start putting solutions on the table, everyone in government lines up to tell you about why we can't do that thing. So the strategy and the plan, I think, is actually the easy bit. It's the delivery, the implementation of it. And the biggest barrier we had when it came to masks, which is mind-blowing when you think about it, is that if everyone was mandated to wear a mask, then there wouldn't be enough masks for the people who really need them on the front line.

It's absolute rubbish. And this is why we try to shift the role and purpose of masks from protecting the wearer to protecting others from transmission. Because even just covering your face with a sock, so stopping fluids and droplets leaving your mouth has a big impact on your neighbor. And it's starting to change the mindset a little bit of the individual and the citizen too, to really start thinking about other people rather than themselves. And I think there's something quite compelling about that. I think we're in an age when, as a message, as a piece of communications, being able to say to people, look, here's how you can do

your bit for other people, could be quite compelling. And wearing a mask is one of those things. One of the things that struck me in that other paper I showed, which has had a lot of like high level calculus and stuff. But one thing I did seem to glean from it is that the effectiveness of the mask is squared if two people wear it, such that if two people wear rags over their face, it might be more effective than a single person wearing an N95 mask. Did I get that right? I see what it seemed to be saying. This is actually, in fact, what the simulation that we put online that everybody can try does because in this simulation so there's this four minute explainer youtube video on how to do this and it actually shows the

a bunch of sliders that you can play with and those there are two sliders that control the mask transmission rate and the mask absorption rate. So the transmission rate is how effective the mask is at stopping particles from getting out when you exhale. And the absorption rate is when you're inhaling, how effective it is at stopping that. So those two parameters together, you can dial in your own assumptions. So if you decide, okay, I'm going to make my homemade mask out of fishnet, then you can just go ahead and set your sliders down to zero, both of them. But then you can also say, you know, well, I'm going to build this kind of cloth mask, and it's not going to have any coffee filters in it or whatever. And so then you can just set it to whatever efficacy you want to and because you can control

those separately then this model which is the the one that's sort of running in my background right now uh will actually let you see for yourself the impact when uh people are wearing masks and and how that that combines in both the transmission and absorption direction. And you can see that if someone's listening but not watching, D-E-K dot A-I, H-T-T-P, D-E-K dot A-I. I didn't know A-I was an extension on the internet. I actually played with that. It was pretty interesting.

Contact tracing. So am I wrong here? Because a lot of people keep telling me about how important it is to wash my hands and how much virus is being spread by touching surfaces and stuff. And to me, I don't believe that's really true or people really believe it's true because if that were the case, then how far could contact tracing get us? If people were catching viruses by touching stuff an hour after someone else was in the restaurant or something, would contact tracing even work that well? Contact tracing, I think, could have a profound impact on containing the virus because if you think about how it works, if i'm in your proximity and even

if there's a small chance that i've passed on the virus to you i don't know by coughing over your shoulder or wiping my hands accidentally on your face which is something i have been known to do then contact tracing will mean that we can identify uh you'll get an alert on your phone and it'll tell you to to self-isolate Or, and this is really crucial, if you've got a proper testing strategy in place, so if states and countries have built up their test capacity, you'll get an alert on your phone saying that you've come to contact with someone who has got COVID-19 or has exhibited the symptoms of COVID-19. And therefore, you can go for a test and then that test comes back positive or negative.

If you come back positive, then that then triggers a chain of interactions with people you've come into contact with. And what you're doing is, you know, you're outrunning the virus at the moment. We're just letting the virus outrun us. Obviously lockdown's a little bit different from that and stops it, but out of lockdown,

you're letting the virus run at its own pace. Whereas what we're trying to do here with contact tracing is saying, okay, you might have it. Step back into society. Lock yourselves down. Let everyone else carry on as normal. And then if the virus is isolated, your society might then disappear.

And that has a positive impact then on the R8, which puts it below 1. But that implies that most people are getting it by being in close proximity to each other rather than touching something that somebody touched yesterday, right? Yeah. And the papers we've looked at certainly show that most of the transmissions happen in households actually and on public transport. So in small contained spaces. What about wearing masks? Because most of the things that are shut down right now in New York are bars, restaurants. Of course, Noam's a comedy club owner. That's been shut down. Places where people eat and drink. So if we're going to use masks, how are we going to do it in restaurants and bars and places that serve food and drink?

Or we cannot? Are you saying that that has to wait until the virus is completely gone? So in Hong Kong, the restaurants have never been shut down. All we've done is the sensible physical distancing. So tables were set apart by six feet, and each table would have a maximum of four people at it. That has since been relaxed to eight people at a table. We have had no, you know, obviously, you take off your masks as you're eating and drinking. And so because of this combination, we haven't needed to close down the restaurants. Are people wearing masks in between

taking a bite, taking a sip, or are they just going mask all together? No, once they sit down at the table and the food is served, they basically take off the mask for the duration of the meal. Now, so that'd be great. Is there any possibility of something, I remember reading, I'm going to get it wrong, but there's some childhood vaccine that apparently is common in Asia that's not common in the West. And some people speculated maybe that vaccine gave some advantage to people from Asia. You know what I'm referring to? it fails to account for the fact that actually the infection rates in Asian Americans, as well as some other countries is also like half of that of the rest of the population. This has to do with this acceptance of hygiene.

You know, it's, it's masking. It's, it's also, you know, taking shoes off at the door and other things like that. So I,

there, there's really strong cultural tendencies. I don't think it's, you know, some vaccine somebody has had. Perrielle, we're almost at half an hour. Do you want to say something, Perrielle? I mean, my understanding from everything that I've read is that one of the biggest issues you have here in this country is just the sheer idiocy and arrogance of people I've read is that one of the biggest issues you have here in this country is

just the sheer idiocy and arrogance of people thinking that their freedom is somehow being, you know, oppressed by them having to wear masks, which I've been arguing with people about recently on Facebook, actually, which is generally a practice I never engage in. But it's, I mean, to what to Ryan's point, I mean, it's just astonishing. And I think America might be the only place in the world, although what Ryan is saying is suggesting that perhaps that's not the case, where you could even imagine that that would be a thought that occurred to somebody that I want to I want to say a word on behalf of the American public.

Nobody's actually explained this to them. Like every person we speak to and I start showing them these headlines and showing them some studies are like, this can't be right because I would have heard about this on the news already. You know, like they think they don't want to wear masks because it's a total waste of time or it's silly or whatever it is. They've been told that they don't work or they're told they're even very counterproductive. I think that they need to, there's a real failure of our media here

to really present statistics and facts. So people, I mean, who wouldn't wear a mask if they believed that would prevent them from getting COVID-19? who wouldn't wear a mask if they believed that would prevent them from getting COVID-19? Like, who wouldn't wear a mask? And, you know, I have to say that we've been making progress on that forefront. You know, probably about 80%, according to the latest surveys, of Americans actually are on board now with the masks. But what we hear about on the news is primarily whatever the other 20 some percent are and I think that this is you know still residual from thinking about masks as something that we use to protect ourselves it's not we use masks to protect the community from ourselves and I think

that the way we have to explain it has to do with you know think about this we if we get attacked uh by what are terrorists or something and you know they kill three four thousand of us uh uh you know we go to all sorts of things to like put that kind of um attack down right we are asked to go to a wartime footing uh you know people have to suit up for war and go overseas and go into the trenches almost. That is a lot of defending our country. And Americans everywhere are on board with that. It has nothing to do with which side of this issue you're on. And we have to understand that when we've got an enemy that is killing 3,000 or 4,000 of us per day in the U.S., that we have to understand that when we've got an enemy that is killing three or four thousand of us per day in the u.s that we have to fight that enemy and we have to defend our country and our

community uh that is our patriotic duty i i agree with you very much all right well i mean i have a few contacts with some journalists who are on television. And I'm going to make sure that they see this because on top of being really, really smart, you're both quite telegenic. And really, you have an awesome look. And I really think that if people heard this stuff, it could really catch on. And we all want this to end.

I sent you an article in the New York Post. It was more of a rant than an article, basically saying, open the fuck up now. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how they feel about that. I'm not that sympathetic to that. I want to open the fuck up responsibly with everybody wearing masks. Then I'd be like, yeah.

The lockdown was important because it suppressed the virus and it bought us time. The question you've got to ask is how well have governments used that time that it's bought? Have they introduced test and trace facilities and infrastructure?

Not in the UK. It's been poor and infrastructure? Not in the UK. It's been poor. I think similar in the US. Have they made the case about masks to the population? And critically, have they started to onshore manufacture of masks, which is a very, very easy thing to do? The answer is no. So it's a real challenge.

We've got to make the case for it. And I agree. I think communication is absolutely critical to all of this and if people understood it was their civic duty and you know you rarely spoke to the head and the heart i think it could be quite a powerful message to get across and people would would listen to it and we've got a phenomenal case study in what's happened across asia and just how quickly those guys put on a mask when they knew there was a crisis and challenge. And the case speaks brilliantly to that. So I think we're all aligned on this, right? When I go outside here in New York,

I will say that, at least in New York City, and I don't know if this represents everybody, but most people are on board with the masks. I would say about 90% of the population that I see outside are wearing masks and every store requires you to have a mask to get in the store. So I think the New Yorkers are on board with that. I see them wearing half a mask

or hanging over their chin while they're screaming onto their cell phone and spitting all over the place. By the way, I'm afraid that one cultural problem difference between America and Asian

countries is that people will turn off their contact tracing apps here. If they have it, they're just going to I don't want anybody to know I had it. They're just going to shut that cell phone off. So I worry about that actually not panning out. But I guess it can't hurt. You never know the law of unintended consequences. The solution is always going to be a combination of different measures. And what we can't do is just look at one solution as a silver bullet. It's having a combination of things,

which none of them will work 100%. There'll be people who wear masks that are a little bit skew-iff, or they use a sock that's got a hole in it, so on and so forth. And the fact is, if you have three or four measures at play simultaneously, that will do enough to start bringing the R rate down.

And we can live a relatively normal life, make sure the economy is not falling apart and move from lockdowns where we're suppressing COVID-19 to a new normal where we're just mitigating the virus as and when we can. And the final thought is, I'll give you the last word after this, that Dakai made a comment about fishnets, and I just want to tell Periel, I don't think you should be using your panties as a mask. Go ahead, Dakai. Absolutely, absolutely there is a positive connection

between the different interventions. And so to do contact tracing effectively, you also have to have testing effectively so that you know which contacts to trace. And when you have masking, that helps reinforce with the social distancing because the physical, you know, when you're wearing masks, if you're six feet apart from other people wearing masks, that combines to give you much greater effectiveness. Oh, that's a good question. How close can we get to each other for wearing masks? I think it's still a good idea to maintain that kind of distance if you can. Now,

it's a very small group that you're always hanging around, then obviously you can be closer. But you want to try to reduce the mixing proportions, right? So you don't want too many people who don't run into each other all crammed, normally all crammed together, because then you're just going to increase the chances of spread. And, you know, like there is a lot of evidence that even for countries that had universal masking and succeeded, that did not do much contact tracing. Japan didn't do any. I'm talking the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia. They didn't have much tracing infrastructure in, but they had the universal masking, and they successfully fought down the spread of the virus.

Japan is amazing. Was the final goal elimination of the virus or herd via it can't find a host or via herd immunity? If it's via herd immunity, you might want to encourage people to get it, no? I don't think we have a lot of evidence for success of herd immunity yet. That doesn't seem like the, you know, to me that really doesn't seem like

your default assumption that that's what you should do. I think countries that are doing that, basically, mostly it's because they were underprepared at the beginning and sort of found themselves in a position politically where they had not much choice left, whether they acknowledge that that's what they were doing or not. I mean, if a vaccine could potentially be coming down in January, let's say, then wearing masks until January. As you said, it should be something that pulls us all together. I mean, it's not asking a lot.

We're locked in our homes, losing tens of thousands of dollars, and now you're complaining about wearing a mask? Like, let's just pull together. Instead of Rosie the Riveter, we need to have Rosie the, what is it, Myrna the Mask Maker or something. Mask Maker, Mask Maker, make me a mask. I never had much faith in the federal government commandeering factories to make ventilators, but certainly they could make masks.

They could make masks. There are mask companies banging on the door saying, give us space, find us a factory. We'll move some of our operations from china or we'll build machines in china we can import over here it creates jobs for um local people and you're able to onshore supply and make sure that you've got your own distribution that's it that gives you security in your supply chains and it means that you don't end up in a situation which is where the uk and the us found themselves you know in the as covid took off which is where the UK and the US found themselves, you know, in the, as COVID took off, which is where you're, you're shouting at China. And then you're asking them behind closed doors,

if they can send over millions of masks at the same time. Yeah. All right, gentlemen, it was, it's been an absolute pleasure. And I, I, I hope we're doing a public service here and I really want to try to help you guys get your, your word out. I'm more convinced than ever after just speaking to you and seeing you and, you know, kind of taking the temperature of your credibility that I... No, no, you know, it's true. Like, we had Alex Berenson on, you know, Alex Berenson. And afterwards, I was like, you know, I'm just not buying this guy. But you guys, I feel even more confident about. So anyway, be safe.

I know none of us are wearing masks, so I guess. Oh, God, you're close. They get the credibility. I'm sitting in a crowded bar here, actually. You can't tell. And if they do open the world up again, I'd love to meet you guys in person if you ever want to come down to the Comedy Cell

and hang out and have a drink. Anything else? That's it? Thank you so much. If somebody can invent a mask that doesn't kill my ears, I'd be most grateful. Perio, send me the link to this as soon as you possibly can tonight

so I can send this. I have somebody in mind. I want to send it to them. I will. I have one more question, which if you guys have to go, you don't feel obligated to stay. Noam or Dan could maybe help answer this. So wearing a mask I know helps you to not get other people sick, but doesn't it prevent you at all from getting sick? Or is that contingent upon if you're wearing a KN95 or a cloth mask? Exactly that.

So the disposable surgical masks or the custom-made masks, see them as protecting other people. And then the N95 masks with the filtration in, the ones that our doctors and nurses wear, they're the ones that protect the wearer. What about the KN95 ones? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And by the way, I just bought a hundred of them. They're available on the internet. You guys wait one second, just for the viewer. One second. Hang on.

Yeah. Don't, don't wear the masks that have the exhalation valve. Those are made for medical workers who have to be confronting patients for 24 hours a day. And so they're designed to let them exhale with no effort. And there are little flaps that open up on the exhale. That will do nothing to help protect the people around you. So we need to really, to Ryan's point,

separate medical PPE from the kind of non-medical masks that we're talking about here for the general public. That's a huge point. I'm happy you said that. I'm happy we stayed on to do that. Go ahead, Perry Alden. Okay, just for viewing, if we're going to really do a public service announcement, let's do them properly. This is just a cloth, regular cloth. You see I have my little I love New York sign there. Nice.

This is not going to prevent, this is going to prevent you from getting other people sick, right? Yes. Yep. other people sick, right? Yes. This is a disposable surgical mask, which I actually got the last time I was in the comedy cellar before you guys closed. Same, same. I'll protect others. This is a KN95

mask. Nice. Okay. Hot. They gotta go. Okay, Hot. They got to go. Okay, they can go. Well, no, I want to go too, actually. Well, you can go in a second.

And the last one is the N95, which are for the doctors and the healthcare workers. Oh, they're the same. K and the N are basically the same from what I understand. No? The N95s are better. Right, guys? It depends on the may.

They're fairly comparable. Okay. All right. So that's what I've got. Okay, gentlemen. Really, I can't say it enough. This was fantastic. I really appreciate it.

And please, hopefully we can talk again when something new happens in this on this issue where can everybody find you guys Dakai we have your site up and Ryan

I'm at Twitter at Dakai D-E-K-A-I 1-2-3 that's my Twitter

nice and I'm on Twitter as well so it's Ryan and then underscore Wayne which is W-A-I-N. And you can find me on the Tony Blair Institute website as well. Thank you guys so much. You were so nice to come on and it's been nice chatting with you over email too. And I'll let you know when this is up. Pleasure. All right, guys. Thank you. And you can find us at,

at live from the table on Instagram. And you can email us at. Podcast at comedy seller.com. Thank you. Bye everybody.