By Eric J Gruber
Published on: 2020-06-30
As mask-wearing begins to take center stage around the country, there’s a lot of questions about how masks might affect the wearer as they go about their daily lives.
Is wearing a mask all day safe? Will I get sick from wearing a mask too much? Will it restrict my breathing? Will I learn that I need to eat more Altoids?
There’s nothing wrong with asking these questions. We’re in a new world, and you only learn by asking questions. But I decided to take it a step further by doing a little experimenting.
Now, I’m a healthy individual, and most of my work involves sitting at a desk looking at a glowing rectangle all day. So, I figured I would wear a mask, and see how it affected me. But to make things more quantifiable, I decided to log my oxygen saturation levels of my blood with a pulse oximeter that I purchased in the beginning of May. You can find the exact one I purchased here.
To try and replicate a typical workday, here was my methodology:
A little bit about my mask: It’s a standard cloth mask that can be found for sale almost everywhere by people who can sew better than me. It has elastic loops, and a slot where I can put a filter inside of it. My filter is a blue shop rag from Scott I purchased from Home Depot.
So what did I find about my experiment?
But what about the data? Tell us about the data!
I put my data in this Google Sheet. Feel free to check it out for yourself. I’m happy to report that my pulse oxidation levels appeared to stay above the norm for the whole day, according to Mayo Clinic. I don’t think I would want to repeat this daily, as that would certainly require a new mask every day, and it isn’t the most pleasant experience to work with a mask on.
However, it is doable — at least for me — and it certainly beats shutting down a business.
TLDR; I wore a mask all day and didn’t experience anything negative, aside from not getting nearly enough coffee.