Actually, those are based on research and evidence. Would you like me to show you again?
In operating rooms, for example, it would be great if there was a way to keep all people out of the OR during operations. Since surgeons are required to be there, masks are a useful way to reduce hazards. I fully expect that robotic surgery, which is still very new, will be safer than wearing masks. But yes, they do reduce hazards. Six feet will keep the airstream of humans separated.
In reality, a standing human has an air fountain of microbes around them, moving mostly by convection. Six feet does provide adequate protection from that. Normal speech projects an airstream farther, and masks do greatly restrict such projection.
Meadow and his colleagues tested the ‘uniqueness’ of human microbial clouds by asking three volunteers to sit alone in a sanitised chamber filled with filtered air. They were each asked to put on an identical brand-new outfit so their clothing emissions would be the same, and sit in a disinfected chair and use a sterilised laptop to communicate to the researchers outside. For the first session they had to remain in the chamber for 4 hours and then after a break, returned for another 2 hours.
As each volunteer unwittingly shed their various microbes, they would be filtered out of the chamber and genetically sequenced so the researchers could figure out which types of bacteria each person contained. The most common bacteria they found were Streptococcus from the mouth, Corynebacterium and Propionibacterium from the skin.
The team then set up another experiment to see if they could use these microbe clouds to identify their volunteers. Eight new volunteers were asked to sit in the sterilised chamber for two 90-minute sessions, and their discarded microbes were analysed as they were in the first experiment.
"We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud," Meadow told CBS News. The results were published in the journal PeerJ.
Humans Can Be Identified by The Unique ‘Microbial Cloud’ That Surrounds Them