Post #1720514

@Canageek Right? It's a pretty fascinating question. I have here an experimental research study from 1918 on the efficacy of face masks that was conducted in the earliest weeks of the Spanish Flu outbreak in the US, which started August 27th or 28th. How much trouble they were in only really started dawning on the military around Sept 7th; the article was by two Army scientists. The publication date on the article is the 12th of October. Its findings (6 ft is not enough for a safe zone for unmasked speakers) makes the Boston Globe on October the 14th, though uncited. It is possible, I suppose, that these researchers were felicitously already working on the problem when the Spanish Flu rolled over the US, but the opening words are, "The use of face masks by those whose duties necessitate their coming in contact with cases of respiratory infection has now become general" suggesting at least the writing up happened after the pandemic started. So at the very least they wrote up the experiments, if not conducted them entire, and submitted the manuscript to JAMA, and the journal managed to publish it, necessarily in hard copy, and distribute it wherever it wound up, in approximately ONE CALENDAR MONTH.