Superheros nod approvingly

An unnamed woman in her 30s visited a Starbucks in Paju City, South Korea earlier this month, according to the Korean-language news site Insight. She stayed there for more than two hours drinking her coffee and chatting with friends and she obviously wasn’t wearing a face mask while she was drinking her coffee. She sat on the second floor of the two-story Starbucks establishment, and there were six ceiling-mounted air conditioners in the store. The woman was infected with COVID-19 at the time of her visit. During the two-plus-hours she spent at the Starbucks, she spread the novel coronavirus to 56 other people who visited the store.

The reasons for the outbreak at this Starbucks are beyond obvious. The infected woman drank her coffee in the store without a face mask on and the air conditioning spread droplets and aerosols she exhaled all over the store. Anyone who took his or her mask off to drink coffee — or anyone who wasn’t wearing a mask at all — would have had a high risk of exposure regardless of how long they were inside. But there were four Starbucks employees who were in the store the entire time this woman was there, and several of them even had close contact with her. Not a single one of them caught COVID-19 from this super spreader. Can you guess why?

That’s right, they were wearing face masks. And because the Starbucks employees kept their face masks on at all times while inside the store, they were protected from the droplets and aerosols the infected woman exhaled.