Bill Nye, aka the “science guy," wants to set the record straight about the effectiveness of masks when it comes to curbing the spread of COVID-19.
In fact, he’s brought out some household props along with a generous serving of sarcasm and sound effects to help make his point perfectly clear.
In the video, now viewed tens of millions of times over, Nye boiled it down to the basics.
He starts with a map of the U.S. dotted with red ink splotches indicating places across the nation where mask usage is most prevalent. He then places a transparent overlay across the map with black ink showing where people are getting sick. The visual is pretty straightforward: “the fewer the masks, the more the sick.”
Next, the science guy pushes a stick through a metal colander to visually represent claims made by anti-maskers that a virus will power right through. But Nye isn’t having any of that. He pulls out what looks like a plinko board and drops a couple of balls - representing “spit” and “snot” droplets - into it. Instead of bouncing along the pegs on the vertical board to the bottom, the balls end up stopping along the way demonstrating how respiratory droplets would get stuck in the fibers of a mask.
Nye added "This is not that hard to understand everybody."
Within days of the video’s posting on TikTok, it had been viewed nearly 14 million times with 4 million likes.