While wearing a mask shouldn’t replace hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing, experts say
As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, experts have started to question official guidance about whether ordinary, healthy people should protect themselves with a regular surgical mask, or even a scarf.
The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to state that masks don’t necessarily protect healthy individuals from getting infected as they go about their daily lives…
Studies of influenza pandemics have shown that when high-grade N95 masks are not available, surgical masks do protect people a bit more than not wearing masks at all. And when masks are combined with hand hygiene, they help reduce the transmission of infections.
When researchers conducted systematic review of a variety of interventions used during the SARS outbreak in 2003, they found that washing hands more than 10 times daily was 55 percent effective in stopping virus transmission, while wearing a mask was actually more effective — at about 68 percent. Wearing gloves offered about the same amount of protection as frequent hand-washing, and combining all measures — hand-washing, masks, gloves and a protective gown — increased the intervention effectiveness to 91 percent…
To read the entire article from The New York Times, click https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/health/us-coronavirus-face-masks.html?referringSource=articleShare
I have always suspected that the reason that Japan wasn’t hit by a COVID-19 outbreak is that it’s a culture where LOTS of people wear face masks LOTS of the time — whenever they’re sick or trying to protect themselves from becoming sick. Pretty sure the CDC was giving us bad advice when they told us not to wear them!
It never made sense to me when the public was told not to wear masks because they wouldn’t help prevent infection – besides, medical professionals need them…to prevent infection.
Exactly!