Are Cloth Masks Better Than Nothing?
If you’re like most Americans, there’s a good chance you’re going to wear a cloth mask today. Both of us wrote articles as far back as March urging people to wear homemade cloth masks. We’re also the authors of a paper titled “An Evidence Review of Face Masks Against COVID,” which was just published in peer-reviewed form in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But it’s past time for better solutions to be available to the public.
We first released the paper as a pre-print back in April, and it took nine months to go through peer review. Cloth masks, especially homemade ones, were supposed to be a stopgap measure.
They definitely help reduce transmission of the coronavirus from the
wearer and likely protect the wearer to some degree as well. But we know that not all masks are equal, and early on in the pandemic, there was a dire shortage of higher-grade masks for medical workers.
Even all cloth masks are not equal. Construction, materials, and fit matter, and these can’t be tracked or certified with homemade masks. Unlike cloth masks, medical-grade masks that adhere to standards such as N95 , FFP2 , and KN95 do a much better job of protecting the wearer and dampening transmission. No reasonable certification is available for the most useful masks generally available to the public.
Taiwan’s COVID-19 death rate per capita is more than 1,000 times lower than that in the U. Fixing this problem is more urgent now that a new variant of the coronavirus, known as the B. The cloth masks that we focus on in our paper do a good job at source control, but on their own they do not protect the wearer as well as medical-grade respirators do. Right now, while the CDC language on supply shortages has not been updated, it’s unclear if that’s because the shortages are really that dire or because this topic has not been paid sufficient attention. Not having higher-grade medical masks or even reliable, certified cloth masks distributed to the population means more transmission. If we could confidently tell people that the masks would also help protect the wearer from infection, we would likely get more people to wear them.
Even better, we could have distributed them to the public for free like so many other places. We need the CDC and the FDA to step up and provide simple, clear, actionable, and specific information that would allow the public to know which masks are reliable and where they can get them, as well as how to upgrade and better wear their existing options. A good supply of KN95 masks is available from China, with many supermarkets and pharmacies now selling them for a couple of dollars each.
But none of these solutions can work widely as long as the public has
little guidance on which masks are reliable and certified.
When, three months ago, one of us found FDA-certified KN95 masks at a local supermarket, she was shocked that they were just sitting in a large bin, next to similarly priced single-layer cloth masks. There was no run on them, because the public was not informed of their importance.
One person reached out to say that his fiancée was about to undergo an
organ transplant and was expected to do her rehabilitation wearing only
cloth masks. A hand-off of medical-grade masks was arranged.
Original Article Here...