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I posted a month ago how I tried to buy some masks but there were none to be had. Other posters told me to not bother and one even suggested that masks made you less safe. At the time, I let it go, but kept looking and eventually found some.
Guess what. Masks work. Of course they work. It's just common sense. Say I meet you on the street and one of us has the virus and the other does not. We are both wearing masks. The chances of it spreading to the other person are GREATLY reduced. We should all have been wearing masks from the start.
Telling healthy people that they should not wear masks would be fine if you could always tell when you were healthy. But that's not how Covid-19 works. People can be asymptomatic but still contagious and spreading it for days.
I get that the leaders wanted to stop panic buying and keep the masks available for medical workers. But I don't like being lied to. People will die because of that lie.
And no, it doesn't need to be an N95 mask. A regular mask isn't perfect but it's better than nothing. A bandana wrapped around your face is better than nothing.
Start wearing masks.
Guess what. Masks work. Of course they work. It's just common sense. Say I meet you on the street and one of us has the virus and the other does not. We are both wearing masks. The chances of it spreading to the other person are GREATLY reduced. We should all have been wearing masks from the start.
Telling healthy people that they should not wear masks would be fine if you could always tell when you were healthy. But that's not how Covid-19 works. People can be asymptomatic but still contagious and spreading it for days.
I get that the leaders wanted to stop panic buying and keep the masks available for medical workers. But I don't like being lied to. People will die because of that lie.
And no, it doesn't need to be an N95 mask. A regular mask isn't perfect but it's better than nothing. A bandana wrapped around your face is better than nothing.
Start wearing masks.
It's Time to Face Facts, America: Masks Work
Official advice has been confusing, but the science isn't hard to grok. Everyone should cover up.
WHEN YOU LOOK at photos of Americans during the 1918 influenza pandemic, one feature stands out above all else: masks. Fabric, usually white gauze, covers nearly every face. Across the country, public health experts recommended universal mask wearing, and some cities ordered residents to wear them under penalty of fine or imprisonment. The Red Cross made thousands of cloth masks and distributed them for free. Newspapers published instructions for sewing masks at home. “Make any kind of a mask … and use it immediately and at all times,” the Boston commissioner of health pleaded. “Even a handkerchief held in place over the face is better than nothing.”
After the 1918 pandemic, the prophylactic use of masks among the general public largely fell out of favor in America and much of the West. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has almost never advised healthy people to wear masks in public to prevent influenza or other respiratory diseases. In the past few months, with medical supplies dangerously diminished, the CDC, US surgeon general Jerome Adams, and the World Health Organization have urged people not to buy masks, paradoxically claiming that masks are both essential for the safety of health care workers and incapable of protecting the public from Covid-19. (WIRED's editorial staff, like the CDC, suggests that healthy people not wear masks.)
Recently, some experts have disputed this contradictory advice. They propose that widespread use of masks is one of the many reasons why China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have controlled outbreaks of coronavirus much more effectively than the US and Europe. “Of course masks work,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a New York Times editorial. “Their use has always been advised as part of the standard response to being around infected people.” Public health expert Shan Soe-Lin and epidemiologist Robert Hecht made a similar argument in the Boston Globe: “We need to change our perception that masks are only for sick people and that it’s weird or shameful to wear one … If more people donned masks it would become a social norm as well as a public health good.” Last week, George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that America and Europe are making a "big mistake" by not telling the public to wear masks during the ongoing pandemic.
It is unequivocally true that masks must be prioritized for health care workers in any country suffering from a shortage of personal protective equipment. But the conflicting claims and guidelines regarding their use raise three questions of the utmost urgency: Do masks work? Should everyone wear them? And if there aren’t enough medical-grade masks for the general public, is it possible to make a viable substitute at home? Decades of scientific research, lessons from past pandemics, and common sense suggest the answer to all of these questions is yes.
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It'''s Time to Face Facts, America: Masks Work | WIRED