COVID-19 and face masks: To wear or not to wear?

Many countries around the world recommend that people wear masks in public as part of their strategy to curb the pandemic. We look at why some people do not wear masks and discuss what scientific evidence says about wearing them.To get more news about Quality Medical Mask, you can visit tnkme.com official website.

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Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and other experts have debated whether the general public should wear face masks and whether these masks should be medical grade masks or homemade face coverings.

From early April onwards, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States recommended that people wear homemade face coverings in places where physical distancing is impossible.

Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have made wearing a face covering on public transport mandatory.

The World Health Organization (WHO) long shied away from such recommendations, maintaining that only healthcare professionals, those who currently have the new coronavirus, as well as those caring from them at home, wear medical grade masks.

But in early June, the WHOTrusted Source released a list of recommendations suggesting the most appropriate types of masks to wear in a variety of settings. This included the use of non-medical masks in crowded places and public transport.
1. Masks offer no protection to the wearer
Claims: Masks are not an effective way of protection from the new coronavirus, only N95 are, and masks have disclaimers saying they cannot prevent someone from acquiring the new coronavirus

These claims represent the essence of the argument around whether to wear a mask. The primary aim of asking the general public to wear masks where physical distancing is not possible is not to protect the wearer.

Instead, this public health measure aims to stop people with a SARS-CoV-2 infection who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic from transmitting the virus. Experts refer to this as source control.

Rather than protecting the wearer, source control seeks to block the release of virus-laden droplets into the air that surrounds the person wearing the mask.Prof. Trisha Greenhalgh from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom has voiced her support about using face masks in several prominent research journals, such as The BMJTrusted Source.

“The argument that we should not recommend face coverings because there are no published experiments is out of step with other public health policy on infection control in general and [COVID-19] in particular,” she recently wrote in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical PracticeTrusted Source.