I started wearing a mask at the end of February because I happened to have some (from the choking smoke in California last summer) and I figured it made sense. I wasn’t the only one. From the beginning, there were a few people like me and I assumed it would become a normal thing. But then the authorities said they were actually bad because people would touch their faces, which seemed silly to me — just don’t touch your face! And obsessively wash your hands and use hand sanitizer!
I realize they wanted to save the medical-grade masks for the health care workers because there was such a shortage but that bad advice during a pandemic was unhelpful. The medical people need to take a hard look at whether they did more harm than good with that.
Anyway, I’ve been a mask believer from the beginning. Here’s some new evidence that short of a vaccine, they are one of the few strategies that help reduce the spread of the virus.
As the debate over the effectiveness of wearing masks during a pandemic continues, a new study gives weight to arguments by medical professionals and government leaders that wearing a mask does indeed reduce virus transmission — and dramatically so.
Experiments by a team in Hong Kong found that the coronavirus’ transmission rate via respiratory droplets or airborne particles dropped by as much as 75% when surgical masks were used.
“The findings implied to the world and the public is that the effectiveness of mask-wearing against the coronavirus pandemic is huge,” Dr. Yuen Kwok-yung, a leading microbiologist from Hong Kong University who helped discover the SARS virus in 2003, said Sunday.
The study was released by the department of microbiology at The University of Hong Kong, and local media state it will be published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases medical journal, suggesting it is yet to be peer reviewed. The sample size was also reportedly in the double digits.
The team’s conclusion comes after months of conflicting information from world health bodies concerning masks. The World Health Organization has questioned their effectiveness outside of medical settings, while governments including those in the U.S. and U.K. initially urged citizens to leave them for health worker use, only to later make a U-turn and encourage widespread mask-wearing.
The study, which the Hong Kong team calls the first of its kind, used hamsters in two cages; one group of hamsters infected with Covid-19 and the other healthy. The researchers created three different scenarios: mask barriers placed just on cages with the infected subjects, masks covering the healthy subjects, and one with no mask barriers at all, with a fan between the cages allowing particles to be transmitted between them.
With no mask barriers at all, two-thirds of the healthy hamsters — 66.7% — were infected with the virus within a week, the researchers found.
When the mask was placed over the infected cage, however, that infection rate dropped to 16.7%.
The infection rate went up to 33% when the mask barrier was only used to cover the healthy hamsters’ cage.
The hamsters who were still infected despite having the mask barrier also had less of the virus in their bodies compared to those infected without the masks, the researchers found.
“In our hamster experiment, it shows very clearly that if infected hamsters or humans — especially asymptomatic or symptomatic ones — put on masks, they actually protect other people. That’s the strongest result we showed here,” Yuen said.
“Transmission can be reduced by 50 (percentage points) when surgical masks are used, especially when masks are worn by infected individuals,” he said.
It’s obvious to me that a lot of people just aren’t going to do it for a variety of reasons. But even if some of us do it, it will reduce the spread. And I take heart in the finding that the infected hamsters that wore masks had less virus in their bodies than those who didn’t have the masks. Every little bit of advantage helps.
So, I will keep wearing the mask:
