I wasn’t surprised when health officials told North American public not to get masks. It was obvious that they were needed for health providers.
I was a little more confused by U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, tweet which seemed a bit twisted in logic. Masks didn’t help the public but “if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Recently, I started looking at the countries who have been more successfully containing the virus and what they were doing. In most – although not all – people were wearing masks.
They’re not a perfect solution, but they do appear to reduce the transmission of the virus. That’s particularly important since we know we can have the virus awhile before we get symptoms or can even remain asymptomatic.
I like this article: it summarizes lots of information – and views the mask question from various angles including the whole airborne discussion.
As this article puts it so well, “The mask debate is so intense because both the stakes and the uncertainty levels are so high. “We’re trying to build the plane while we’re flying it,” Hanage said. “We’re having to make decisions with quite massive consequences in the absence of secure data.”
https://medium.com/the-atlantic/everyone-thinks-theyre-right-about-masks-bb184fa8b13c
