The public doesn’t need to wear heavy-duty respirators.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may soon agree with
this assessment; the agency currently states that healthy people do not
need to wear face masks unless they are caring for someone who is ill
with the new COVID-19.
That
said, the public does not need to wear face masks most of the time,
said Dr. Otto Yang, a professor in the Department of Medicine and the
Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at the
David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los
Angeles.
If
you’re out for a walk — in essence, going to a setting where you can be
at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) from other people, “then I think that not
having a mask is fine and that fits the CDC recommendations,” Yang said.
The
discussion about face masks has become a national conversation. Many
people in the public are buying face masks to protect themselves. But
health care experts have urged against hoarding, since these supplies
are desperately needed in hospitals. Even the U.S. surgeon general
tweeted “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!”
“The
CDC, it’s like they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth,” Yang
said. “One side of their mouth is telling the general public, ‘Hey, you
don’t need masks, forget about it.’ The other side is, ‘Health care
workers need to wear N95 respirators.’”
“Is that a double standard?” Yang said. “Are they valuing some people more than others?”
Some
of the confusion about “masks versus N95 respirators” exists because so
little is known about COVID-19. At first, it wasn’t clear if the virus
spread predominantly through large respiratory droplets (like influenza)
or also through a fine mist, called an aerosol, which can linger for
hours (like measles). This great unknown made it unclear whether a
heavy-duty mask, known as an N95 respirator, which blocks the smallest
virus particles, or a regular surgical mask, which only blocks larger
droplets, was better suited to protect against the virus.
At
first, the CDC advised health care workers to wear N95 respirators
because it wasn’t clear whether COVID-19 could spread through aerosol. A
March 17 study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) seemed to
justify the fear of airborne spread, showing that the new coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 could survive in the air for up to 3 hours as an aerosol.
But
Yang doesn’t see it that way. The new study showed that the virus was
viable as an aerosol in a lab, but not in real life, he said. In the
study, the researchers “took extremely concentrated virus, much more
concentrated than a person makes, they used an artificial aerosol
machine [a nebulizer], which probably generates way more aerosol than a
normal person does,” Yang said. “So their conclusions were in this
system.”
The
researchers of that study looked at SARS-CoV-1 (the original SARS from
the 2003 outbreak) and SARS-CoV-2 and found that both could be aerosols.
“But we already know that the original SARS virus was not transmitted
that way,” in the general public, so that makes their model “not very
believable,” Yang said.
In
other words, except in certain hospital situations such as a
bronchoscopy, which essentially creates a fine mist of virus, SARS-CoV-2
is likely spread mostly through droplets, like the flu, Yang said.
That’s supported by a Feb. 24 case report in the Canadian Medical
Association Journal, which found a man sick with COVID-19 on a flight
from China to Canada in January did not infect his fellow passengers,
even though he had a dry cough during the 15-hour flight. The man was
wearing a face mask, but because no one else on the plane got infected,
this case “supports droplet transmission, not airborne, as the likely
route of spread of the COVID-19,” the researchers of the case study
found.
However,
it’s still unclear whether the virus can spread through aerosol. For
example, after the Skagit Valley Chorale in Washington met for rehearsal
on March 6, 45 of its members were diagnosed or showed symptoms of
COVID-19, at least three were hospitalized and two were dead within
three weeks, according to the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps the choir
singers’ forceful breathing as they sang dispersed the viral particles,
Jamie Lloyd-Smith, an infectious disease researcher at the University of
California, Los Angeles and a co-researcher on the NEJM study, told the
Los Angeles Times.
“One could imagine that really trying to project your voice would also project more droplets and aerosols, Lloyd-Smith said.
N95 respirator or face mask?
Due
to the N95 respirator shortage, the CDC recently relaxed its
guidelines, saying that among health care workers, face masks were “an
acceptable alternative when the supply chain of respirators cannot meet
the demand,” except in situations when respiratory aerosols might be
produced, such as intubation or nebulizer treatments.
In
addition to the shortage, N95 respirators are challenging to put on.
Doctors receive annual training on how to mold the respirator around the
face. As a test, doctors put on a hood and have the artificial
sweetener saccharin sprayed in. “If you’re wearing the mask properly,
you don’t taste any saccharin,” Yang said. But most people do, he noted.
For
this reason, the N95 respirator isn’t recommended for the public, since
it requires training to put on properly. Moreover, the N95 respirator
is thick, so it’s hard to breathe through.
In
a nutshell, the public does not need N95 respirators; they likely will
not be in a situation where they’re exposed to aerosol of the virus, and
these masks are needed by health care workers who will, Yang said.
“There’s no reason for the general public to wear N95’s,” Yang said.
However,
even regular face masks are in short supply, prompting the CDC to
recommend the use of bandannas and scarves when necessary. There’s not a
lot of research on homemade masks, but a small 2013 study found that
masks made from cotton T-shirts were effective, though not as good as
surgical masks.
“The
surgical mask was three times more effective in blocking transmission
[of microorganisms] than the homemade mask,” the researchers of that
study found, who noted that homemade masks “should only be considered as
a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected
individuals.”
Tiny & nasty: Images of things that make us sick
For
people opting to use scarves and homemade masks, Yang recommended
washing them after every use, and to stop wearing them when damp from
breathing. Wearing eye protection, such as a face shield or goggles,
could also physically block the virus, said Yang and Dr. James Cherry, a
professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the David Geffen School
of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles
.
In
a 1987 study Cherry did with colleagues, health care workers who wore
face masks or goggles were less likely to get respiratory syncytial
virus (RSV) from hospitalized children than doctors who did not take
these measures.
However,
unlike Yang, Cherry agreed with the current CDC guidelines, and said
that except for certain exceptions, the public doesn’t need to wear face
masks, as did Dr. Jaimie Meyer, an infectious disease specialist at
Yale Medicine. That’s especially true given that the safest way to avoid
being exposed, or exposing others, is to simply stay home.
“The
current CDC guidance says the general public does not need to be
wearing surgical masks,” Meyer told Live Science. “The best protection
is to focus on social distancing, hand-washing, not touching their faces
and bleaching high touch surfaces.”7,788,971,247Current World
Population-Recovered form COVID-19: 3,168,921
Do not Panic &
don’t kill yourself with unecessary fear. This posting is to balance
your news feed from posts that caused fear and panic.
SO DO THE DAILY THINGS TO SUPPORT YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM , PROPER HYGIENE AND DO NOT LIVE IN FEAR.
Join to Spread Hope instead of Fear.The Biggest Virus is not COVID-19 but Fear!
”Pain is a Gift
Instead of avoiding it,
Learn to embrace it.
Without pain,
there is no growth”
All
are Happy, Well, and Secure having calm, quiet, alert, attentive that
is Wisdom and equanimity mind not reacting to good and bad thoughts
with a clear understanding that everything is changing!
Murderer
of democratic institutions (Modi) collected crores of rupees through
unconstitutional secret trust only to the remotely controlling
Foreigners thrown out from Bene Israel chitpavan brahmins of RSS (Rowdy
Rakshasa Swayam Sevaks who also collect in the name of Guru Dhashana.
The
Executive, Supreme Court, Parliament, Media must see that the funds
collected by unconstitutional way are distributed to the needy suffering
by hunger, unemployment, under employment by COVID-19 -induced Curfew
‘draconian’ which has ended up decimating the economy and flattened the
GDP curve.