Wear a mask. Those three words, the simplest of commands, mask a staggering degree of scientific complexity. Make no mistake: amid this pandemic, you should wear a mask when in close contact with others outside your immediate circle, when in enclosed spaces with others outside the family bubble, and when in crowds outside or inside. But the science behind mask-wearing – like so much of the science related to the COVID-19 pandemic – remains a work in progress. The State of Colorado mandates – and many Colorado counties require – masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing…READ MORE: https://northdenvernews.com/the-strong-scientific-basis-for-wearing-a-mask-covid19/
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Wear a mask. Those three words, the simplest of commands, mask a staggering degree of scientific complexity. Make no mistake: amid this pandemic, you should wear a mask when in close contact with others outside your immediate circle, when in enclosed spaces with others outside the family bubble, and when in crowds outside or inside. But the science behind mask-wearing – like so much of the science related to the COVID-19 pandemic – remains a work in progress. The State of Colorado mandates – and many Colorado counties require – masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing masks; the World Health Organization does too; UCHealth requires masks in hospitals, clinics and administrative areas. One model created by Colorado scientists assumes that masks reduce a wearer’s contagiousness by as much as 50%. “If you’re not social distancing, I think you should be wearing a mask,” said Dr. Michelle Barron, medical director for infection control and prevention at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “It’s really to prevent others from being exposed to your droplets and spittle without even knowing it.” The scientific questions surrounding masks – homemade or store-bought cloth masks and surgical-style masks, not the still-scarce N95s that health care workers need more than we do – are more nuanced. The mask-skeptical arguments rest on a couple of pillars. One is that there’s little in the way of convincing, peer-reviewed proof that regular folks wearing cloth masks are protecting themselves or anyone else from COVID-19. Another is that many such masks aren’t great in the first place, and even good ones often aren’t being worn properly (that open-air nose defeats the purpose). Yet another is that masks may lull the wearer into a false sense of security in the crowded places and tight spaces where transmission risk is highest. No less an authority than University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said in June: “The messaging that dominates our COVID-19 discussions right now makes it seem that, if we are wearing cloth masks, you’re not going to infect me and I’m not going to infect you. I worry that many people highly vulnerable to life-threatening COVID-19 will hear this message and make decisions that they otherwise wouldn’t have made about distancing because of an unproven sense of cloth-mask security. Distancing remains the most important risk reduction action we can take.” Then why wear a mask? The science that supports wearing masks One reason is that the science of masks is evolving, and all indications are that it’s evolving toward the theory that masks are an effective way to slow the pandemic’s spread. There are indeed few peer-reviewed studies on the effectiveness of masks on slowing the spread of the coronavirus. That’s because the human disease the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes is still just months old. COVID-19 studies take time; so does peer review. More research, rest assured, is coming. Until then, we must largely rely on work that predates COVID-19 and mathematical models of the disease based on best estimates of how well masks and other coronavirus countermeasures work. A 2015 study done in Vietnam compared cloth masks to surgical masks among 1,607 hospital health care workers and found that those wearing cloth masks ended up catching influenza more often (there was no mask-free control group). The same research group recently revisited the topic amid the COVID-19 epidemic. They concluded that, while health care workers need N95-class protection, “The general public can use cloth mask..
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