A 3-Step Strategy to Support the New U.S. Mask Mandate

We couldn’t agree more with the Biden administration’s plea for Americans to wear masks for 100 days and its mandates that people must wear masks on federal property and during interstate travel on airlines, trains, buses, and ships. These actions are crucial to address the surges in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations that are occurring across the United States this winter.To get more news about antiepidemic mask factory outlet, you can visit tnkme.com official website.

Although two effective Covid-19 vaccines are being distributed in the United States and others hopefully will be available soon, it will probably take until sometime in mid to late 2021 for enough people to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity and for life to start returning to normal in the United States. Widespread vaccination is expected to take multiple years globally. In the meantime, with the growing concern about Covid-19 mutations, CEOs, mayors, and governors should immediately take three steps to promote the effective use of face masks.

1. Launch an awareness blitz. To increase the utilization of masks and dispel misinformation, an effective campaign is needed to raise awareness of the mask recommendations. With few exceptions, all people should wear masks consistently when sharing airspace with others from outside their bubble of family, friends, and coworkers. They are not currently doing so.

In a U.S. national survey we conducted in December, over 85% of the 466 respondents said they were using masks to protect themselves and those around them (consistent with a similar survey by Pew in August), and 80% said they were using their masks at the grocery store. But only 56% said they used one when with people outside their home, only 48% were doing so at work, and just 33% were wearing them when someone visited their homes.

The usage of masks and the way they are being worn also varies from city to city: Using publicly accessible street cameras, we recently counted how many people were correctly wearing masks in one location in San Francisico (Castro Street) and another in Los Angeles (Hermosa Beach); while 90% of people in the former were correctly wearing masks, only 60% in the latter were doing so.

2. Communicate which mask types people should wear. In our survey, the majority (71%) said they were using basic masks (cloth or surgical masks), which are a reasonable option for people at low risk of contracting a severe case of Covid-19 and have limited exposure to the virus or to people outside their bubble. Regions in Kansas and Germany that required basic (any) masks had much lower rates of infection than regions that did not.

But people at higher risk of contracting a severe case of Covid-19 or who have exposure to others outside their small bubble may require a higher-filtration mask. For example, wearing a basic mask did not stop infections altogether on a long-haul flight in Boeing 777 equipped with HEPA filtration and among workers at a seafood-processing plant and meat processing plants. Surgical masks distributed on an Argentine cruise ship during an outbreak and in a Danish randomized controlled study did not prevent transmission altogether, although these masks may have reduced the severity of symptoms. Germany, France, and other European countries are now requiring high-filtration (medical) masks in public.

New standards being developed by ASTM International, an international standards organization, for labels that display the filtration efficiency of face masks for consumers are coming in the near future. Several options for high-filtration masks are considerably more effective in limiting the spread of Covid-19 than basic cloth masks or consumer-grade “surgical” masks.