COVID-19 Prevention & Treatment

Wear a Mask

“Protect yourself from others, and protect others from yourself.”  This is the logic behind wearing a mask to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and avoid getting sick with COVID-19.  There are several reasons why wearing a mask makes sense to prevent viral transmission.  As has been mentioned earlier, a sneeze or a cough can project droplets of respiratory tract fluid.  Research has proven that these projectiles can reach 6ft to 9ft away from the person who sneezed or coughed (more on this later).  If you are wearing a mask, you have less chances of those droplets landing on your mouth or nose, and therefore more chances of protection.  That is the concept of protecting yourself from others.  If they are carrying the virus, and they sneeze or cough your way without covering their mouths, if you are not wearing a mask you will possibly catch their respiratory tract fluids.  If you are wearing a mask, you will possibly have your mask catch their respiratory tract fluids before these make their way to your mouth.

What about protecting others from yourself?  Well, if you are carrying the virus, and you sneeze or cough, you will be projecting the virus through the droplets you sneeze or cough out.  Even if you cover your mouth with your hands, not only are you getting the virus onto your hands, research shows that much of the droplets still do not get trapped by a hand, especially if the hand is slow and too late to cover the sneeze or cough (which can often be the case).  Wearing a mask raises the chances that whatever you sneeze or cough out will be caught by your mask before it infects others.

Take note that a sneeze or cough can also project respiratory fluid in aerosol form, tiny droplets that can get suspended in the air for a few minutes (think of atomizers).  These aerosolized respiratory tract fluids can carry the SARS-CoV-2.  That means if someone sneezes or coughs, and creates an aerosol of virus-infected respiratory tract fluid, and you walk into that aerosol (because you could not see it and did not know it was there to begin with), if you were not wearing a mask you could breathe the virus in.  If you were wearing a mask, there’s a higher chance your mask will catch the aerosol before it gets into your mouth or nose.  Wear a mask.

There are several types of masks to choose from.  In a hospital setting, when dealing with COVID-19 patients, they use masks that filter out AT LEAST 95% of viruses (e.g. N95, FFP2, etc.) because of the higher risk they face, because the environment there is virus-rich.  For the ordinary persons going out to public places, higher-filtration rated masks like those used in the hospital setting would be beneficial, but not as needed.  Surgical masks (some of which are rated to filter out 80% of viruses) are cheaper, currently more easily available than N95 masks, and should be sufficient for general public use when physical distancing is observed (more on that later).  Cloth masks and handkerchiefs or bandanas, some of which are home-made, are not officially rated, but would still offer a layer of protection.  The level of protection offered by home-made cloth masks, handkerchiefs, and bandanas would be dependent on the thickness of the cloth, how many layers of cloth there are, and how easy it is for droplets to penetrate through the layers of cloth.  The rule of thumb would be, the thicker the cloth, the finer the weave, the more difficult for the droplets to get through.

Make sure to wear your masks properly.  If the mask does not seal around your mouth AND nose (not just one or the other) then those leaks on the side can become entry or exit points for droplets and aerosols.  Proper N95 or FFP2 masks, as well as surgical masks, have a strip of metal or wire that is meant to be formed to the contour of the nose when worn.  These masks are also sized according to the wearer’s face, it is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.  For cloth masks, it would be good to try to get it sized to one’s face to reduce those leaks around the mouth and nose.  Note that this also means it will not be as easy to breathe when wearing a mask.  This is to be expected, and to be endured.  Consider the possible consequences of not wearing a mask (i.e. higher chance of catching COVID-19) versus the discomfort or inconvenience of wearing a mask, and the choice would logically be obvious.  Wear a mask when going out to the public.

One more note about masks:  You need to change them from time.  Some hospital protocols, especially for those frontliners dealing with COVID-19 patients, require their masks to be changed every 3 to 4 hours.  This is because there is a high likelihood that the masks the frontliners wear would have gotten contaminated over that period of time in a virus-rich environment.  The general public will still get their masks contaminated, but as long as physical distancing is observed, changing masks every 3 to 4 hours may not be necessary.  It is difficult to generalize a protocol on regularity of mask changing, since different people use different types of masks, and have different places they go to, have different population densities in the places they go to, and observe different distances in physical distancing.  The rule of thumb is, your mask is likely to have gotten contaminated over the course of a normal day, change it after a normal day’s use.  If you suspect your mask is already contaminated (possibly because someone sneezed on you without them wearing a mask), change it if you can.  Of course, all this is dependent on mask availability.  If a replacement mask is not available, consider decontaminating your mask.  Note, that using solvents on surgical masks has the potential to compromise their filtering ability.