Eric Shawn: Wear a mask
Rep. Mike Gallagher says it is a small price to pay to reopen the economy.
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Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the question is not just should you wear a mask, but what kind.
A young man known as The Poof Daddy with platforms on various social media, from TikTok to Instagram, made a sock hack for a coronavirus mask -- a simple way to keep safe.
The video, which has been seen at least 14 million times on TikTok, shows Joshua taking a Nike sock and cutting it up to make a mask.
Researchers have found that wearing surgical masks can significantly reduce the rate of airborne COVID-19 transmission, according to a study released on Sunday.
The study, conducted by a team of scientists in Hong Kong, found the rate of non-contact transmission through respiratory droplets or airborne particles decreased by as much as 75 percent when masks were used.
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“The findings implied to the world and the public is that the effectiveness of mask-wearing against the coronavirus pandemic is huge,” said Dr. Yuen Kwok-yung, a leading microbiologist from Hong Kong University who helped discover the SARS virus in 2003.
The study was released by the department of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and comes as world leaders, including the World Health Organization (WHO), have questioned the effectiveness of face coverings outside of medical settings.
The study, described as a first of its kind, placed hamsters in two cages, with one of the groups infected with COVID-19 and the other healthy. They placed the animals in three different scenarios to analyze the effectiveness of the face coverings.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also has recommended wearing masks in public settings to slow the spread of the coronavirus. A new study suggested that cases of COVID-19 could be cut significantly if 80 percent of people heeded this advice.
The research, published by a group of international experts, created a model that shows the cases could be cut significantly if "(near) universal masking" is adopted.
"Universal masking at 80 [percent] adoption flattens the curve significantly more than maintaining a strict lockdown," researchers wrote in the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
"Masking at only 50 [percent] adoption is not sufficient to prevent continued spread," the researchers added. Replacing the strict lockdown with social distancing on May 31 without masking results in unchecked spread."
The model the researchers built is known as the maskim simulator. One of the collaborators on the study, economist Guy-Philippe Goldstein, told Forbes that in addition to social distancing, wearing a mask is the only thing working "to flatten the curve of infections" as the world waits for treatments and vaccines.
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