Joseph Allen from Harvard says ‘everyone’ should wear an N95 mask

Joseph Allen from Harvard says ‘everyone’ should wear an N95 mask

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The call for the federal government to ensure that high-throughput masks are available to all essential workers and that the general public grows.

Joseph Allen, associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, has a op-ed for The Washington Post on Tuesday set out the issue of why ‘everyone’ should wear an N95 mask at this stage COVID-19 pandemic.

Allen is not the only local public health expert who is campaigning for “better masks” as the pandemic continues. His colleagues at Harvard Medical School, dr. Abraar Karan and dr. Ranu Dhillon, insists on a national initiative which distributes high-filtration masks, such as N95s, to every household in the United States.

“I’m not alone in calling for better masks, and certainly not the first,” Allen wrote. ‘But I join the choir and ask for them. This could be the key to slowing down the pandemic and limiting the spread of the new more transmissible variants until we are all vaccinated. ‘

While a typical cloth mask is expected to take up about half of the breathing aerosols released when someone speaks or just breathes, high-end masks like N95s filter 95 percent, Allen writes. Two people wearing N95s result in a 99 percent reduction in potential exposure.

“In the early days of the pandemic of searching for information and tools, it was acceptable to just say that any cloth mask would do it, because it is true,” Allen wrote. ‘Any face covering is better than none. But we have learned so much since then, and we need to adjust our strategy. ”

The professor said that at this stage in the pandemic there is no reason why any essential worker – or anyone else – should be without better masks.

Before the pandemic, according to Allen, N95s cost about 50 cents and were easy to manufacture.

“We can reduce exposure by 99 percent for $ 1 per mask,” he wrote. “(Prices are now higher because of the failure to deliver enough supplies.) Throw in better ventilation and some distance between people, and you have protection in the hospital.”

According to dr. Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician and medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston Medical Center, says the United States needs not only a national effort to get hi-fi masks for the public, but the government should start releasing a standard for the masks available.

“It is unscrupulous that the American public has the largest use of PBT in history, and the quality of these masks is not moderated, standardized or regulated,” she wrote on Twitter. ‘It’s not just about N95s. It may not work in every situation, but there are other properties of good masks besides filter effectiveness, including fit and seal, the ability to resist moisture (from sweat and saliva) etc. These properties can be improved in consumer masks. ”

What is needed is the equivalent of Operation Warp Speed, “began the government initiative under the Trump administration aimed at accelerating the development, production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines for high-quality inexpensive PPE and improved ventilation in public places,” she said.

‘Do not get me wrong; ‘a mask is better than no mask’, she wrote. ‘Wear a mask. Use [the] an excuse of no high quality masks not to wear a mask is like refusing a life raft because you did not get a boat at the time. ‘

During a city hall on Wednesday night on CNN, dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top medical adviser to President Joe Biden at COVID-19, and dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new head of the centers. for the control and prevention of diseases and the former head of the infectious infectious disease for the Massachusetts General Hospital, was asked about the pressure on better masks. Both doctors said the general public does not have to wear N95 masks.

Boston doctors Karan and Dhillon, who have been advocating for a hi-fi mask program, have expressed frustration on social media over the reaction of Fauci and Walensky.

“We must do everything we can [to] stop the transfer to save lives now, prevent the spread of faster spreading lethal variants and the time to get vaccinated on a scale, ”Dhillon wrote in a Twitter thread to refute the argument of top officials.

Karan reiterates in his own thread that the argument for providing better masks is not as simple as ‘mass-producing N95s’.

“You still need to make sure that the fit is correct and that people use it consistently during situations with a high risk of transmission, as well as sometimes indoors,” he wrote.

Until there is federal leadership for expanding access to the high-filtration masks and better guidance for their use, Allen writes in his op-ed that if you can not find a better mask than ‘double mask’ with a surgical mask and a cloth mask.

“The surgical mask gives you a good, certified filtration, while the cloth mask improves on top of the fit,” he wrote. “Research shows that it can achieve more than 90 percent filtration.”

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