Why more people are starting to wear two masks

In a comment in mid-December in the journal Cell on the science of mask-wearing, two experts wrote that one way for the public to get ‘maximum protection’ from masks was ‘to put a cloth mask tight on’ wearing a surgical mask the surgical mask acts as a filter and the cloth mask provides an extra layer of filter while improving the fit. ‘

When you combine several layers, ‘the air has to follow this winding path,’ Linsey Marr, a virus transmission expert at Virginia Tech, who was one of the authors of the Cell commentary, told The New York Times. ‘The big things [like virus particles] wearing it will not be able to follow the turns. ”

(Another alternative suggested by the authors: a cloth mask with a bag that can be filled with filter material, such as the one found in vacuum bags.)

‘I recommend that people choose masks based on the activity and the level of risk for the activity. If you go for a walk with a friend outdoors, it’s a simple two or three layer mask, ”said Joseph Allen, a professor of exposure assessment at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

“If you go to the grocery store or if you are an essential worker who comes in contact with a lot of people, I recommend that you wear a cotton mask over a surgical mask that can catch more than 90% of the breathing aerosols,” he said. Allen said Friday. by e-mail. ‘I also like this approach because most people do not have access [high-filtration N95 masks], but they do have access to a cotton and surgical mask. ‘

On Friday, dr. Dara Kass, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, who patients with coronavirus treated this spring and had the virus itself, declared her support for doubling. “If you are in a high-risk area and you are not vaccinated, double masking is the right way,” she tweeted.

Her tweet included a photo of Pete Buttigieg, President Biden’s nominee for secretary of transport, and his husband, Chasten, wearing double masks during the inauguration. ‘Always proud to see@PeteButtigieg and @Chasten to model best practices, ”she wrote.

Former US Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb said in a tweet on Monday: “We also need to be vigilant about the masking. The quality of the mask is now more important. N95 best, or double masking. ”

The website of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not mention double masking. The official recommendation is that people wear a mask of two or more layers of densely woven material that you cannot see, said Brian Katzowitz, spokesman for CDC. However, he noted that people who only wear single-layer cloth masks can double it to get the ‘recommended level of protection’.

Dr Paul Sax, clinical director of the Infectious Diseases Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, made a similar remark, saying that double masking makes sense if someone owns only thin masks.

Other experts said the new double masking methods could help, but noted that there was no research on the topic yet.

“Double masks are well intended, but they have not been studied,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said.

“If you want to wear a double mask, that’s fine,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It’s good common sense to have double barriers … but make sure you apply the first mask correctly.”

“I think the most important thing is to get so many Americans to wear and wear it correctly, which means they include the nose mask,” he said.

Dr. Abraar Karan, a global doctor of health and internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was a staunch supporter of better masks, said ‘all these solutions are important’, but he also warned that double masking is not a sure thing is not. .

“While MacGyvering your own mask at home is something that is tempting to do and that offers protection, there is really no guarantee,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.

He noted that for each mask a good fit is the key to the best filter, and that the authors of the cell have a better fit than one of the reasons for double masking, with a cloth mask ‘tight on top’ of the blue surgical mask.

Karan also said the interest in double-masking underscores the lack of high-filtration masks available to the public.

“The reason people are trying to create these solutions is that we do not have access to the masks that we know are already certified for health workers,” he said.

In an opinion column in STAT earlier this month, Karan and co-authors called for a national initiative to manufacture and distribute high-filtration masks such as the N95s used by health workers.

“Ideally, a set of masks would be mailed to every U.S. household each month – the cost of doing so pales in comparison to the pandemic for life and the economy,” the column said as President Biden was asked to cut defense production use. Act to intensify the production of masks.

Sax said it is also in favor of making high-quality masks available for free or at lower prices.

Good masks are key, experts say. A mask that is very effective in blocking the transmission of the virus through the carrier and transmitting the carrier against other people will prevent the virus from spreading.

This ‘makes the carrier essentially a dead end for the virus’, Karan said in the interview.

Now that the highly portable British variant has raised its head in the United States, effective masks are even more important, he said.

Materials from Globe Wire Services were used in this report.

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Martin Finucane can be reached at [email protected].