Wearing a Face Mask: China’s Experience

In the following weeks or even months, your state management is expected to advise you wearing a face mask to guard against coronavirus. According to the latest events, you ALREADY wear the mask.

For those living in Asia, such messages will be an example of a tactic that has been adopted across much of the region since the opening of the crisis and appears to have been borne out by lower prices of disease and faster containment of disorders.

In other parts of the world, this message may be confusing, coming after weeks of public health authorities, legislators, and media figures boldly claiming masks do not help and urging people instead to focus on washing their hands and having social distancing.

The tone of such cases ranged from proud to frustrated, with the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeting in late February — in all caps — “STOP BUYING MASKS!”

Current Pandemic

Writing last month, Adrien Burch, an expert in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that “despite hearing that face masks ‘don’t work,’ you haven’t seen any substantial evidence to establish that claim. That’s because it doesn’t live.”

There is evidence of the exact reverse: that masks help block viral diseases like the current pandemic.

Burch led to a Cochrane Review — a systemic analysis of written studies on a given topic — which found strong evidence during the 2003 SARS epidemic in support of wearing face mask.

One survey of society transmission in Beijing found that “consistently consuming a mask in public was compared with a 70% decrease in the risk of contracting SARS.”

White House task force actively discussing whether the public should be wearing masks, Fauci says

SARS, like COVID-19, is a respiratory illness made by the same family of viruses named coronavirus.

While SARS scattered around the world, the worst of the epidemic was focused in Asia, particularly mainland China and Hong Kong. The legacy of this event could be seen early on in the current pandemic, as news of a virus growing led people across the region to don face masks to defend themselves.

From the beginning, Hong Kong and many other Asian states have suggested people wear masks in public, whether they are showing virus symptoms or not.

Despite eye-rolling in some parts of the Western press and talk of Asia’s “obsession” with face masks, the tactic appears to have participated in helping to stem the explosion.

Taiwan, South Korea, and land China, all places with widespread mask use, have seen greater success in preventing major outbreaks or reining them in once they begin than in Europe and North America where masks are either not used or hard to come by.

Speaking to CNN, Ivan Hung, an infectious disorders specialist at the Hong Kong University School of Medicine, said that “if you look at the data in Hong Kong, wearing a mask is the most important thing in terms of disease control.”

At the commencement of March, Hong Kong had only around 150 cases of the virus, despite being on the frontlines of the pandemic since it began and not instituting many of the more draconian state controls seen elsewhere. The city has only seen a spike recently after people started to return to the city from Europe and the US.

Heightened Dissensions

In its guidance on the coronavirus, the CDC notes that it spreads principally “through respiratory droplets created when an infected person coughs or sneeze,” which “can land in the mouths or projections of people who are nearby or perhaps be breathed into the lungs.”

The agency suggests that individuals who are sick wear a face mask or otherwise try “to cover your coughs and colds,” while those caring for them should also wear a face mask whenever they are in the same room.

Yet, in the same advice, the CDC said that non-symptomatic “do not need” to wear face masks, adding that they “may be in short supply and they should be conserved for caregivers.”

Furthermore, this is what has been so frustrating and confusing for many people, especially those who support wearing face masks as a precaution. The CDC, along with the WHO and several other public health bodies and experts, has been together, claiming that costumes do not offer security in ordinary things while stating they are necessary for health operators and caregivers.

Wearing a Face Mask Truly Helps

Attempting to avoid mask deficiencies for healthcare operators appears to have been the main priority of those fighting against widespread their widespread use. But while the motivation behind this may have been right, such advice may have helped spread the virus, thus adding to the number of sufferers might hospitals.

One of the reasons the CDC’s Redfield gave for potentially changing the guidance on masks is that the coronavirus can be spread when people are asymptomatic, and therefore having everyone covering their faces — as has been the norm in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia since January — could help rein in the device.

That the virus is spread before people feel sick is not news, however. It’s been generally thought since the first weeks of the outbreak, and evidence has only grown stronger in recent months.

The lack of masks and other protective equipment in hospitals across the US and other nations should be treated as fast as possible. But these shortages were caused by policy missteps and supply chain issues, not a sudden run on 75 cent paper masks by concerned members of the public.

Because the evidence often comes round in favor of masks, we must ask how many attacks might have been withdrawn if in January, instead of saying covers wouldn’t help, officials and the media had instead begged for factories to ramp up internal production, gave guidance on how to make masks at home, and asked other countries to donate surplus materials?