As people around the world do their bit to help stop the spread of coronavirus — by social distancing, working from home, or other means — one question looms large: Should we be wearing masks when we do go out?
The World Health Organization on Monday stood by its recommendation that you only need to wear a mask if you are sick or caring for someone else who is sick.
But a growing number of other health experts argue that people should wear masks to help prevent the spread of the virus.
“We are not going to be wearing masks forever, but it could be for a short period of time after we get back into gear. I could see something like that happening for a period of time,” said President Donald Trump, during Monday’s White House briefing.
A source close to the coronavirus task force told CNN the idea of asking Americans to wear masks for a period of time during the pandemic was likely to be under serious discussion.
And the Washington Post reports that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is seriously considering changing its guidelines when it comes to mask use by the general public.
Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, wrote in a Twitter thread Sunday that “members of the general public should wear non-medical fabric masks when going out in public in one additional societal effort to slow the spread of the virus down.”
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, also wrote in a Twitter post Sunday that a recommendation from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “for consumers to wear cotton masks (with guidelines on how to fashion these products from household items) can improve safety and reduce spread and not strain the hospital supply chain.”
WHO and CDC experts have long argued that people who are not sick, nor caring for someone who is sick, should leave masks in the medical supply chain for healthcare workers who need them most.
The US CDC currently recommends that if you are not sick, “you do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick.” Yet in China, where the pandemic began, the Chinese CDC has recommended that people “wear a mask when going out.”
Some experts who have made the argument for people to wear masks have pointed to past research showing their effectiveness against the spread of influenza, and to early research on Covid-19.
A study published in the Journal of Hospital Infection in 2013 found that surgical masks could help reduce exposure to infectious influenza virus in the air.
Preliminary data on how the virus shed from 13 Covid-19 patients at the University of Nebraska Medical Center supports “the use of airborne isolation precautions,” such as masks. That early data currently is not published in a peer-reviewed journal.