Day 126: The WHO Dons Masks

Massachusetts cases are up half a percent today. Protests and riots continue, but one should not ask whether COVID-19 is over now.

The Guardian reports that, in a surprise move, the WHO has come out in favor of masks with a vengeance. Take that old Metallica t-shirt off your head, because the WHO recommends the sorts of masks no one has: "medical grade" masks for the elderly and ill. They taunt the rest of us with complex homemade masks the likes of which Pinterest has never seen:

All others should wear a three-layer fabric mask: absorbent cotton closest to the face, followed by a polypropylene layer and then a synthetic layer that is fluid-resistant, the WHO said. It envisages that these masks can be made at home, but that small companies may begin to produce them, also providing jobs.

PlagueBlog's experience of making masks at home is a bit different from the WHO's pipe dream. You can't even get elastics to go around your ears anymore, never mind unspecified fluid-resistant synthetics or polypropylene (which is not merely non-woven mask filter material, though that was already difficult to source). At least the WHO only recommends masks when you can't socially distance, unlike certain tin-pot mayors in the US.

On the breathable side, the Finnish government has rejected mask requirements out of hand. As you may recall, their health ministry came down against them last week, and the government has sided with them against another panel who reported in favor of masks.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on the inadequacy of surgical masks in a medical context. (Cloth masks were right out.) The paper behind the article is Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis [PDF]. The PlagueBlog hopper also spit out a slightly older and more pessimistic paper on the topic of hospital protections: Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era, which focuses on other precautions in hospitals, and tosses off this gem early on:

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.