A Harvard medical expert has a simple plea during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: wear a mask, specially an N95 mask.
Joseph Allen, an associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said "everyone" should be wearing an N95 mask as the world continues to face a global coronavirus pandemic in an op-ed for the Washington Post published this week.
Allen said colleagues at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Abraar Karan and Dr. Ranu Dhillon, share his sentiment on calling for national hi-fi mask distribution in an effort to combat the ongoing pandemic.
“I’m not alone in calling for better masks, and certainly not the first,” Allen wrote via the Washington Post. “But I am joining the chorus calling for them. This could be the key to slowing the pandemic and limiting spread from the new more highly transmissible variants until we all get vaccinated.”
Allen said N95s filter 95% of the respiratory aerosols released when a person talks or breathes, while typical cloth masks are expected to capture about half of the potential exposure.
“In the scrambling for information and tools in early days of the pandemic, it was acceptable to just say any cloth mask will do because it’s true,” Allen wrote. “Any face covering is better than none. But we’ve learned so much since then, and we need to adjust our strategy.”
The Harvard professor said, at this point in the pandemic, all individuals should be wearing the most effective masks possible, but acknowledged that the cost of N95s -- which was previously about 50 cents to manufacture -- has drastically changed with the high demand created by the pandemic.
“We could reduce exposure by 99 percent for what should be $1 a mask,” Allen wrote. “(Prices are higher now because of the failure to produce an adequate supply.) Throw in better ventilation and some distance between people, and you have hospital-grade protections.”
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