The ongoing debate over facemasks

There is an ongoing debate amongst experts about how effective masks are when used by the general public – particularly those that are not of surgical grade.

This has been accelerated by cases demonstrated internationally where healthcare workers have been infected with the virus due to asymptomatic patients in the GP waiting room.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently recommended wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (such as grocery stores and pharmacies), especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

The CDC has also advised the use of simple cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others. It stresses that the cloth face coverings can be simple coverings fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials – not surgical masks or N-95 respirators that should be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders.

The Trump administration is backing this call, encouraging Americans to wear facemasks in public – but President Donald Trump says he does not intend to wear one himself.

“I just don’t want to wear one myself. They say ‘recommendation’, they recommend it. I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing – somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk, I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but this will pass, and hopefully it will pass very quickly.”

This is despite his wife Melania Trump asking the American public to take the advice from the CDC seriously.

New Zealand’s Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield and the Ministry of Health is considering whether to recommend that the public adopt similar practices. Bloomfield says the experience in Asia of routine face mask use appears to back up the position of the CDC, and has said some of the 40 million facemasks that are currently being imported by the ministry could be diverted for public use. Some clinics in New Zealand have already made the decision for themselves that all patients entering the clinic should be wearing a mask.

Regan Duff, a PhD student at the University of Auckland, is promoting a facebook group under the hashtag #masks4all. He wants New Zealand to adopt a similar media campaign to the Czech Republic where celebrities through the use of social media have spread the message for the public to wear their own masks.

He says the Ministry of Health could advise best practice, and then “give it over to social media influencers, celebrities and the like to spread the message across their networks and empowering people to take control of their own hygiene.”

A petition has been set up that will be presented to the Chief Science Advisor Professor Juliet Gerrard and the Prime Minister to back the campaign as part of their strategy to ‘flatten the curve’.

The petition argues that although high-quality masks may need to be reserved for processionals, homemade masks can also provide protection.

Siouxsie Wiles, New Zealand’s prominent science communicator throughout the Covid-19 crisis, has written a piece for The Spinoff where she says the facemask question is more complicated than it might seem at first. She writes that a facemask recommendation can lead to a false sense of security from the public when wearing one, and can lead to masks being panic-bought making it difficult to get masks to those who really need them.