Wear A Face Mask: The Life You Save May Be Your Own
- A shortage of N95 respirators made it appear imperative to discourage non-medical personnel from buying up all off the available N95 respirators on the market.
- Anyone who became ill after following that advice might have a cause of action against the government for having issued bad advice
- The government was attempting to conceal the fact that we didn’t have enough protective equipment for our medical personnel
- The government (which, for all intents and purposes, means the Trump administration) did not have the means to ramp up production of the face masks because most of them come from overseas, and mostly from China.
- Some people believed that, if everyone started to wear face masks, that this would contribute to the general hysteria (which might, in fact, have been a good thing.)
- The abject denial of an obvious fact that a very serious epidemic was spreading around the world.
There were – and there still are several very important reasons why it is imperative that you wear face masks whenever you go out in public:
- To avoid spreading the infection when you have not yet become ill and do not know that you are carrying the Covid-19 virus.
- To avoid inhaling particles of the virus in the ambient atmosphere around someone else who is distributing particles of the virus.
- To remind you not to touch your face when your hands might be contaminated with the virus.
However, regardless of the source of the contagion, wearing face protection was always the obvious solution. The reality is that regions where everyone was advised to don face protection have fared much better so far than the regions that have rejected face masks for all.
Over the past 48 hours, this advice has changed. As of April 1, the advice about face masks on the CDC website reads:”CDC does not recommend the routine use of respirators outside of workplace settings (in the community).”
Nevertheless, even though the CDC’s new advice is crystal clear, employers are still are still resisting this common-sense measure in retail, wholesale and manufacturing environments.In some cases, they have refused to provide face masks to their employees. It other cases, they have forbidden their employees to wear face masks at work in positions where they are face to face with customers. The employers are still citing the old CDC advice, even though it is out of date.
THIS MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY.
If you walk into a place of business where the employees are not wearing face masks, don’t shop there because you are shopping in a hazardous environment. You might also want to tell the manager of the store that you are not shopping there specifically because they have created an unsafe environment for their workers and for their customers.
Ron Powell
04/02/2020 @ 1:17 am
“A shortage of N95 respirators made it appear imperative to discourage non-medical personnel from buying up all off the available N95 respirators on the market.”
It is my understanding that the N95 face mask is not specifically required for use by the general public to achieve the desired goals and effect.
The less expensive and more accessible common or garden variety face mask will do for the purposes you outline in your post…
Alan Milner
04/02/2020 @ 10:31 am
The N95 mask isn’t even that good. You were able to buy masks from Home Depot that were ventilated and much better at filtering out tiny water droplets as in like paint. I didn’t say that the N95 masks were necessary. I have said that anything, even a bandana, was better than nothing. However, it is a fact that the CDC and the WHO were discouraging the use of masks at all to protect medical supplies….and they said as much at the time.