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How to stop your glasses steaming up – and 19 other essential facts about face masks
Jul 9, 2020
T he British have been slow to embrace face masks, despite calls from public health experts. Uptake has been just 25% in the UK, compared with 83.4% in Italy and 65.8% in the US. The president of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, said this week that wearing one “is the right thing to do” and that a refusal to do so should be seen as socially unacceptable as drink-driving or not wearing a seatbelt.
Perhaps one of the problems has been the changing advice as new evidence emerges. The World Health Organization (WHO) now recommends people wear cloth masks . Ramakrishnan said that in the UK, “the message has not been clear enough, so perhaps people do not really understand the benefits or are not convinced”. It also doesn’t help that the guidance across the UK is different.
In England, it is mandatory to wear a mask on public transport and in hospitals, for visitors and outpatients. From Friday, masks will be mandatory on public transport in Northern Ireland, and Scotland is also extending that to shops this week. In Wales masks are recommended, though not obligatory, on public transport.
A mask, says Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is a “means of reducing the propensity of someone who has got Covid-19 to spread it to others. We’re not talking about protecting yourself by wearing one, but about reducing the risk to other people.” Wearing a mask is just one measure, along with handwashing and social distancing, to try to contain Covid-19, and seems particularly useful for stopping people who have unwittingly contracted the virus, but who are not showing symptoms, from spreading (if you do have symptoms, you should be self-isolating, not going out wearing a mask) . “What you’re doing,” McKee says, “is catching all the little droplets that are coming out of your mouth before they can get into the atmosphere, when they can dry out and become very small and float around as an aerosol. There is still stuff that is going to get out, but you are reducing that risk.”
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