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“It just makes sense that it would probably be more effective.”
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Dr. Anthony Fauci says two masks are better than one.
“It just makes sense that it would probably be more effective,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC’s Today Show this week. “That’s why you see people doing double masking or doing some version of an N95.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not issued official guidelines for double masking. It did not advocate wearing a face cover until April 3 last year to prevent the wearer from spreading the coronavirus, but since then health workers have said it also helps prevent the wearer from becoming infected.
“A mask is like an obstacle course through which particles have to pass,” Linsey Marr, a virus transmission expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, told AARP. A second mask “increases the chance that the particle will get stuck before it gets through.”
As of Tuesday, 99.9 million people worldwide had contracted COVID-19 and more than 2.1 million people had died. According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, the US had 25.3 million cases and 421,890 fatalities.
Fauci recently said he expects more people will be able to get vaccines to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by April. “I would expect that by the time we get there in April it will be an open season for vaccines,” Fauci told NPR. “Everyone will be able to get a vaccine. So I think by the end of the summer, if we get 70% to 85% of the population vaccinated and get good herd immunity, I think we can get close to some form of normalcy by fall. “
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US President Joe Biden signed a mask mandate last week for all federal workers and everyone on federal property. They should, according to the mandate, “all wear masks, maintain physical distance and adhere to other public health measures, as stipulated in the CDC guidelines.”
Fauci told NPR, “We want to get 1 million vaccinations a day. The idea of having everyone wear a mask for at least 100 days – at least. Everyone is uniform, so we don’t have inequalities where some people adhere to public health measures and others don’t. “
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Pfizer PFE,
and German partner BioNTech SE BNTX,
said that a final analysis of their vaccine candidate showed 95% efficacy. Meanwhile Moderna MRNA,
said his vaccine candidate was about 94% effective.
BioNTech and Pfizer said an in vitro study showed that their COVID-19 vaccine neutralizes the two new highly contagious variants that have emerged in the UK and South Africa. The results have been published on the preprint service bioRxiv and are not yet peer-reviewed.
A candidate vaccine from AstraZeneca AZN,
and the University of Oxford is safe and effective, showing an average efficacy of 70% in a pooled analysis of intermediate data, according to a recently published peer-reviewed study.