We can make better masks

• We’ve been wearing masks for almost a year and we’re still not doing it right.
• It could help to design better masks and create standards and labels for them.
• The same goes for fines, as South Korea has done.
• This article is one of a four-part series on the Easy Ways to Fix America’s Biggest COVID-19 Mistakes. Click here to read more.
• Check out more stories on the Insider company page.

Over the past year, we’ve gone through at least four major cultural shifts when it comes to wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

First, we heard: don’t wear a mask! Save them for primary care health professionals caring for sick patients.

Then: OK, wear a mask, but make it yourself.

Next up: pretty, pretty please wear a mask as they really work pretty well. Health workers, try to get your hands on an N95 if possible.

And now: wear a mask (or two!) That is most comfortable for you, and make sure it filters and suits your face the best.

It’s been a painful learning curve, but we discovered during this pandemic that masks can help us preserve our germs when we’re dealing with a virus that often spreads without symptoms and what people are generally most contagious for before they know about that they are sick. for ourselves in ways that are lifesaving yet simple.

The truth is, masks will be with us for many months to come, especially in public areas, indoors. Yet we are still largely in the dark about how to put on a good one when we leave home. There is no way to try on your mask, no one (really) enforces wearing a mask in public, and there is no clear guideline on the best masks for different purposes.

Researchers and Health Policy Experts Agree There Are Three Simple Ways To Make Our Masked Lives Better

Attach the mask

1. Copy the playbook from NASA

NASA often has to address tricky logistical issues when planning how to get people (and their digestive system) into space.

Toilets in particular have been a challenge for decades. When the agency’s in-house engineers are left empty-handed, creative new solutions are sought.

In 2020, NASA offered $ 20,000 to anyone who could design a toilet that could work on the moon. In 2017, the agency awarded $ 15,000 to a flight surgeon who found a way for astronauts … to relieve themselves while trapped in their space suits.

Why couldn’t the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention run the same kind of crowdsourced, challenge-based mask hack-a-thon?

“There is a mask waiting to be invented,” said Dr. John Brooks, the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer for COVID-19 response, recently told Insider. “A mask that is easy and comfortable to wear, that filters beautifully, that is easy to maintain and that is attractive.”

So where’s the prize money for that?

2. Make good, clear, evidence-based mask rules – and make it expensive to break them

Associated Press

You don’t need the same kind of virus protection in a crowded supermarket as you do in a quiet neighborhood.

Virus expert and University of Maryland professor Don Milton know this well: he wears a simple surgical mask when he goes for a walk.

“But when I go to the supermarket, I put my N95 on,” he told Insider.

In South Korea, it is expensive not to be properly masked in public, but only when it matters the most. Masks are mandatory on public transport, in buffet lines and in the gym.

Scarves, valve masks and chin masks are not enough, says the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, suggesting people are sticking to wearing models approved by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (but still “ cloth masks or disposable allow masks’). masks that completely cover both mouth and nose “to do the job.) Violators can be fined about $ 85.

3. Give people better quality masks

Aldara Zarraoa / Getty Images

Early in the pandemic, David Rothamer, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, turned his home into a high-end mask factory, hiring his partner as a head seamstress.

“I just wear the masks my wife makes,” he recently told Insider. “It’s nice to everyone.”

When he needs to run a quick errand to the hardware store, he jumps on a mask she made that has been lab tested for performance against tiny viral particles. He says it is “just three layers of spun-bonded polypropylene” sewn together using a pattern.

But he doesn’t think everyone should make these kinds of sophisticated, homemade masks.

“The somewhat frustrating thing is that I think there was an opportunity to say, ‘OK, we can use scientists to design this, use experts, design something that is cheap to produce, do it in large quantities, and then bring it out ‘, ”he said. “But instead you basically have an unregulated line of products, nobody really knows how they perform unless you’re someone like me who has a few hundred thousand dollars in equipment to test it.”

The government could create better mask standards (as South Korea has done), regulate and enforce labeling protocols that would keep us safe, while at the same time showing that different masks have different levels of performance. Then it could make hundreds of millions of good quality masks available to people in the US.