New Studies Show the Effectiveness of Different Types of Masks

New studies have come out talking about how COVID has transformed and how we can all protect ourselves. One important aspect about protecting yourself is making sure to wear a mask when in large crowds and when you are indoors. While this is where many people stop, it isn’t where the science does. Because of the new variants flying around, new studies and research must be done. Through new studies we can see how cloth masks provide basically no protection against COVID, surgical masks provide a small amount of protection, and only the N95 and KN95 masks provide a good protection with an efficacy in the high 90 percentages. A quote from Mike Osterholm, (Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research) says “Assuming no protection (not wearing any face covering) at 15 minutes in a room, you get five additional minutes of protection when wearing a cloth mask, and ten minutes when wearing a surgical mask. But, when wearing a tight-fitting N95 mask, you are given an additional 25 hours of protection.”

After many people got vaccinated, they thought that for them, this pandemic was over and COVID was a thing of the past. For a bit of time this was true, but then came in the new variants. Causing more hospitalizations, affecting younger people, more transmissible, more dangerous. Because of this and some deciding to not get vaccinated, this blend has caused this pandemic to keep on going. While the vaccinated population does not get affected by this, they get affected by something else, breakthrough infections (a person who gets infected after getting vaccinated). With such a large portion of unvaccinated individuals, this virus is just being fed to spread more and more which leads to more, breakthrough infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. For all of these reasons, masking is still so important, and effective masking even more so. From the data presented above, we can see how if you are sitting in a room with someone who has COVID, when wearing a cloth mask, you are granted 20 minutes of protection, and when wearing a surgical mask, 25 minutes. This is a massive gap from the 25 hours of protection an N95 mask gives you. This information raises questions on what masks should be required by the state and especially by the schools where kids are getting more and more affected by these new variants.