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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Your Children Need to Wear Masks During a Pandemic? (Pedcast by Doc Smo and Sonya Corina Williams)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Your Children Need to Wear Masks During a Pandemic? (Pedcast by Doc Smo and Sonya Corina Williams)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:14:00
Publish Date: 2020-08-21 15:24:15
Description: Everyone wants to stop the scourge of Covid-19 as soon as possible. Masks seem to be an important tool to that end. In fact, they seem to be our most potent defense. In today's pedcast, I am going to pass on what I have learned about making masking as effective as possible and give you some tips on helping your children adjust to wearing them. Image by Pixabay Musical Introduction Goal of Masking Your Children When SARS-CoV-2 first came on the scene, spread was thought to happen mainly through touch of contaminated surfaces; things like doorknobs, pencil sharpeners, or shared food. Since those early days, many experts now feel that the SARS-CoV-2 germ can get into the air in a very fine form known as an aerosol and travel from person to person, just like smells do. If this is true, even being farther than 6 feet (2 meters) can infect a child or adult, especially if that exposure is in a poorly ventilated closed space like a small room for an extended period of time (currently thought to be 15 minutes or greater). If this is true, masks become an even more important tool to protect your children and family from getting Covid-19 because they reduce the spread outward of contaminated droplets and also impede the mask wearer's breathing in of aerosol. And masks seem to work. No matter how you feel about having your family wear masks, I think if you look around the world at places where masking is accepted as necessary, the spread of all types of viral respiratory infections is much more manageable and contained.  During sick season, the masks just come out without hesitation. In the U.S., What Have We Learned About Masking? So, what have we learned recently about masks with respect to the spread of viral respiratory infections in the U.S.? What does the science show? A recent study found the following when a person coughs; "With no mask, the aerosol jet extended an average of 8 feet from the head. A handkerchief folded according to instructions from the US Surgeon General reduced that distance to 1 foot 3 inches. A store-bought cone-style mask performed better, with the jet only extending 8 inches. The best result came from a mask stitched out of two layers of quilting cotton (second figure), which permitted only a 2.5-inch jet." Still not a mask believer? Consider a large study done in a huge healthcare facility Massachusetts recently where the healthcare workers were at high risk of getting infected. Here they had exponential growth (that's bad) of cases of Covid-19 until they instituted universal masking at which time, they found the infection rate to plummet. In fact, the director of the CDC recently stated that if everyone in the U.S. would mask appropriately, we could get control of the pandemic in 4- 8 weeks! And finally let's look at a study out of Missouri where two hair stylists tested positive and had symptoms but cut the hair of 67 clients. The stylists and clients were masked during the cuttings and guess how many of their clients or their contacts (169 people) came down with Covid-19? None! But we don't need to be statisticians to know that masks work, just look overseas to the Asian world to understand how effective they really are. Even though most of these nations are much more densely populated than the U.S., their daily Covid-19 illness counts are typically under 100. The U.S.'s on August 15th at the time I wrote this pedcast was 56,729. Does the Type of Mask Make a Difference to Its Effectiveness? Ok, we can see that masks are extremely effective and inexpensive devices to limit the spread of respiratory droplets but does the type of mask make much difference to its effectiveness? The answer is yes, mask construction matters.  One of the best being made of tightly woven cotton with multiple layers and tight fitting to the face. It goes without saying that covering the nose is fundamental to achieving mask effectiveness. In a study just published last week from Duke Univ...
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