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Giving Compass' Take:
• While we still have much to learn about COVID-19, Vox's German Lopez details the mounting evidence for wearing masks as a proven transmission-reduction technique.
• How can we raise awareness about the evidence for wearing masks? What can you do to make masks more readily available across the world?
Over the past couple of months, the world has received more evidence that face masks really can play a crucial role in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s a significant shift from earlier this year, when the evidence for mask-wearing was so weak that government authorities and public health experts publicly cast doubts on face coverings as a preventive measure against the coronavirus.
Since then, scientists have done much more research on whether masks work, with new studies coming out over the past few months.
The research increasingly favors both individual mask-wearing and policies requiring universal masking. It suggests that masks not only help stop the spread of the coronavirus — by preventing the spread of virus-containing droplets that people spit out when they talk, sing, laugh, cough, sneeze, and so on — but that policies requiring masks work to significantly slow community transmission.
The growing research for masks also shows how important it is to be adaptable in a fast-moving disease outbreak. There’s still a lot about the coronavirus we just don’t know, such as whether kids widely transmit the virus and what forms of social distancing are most effective. How well a society does against Covid-19 could come down to how quickly it reacts and adapts to new evidence as we get it.
With masks, the evidence still isn’t totally definitive — science can be a very slow-moving process. But it’s increasingly pointing in one direction: During this pandemic, we all should wear a mask whenever we go out in public.
Read the full article about the evidence for wearing masks by German Lopez at Vox.