As the US Death Toll Threatens to Reach 200,000
This was done much better on YouTube by a nurse, but anyone with a paper towel, two rubber bands and two staples can make a mask that is better than nothing because:
1. it keeps you from spreading germs if you cough
2. it keeps you from touching your face and infecting yourself
3. MOST IMPORTANT–it frees up N95 masks to go to the front lines–like my daughter’s colleague at Mt Sinai, the first nurse to die in NYC, a supervisor who didn’t have enough masks on hand to wear one himself.
| Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. spoke to a dozen leading epidemic-fighting experts. Whether or not masks protect healthy people is still being debated, but to remove the stigma from sick people who definitely need to mask up, EVERYONE should have to wear a mask in public. |
| The lesson from Asia, the experts told Mr. McNeil, is that by making masks mandatory for everybody, then the sick automatically have one on, and there is no stigma attached. “The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology,” he writes. A recent Boston Globe editorial points out that wearing a mask has the additional benefit of preventing us from touching our face, something humans do instinctively every couple of minutes. |
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In Thailand–where there have only been four reported deaths out 700 cases in a country of 70 million and with frequent tourist and business travel to and from China–the government has acted on the side of caution and locked down the country for three weeks. Like Italy, not easy for an exuberant, sociable society used to gathering in cafes and coffee houses…
(from a post with my Brown Class of ’68 page)
My current rant–because we are in the right age range–about face masks.
I chose to postpone my flight from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to JFK two weeks ago, partly because it was on Korean Air with a change of planes in Seoul, but largely because the US government looked woefully unprepared and was giving advice about wearing face masks that I believe is DEAD WRONG.
Despite huge tourist and business traffic between China and Thailand, there has only been a single reported death (by a smoker in his sixties with other health issues). The Thai government is corrupt and self-serving, but they turned Covid-19 over to medical experts, and as the medical faculty at Chiang Mai University advised my expat group a few weeks ago, people here DO wear N95, PM2.5 or similar masks. If they wear simple surgical masks, they dispose of them daily. What makes this admirable is that no people on the planet are my style-conscious than Thais.
It also helps the we “wai”–the Thai equivalent of “namaste”–instead of shaking hands.
Curmudgeon in the Land of Smiles 