What mask materials are best?
What mask materials are best?
A new study says that bandanas and neck gaiters may be worse than you think.
Welcome to Not a Doctor, the only newsletter demanding MORE PPE! MORE!!!
I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth (out in November!). I’m not a doctor, or a scientist, or really an expert of any kind. I just like to ask questions and try to find the answers to them.
Today, we’re talking about a new study on mask materials. You might already know what works — but you might be surprised by what was worse than wearing nothing at all.
Cotton masks, pleated to fit snugly on your face, are one of the best ways to protect others. Photo: slgckgc/Flickr
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Which materials protect others from what I’m breathing out?
When I asked Joshua Santarpia, an associate professor of pathology and microbiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, about whether we should wear masks, he said that’s not really the right question.
More important, he said, is how to wear masks properly, and which materials are best.
“I really need, want, someone to come in and say, please, make your mask like this, do it like this,” he said. He would love to see standard sizes and widths, like we do with shoe sizes. “We need better masks for people — better fitting, better quality,” he said. He particularly wanted to know which materials block the virus the best.
Loyal readers of this newsletter are already pros at taking care of masks, from donning and doffing them to cleaning and storing them properly. We also know that medical masks work, and that our understanding of all types of masks is changing.
This week, new research was released on how well different types of masks keep you, the wearer, from spreading the virus. (It’s still not clear how well different materials protect you.)
For the most part, the study is comforting: two layers of pleated cotton, for instance, do pretty great job at blocking whatever you’re breathing out.
(Two layers did better than one, but the researchers didn’t look at more layers than that. Confusingly, in this graph, “Cotton5” and “Cotton2” refer to different designs both involving two layers of pleated cotton.)
But there’s one startling result here: bandanas and knitted masks don’t do nearly as well. And neck fleeces — the circular pieces of cloth you can pull up over the lower part of your face — actually did worse than wearing nothing at all. Droplets still push through the material, but they are split into smaller pieces, which can be much more dangerous.
Edit to add: It’s important to note that this was not a rigorous study comparing different types of material within these types of masks — they only used one type of neck gaiter, for example. And it’s also REALLY important to mention that they only had one participant in the study, making it n=1. So while this gives some food for thought on different types of materials, it is by no means definitive.
The idea that anything is better than nothing doesn’t seem to be true. A couple of layers of cotton, pleated so that they fit against your face snugly, are a solid bet when it comes to cloth masks.
Not surprisingly, though, medical masks — N95s and surgical masks — did better than cloth in this study. It’s easier to find some of these masks now, but we need to continue making sure that anyone working or visiting high-risk environments — not just medical and dental offices but also restaurants, grocery stores, offices, libraries, and more — has plentiful access to personal protective equipment.
Working in a safe environment is essential for essential workers, and that includes continuous access to PPE.
I am so impressed with everyone donning whatever masks they can find and continuing to go to work, but it pains me deeply to know the risks we ask others to take every single day. And I know that returning to work is not a choice for many workers. If this work is essential, if we acknowledge that it’s necessary to keep our world going, we must continue to protect those who perform it.
Next: businesses need to work on other solutions to protect their workers, like better ventilation and air filtration, if we’re not going to take decisive action as a nation to stop the pandemic in its tracks.
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