We’ve all expressed opinions about how history would have unfolded had Hillary Clinton won the Presidency in 2016. It turns out that Covid not only would have been less deadly, but we might not even have seen any widespread cases.
According to a new study published Sept. 8 in Royal Society Open Science, if only around half of the population opted to wear respirator type masks from the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 would have failed to establish in the United States.
I was going to boldface the important parts of that sentence, but couldn’t decide what wasn’t jaw-dropping.
“We were interested in determining effective ways to combat or mitigate the burden of a respiratory disease with pandemic potential during the very early stages, before pharmaceutical interventions, such as vaccines and antivirals become available,” Abba Gumel (leader of the research team, and one of my co-workers) said.
With COVID-19 rampaging the world, the researchers thought of exploring the potential impact of a widespread deployment of high-quality masks during the very early stages of the pandemic on the burden and trajectory of the pandemic.
Mixed messages have led to confusion and misunderstanding in the general public about masks and their effectiveness.
That’s gotta be the understatement of the week.
Previous mathematical modeling studies have focused on the role of cloth and surgical masks when adopted by a large majority of the population. What has not been clear is the potential role that respirator type masks [such as the N95, N99, N100, R95, P95, P99 and P100] could serve outside of health care and what level of use in the population would be necessary to have a significant impact.
Estimates for the efficiency of these filtering face-piece respirators are nearly 100% for charged biological particles such as respiratory aerosols.
The researchers formulated a basic mathematical model for the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in a population where a certain proportion habitually wear face masks. They considered four categories of face masks: cloth masks (with estimated efficacy of 30%), improved cloth masks or poorly fitted surgical masks (with estimated efficacy of 50%), properly fitted surgical masks (with estimated efficacy of 70%) and properly fitted respirators (with estimated efficacy of 95%).
- If 80% of Americans were wearing respirators starting from March 15, 2020, up to 84% of the nearly 128,000 deaths recorded by June 30 would have been prevented.
- The simulations showed that if individuals in the community choose to use cloth masks only, with an estimated efficacy of 30%, COVID-19 would continue to spread.
- If only 40% of Americans had been wearing the highly effective respirator masks right from the beginning of the outbreak, the pandemic could have been eliminated.
“The ‘hit hard, hit early’ mantra, using high quality masks with high compliance, is the best way to suppress deadly pandemics — before vaccines and antivirals become available,” said Gumel. “Our study shows that if we universally had started masking up early, and using high quality masks, COVID-19 would not have taken up in the U.S. — and the nearly 670,000 lives we lost didn’t have to die. It is in our collective best interest to stockpile high quality masks, particularly respirators, and massively deploy them in times of new contagious and deadly respiratory pandemics.”
The study obviously ignores what was happening in other countries. But it shows how big of a difference following the Boy Scouts’ motto (“Be Prepared”) can make.