Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, put it mildly when she tweeted on Wednesday evening, “There is a lot of discussion on use of face masks.”In these recent, destabilizing weeks, dramatic efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 have prompted an onslaught of new, sometimes contradictory guidelines that seem to move as quickly as the virus itself. But even by pandemic standards, the conflicting opinions on whether we should all cover our noses and mouths in public are head-spinning. On Friday, Dr. Gary Garber, an infection prevention and control physician at Public Health Ontario, said the agency, which provides scientific and technical expertise to the government, is “doing a scientific review of the issue,” the latest indication that this question is very much a moving target. At present, Ontario’s public health agency does not advise mask-wearing unless you have COVID-19 or are caring for someone with the virus.“There’s a debate amongst all the experts,” said Margaret Sietsema, an expert on respiratory protection and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is on the “no” side of the masks-for-all discussion. “Who knows what’s going on?” To be clear, the question that a growing number of officials are now probing — as of Friday, this list included the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Public Health Ontario and an advisory panel to the World Health Organization — is not whether the public should start donning medical masks.With personal protective equipment (PPE) in short supply in many countries, including Canada, there is broad and powerful consensus among officials about the need to reserve medical-grade masks — including surgical masks and tight-fitting N95 respirators used in hospitals — for health-care workers on the front lines of the pandemic.Unlike N95 masks, which contain a filter to protect the weare ...
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