CDC: Face masks protect others and YOU TOO!

And they’re not at all funny-looking either.*

*The CDC has not evaluated this statement.

We’ve known for a while now that COVID-19 spreads through respiratory droplets when people sneeze, cough, sing, breathe, basically do anything with their pie-holes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that masks are “a simple barrier to help prevent your respiratory droplets from reaching others. Studies show that masks reduce the spray of droplets when worn over the nose and mouth.”

In addition to social distancing, telework, and other prophylactic safety measures, facemasks can be a good way to mitigate the risk of infecting others with COVID-19.

But, according to a CDC study released this week, face masks can protect the wearer too. The CDC study found — nerd alert — that “cloth mask materials can also reduce wearers’ exposure to infectious droplets through filtration, including filtration of fine droplets and particles less than 10 microns. The relative filtration effectiveness of various masks has varied widely across studies, in large part due to variation in experimental design and particle sizes analyzed. Multiple layers of cloth with higher thread counts have demonstrated superior performance compared to single layers of cloth with lower thread counts, in some cases filtering nearly 50% of fine particles less than 1 micron.”

Normal facemask > Simpsons buff facemask.

If your employees are anything like some of the folks I see at the gym, they may need some help putting on their facemasks. Here is how you wear a mask. And here are some of the masks that CDC recommends (hint, not mine) and some that they don’t.

Seriously though,  I wear a normal mask in public when my kids aren’t around to embarrass them.

So mask up, friends, stay safe, and have a nice weekend.