Mask Solidarity Day is Friday March 20

Make your own fashionable mask, blast it with a hair dryer to sanitize, wash your hands, then wrap that mask 'round your pretty face in solidarity with mask-wearers everywhere!

Q. Why?
A. Preventative mask-wearing will be a part of our lives this decade, to protect ourselves from pandemics or wildfires. Smoke inhalation is very sneaky and smoke masks prevent injury.

Q. Will people think I have the virus if I wear this?

A. Does it matter? Preventative mask-wearing is a thoughtful act, saying "I don't want to be Typhoid Mary and give you a deadly virus. Have a great day!"

Zeynep Tefucki wrote in the New York Times that early in the SARS virus outbreak, officials advised mask-wearing to all citizens, regardless of whether they'd been tested, diagnosed, or exposed. SARS has a much higher death rate than COVID-19, and that virus was very quickly contained. Tefucki addressed the fact that surgical masks are not as effective as N95. But surgical masks still help:

It is of course true that masks don’t work perfectly, that they don’t replace hand-washing and social distancing, and that they work better if they fit properly. And of course, surgical masks (the disposable type that surgeons wear) don’t filter out small viral particles the way medical-grade respirator masks rated N95 and above do. However, even surgical masks protect a bit more than not wearing masks at all. We know from flu research that mask-wearing can help decrease transmission rates along with frequent hand-washing and social-distancing.

Here in San Francisco, many cashiers at grocery stores are still maskless. But many of the Asian immigrants and natives appear to wear masks out in the city, at work, on transit, as soon as outbreaks surface in the news. It appears to be a cultural practice.

Sadly, some Chinese exchange students in the U.K. fled back to China because their mask-wearing brought on harassment from native English people. Either that or the foreign students fled germ-infested mask-avoidant people of the U.K.


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Further Reading:

Chinese students flee U.K. after 'maskaphobia' trigger racist attacks:   theguardian.com

Letter from Mary Mallon: on being 'Typhoid Mary':   commonlit.org

Sewing pattern for a homemade surgical mask   clothwithpegs.blogspot.com




This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.