OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor. This letter is from an assistant professor at the Orillia campus of Lakehead University about the importance of wearing a face mask to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
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We have been living with a pandemic for three months now. In that time, we’ve developed good habits of hand washing, standing at least two metres apart, and lining up to shop. These are simple, low-cost behaviours that help keep us all safe, but one more habit could make a world of difference: wear a face mask.
As the province enters Phase 2 of reopening, the risks necessarily increase. So, we should still stay home, still wash our hands, and still keep our distance.
But when we must go into confined spaces, like a grocery store, where walking past staff and other customers is unavoidable, scientific research clearly shows that we should also put on a mask.
This is because COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, spread mainly through droplets that emanate from the mouth and the nose — even from the mouths and noses of people who aren’t yet showing any symptoms. A mask filters out a large portion of these droplets, reducing the chances that infected people will make others sick.
You don’t need an N95 respirator or a surgical mask to keep others safe. Studies show that non-medical cloth masks, which can be washed and reused, can have a profound effect on taming the virus so long as most people wear them.
You can find them locally, and they are all over the Internet, or you can find myriad tutorials online and make them yourself. Some generous folks are even making masks for free for their communities. You just need to keep them clean and handle them with care.
Clearly, masks are not yet the norm in Orillia. Most grocery stores in town have not supplied their employees with them, and only a minority of the clientele can be seen wearing them.
The problem is that opening our mouths is inevitable: staff and customers have to communicate with each other. Masks, at least, substantially reduce the risks that talking entails.
It’s hard to blame either customers or staff for failing to wear a mask, because the messaging around them has been confusing until recently. However, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the World Health Organization, and the US Centres for Disease Control all now recommend wearing non-
And yet, neither the City of Orillia nor any of the larger stores in town have chosen to require them. Indeed, most haven’t even attempted to promote their use, let alone provide them to their employees or customers.
With a little encouragement, we can do better. We can let the Mayor and City Council know that they should be doing more to champion mask use, like poster campaigns and giving masks out free to those in need.
And we can let our friendly neighbourhood shops know that we would be much more comfortable walking through their doors if their staff wore masks and their customers were encouraged to do the same.
Like all things, there will be some people who simply cannot use a mask, for good reasons. And that’s all right, so long as the rest of us do. But we need to start wearing them right now. With a little help from the City, from the business community, and from concerned citizens, we will.
Daniel Krupp
Orillia
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