Maggie's Farm

If everyone wears face masks, any face masks, that alone cuts transmission of the virus by 75-80%. 75% is from a study that just came out yesterday, the 80% figure I've seen in Korean medical stories on the virus.

Korea requires everyone to wear a mask every time they are out of their homes, and issues two KF94 masks per week for FREE to each person. Korea understands well the benefits of masks, having previously gone through the SARS and MERS epidemics (as well as having to deal with toxic "fine dust" pollution which increasingly comes into Korea from Mainland China). KF94 masks, which last about 3-4 days of wearing, are cheap (in Korea, 1,000 won apiece if you have to buy them, which is about 1 U.S. dollar--I know because we have some at home with the price sticker that our friends have given us), and are basically the Asian equivalent of an N95 mask. KF94 masks also don't have the alleged "fit" problem, so long as to take time to make sure and press the thin metal strip at the top so that it fits snugly on your face. America should be doing the same thing and that would knock this virus out much more quickly, but so far--crickets.

But even cloth masks give significant protection if EVERYONE is wearing them, that's the key. The most significant protection is to prevent the wearer from spreading the virus to others or coughing or sneezing and putting the virus on fomites. The secondary protection is it does stop to a certain extent, the virus from being breathed in, or you putting your contaminated hand on your face, which is the primary way you then get infected with the virus. Positive effects of near universal mask-wearing can be seen in Korea, Hong Kong and to a lesser extent, Japan (which for some reason until recently thought they were somehow exempt from the spread of the virus, but it is now starting to take off).

The lack of N95 masks is attributable to several things:

1. Almost no N95 masks were being produced in the U.S. although the federal government had been repeatedly warned of the danger going back to the early Obama administration. The N95 mask stockpile was also depleted during the Obama administration and not restocked.

2. Most of the world's supply of N95 masks is made in China (and to a lesser extent Mexico). When Wuhan hit, the Chinese government quietly stopped export of most of these masks as well as other PPE out of the country, knowing it would need them.

3. Speculators, mostly Chinese, then also started buying up the mask supplies in much of the rest of the world, because they knew there would be a scarcity and they could make money reselling them in China and other places. (This is a common practice known as "daigou," where overseas Chinese make money by buying up desirable items in Western countries and then resell them for profit in China.) I personally watched this happen in a pharmacy here. I walked in and saw an employee selling the store's entire mask supply under the table for cash to a woman (to be fair she looked like a Filipina immigrant, not Chinese). I should have taken a video on my phone and turned them in, but didn't. This is why you could not find any sort of masks in American pharmacies and other stores starting from late January on. This is also true at all American hardware stores, since all respirators and masks were similarly sold out from mid-January on.