Help Protect Other People From Coronavirus, Wear A Mask
How can you help protect yourself and other people from coronavirus? Wear a Mask
This week, Daily Detroit asked me a ton of questions about the Coronavirus and how to protect yourself, your family, and your community from the spreading virus. It boils down to wearing a mask. I answer many other questions during the podcast, listen here:
Why Should I wear a Mask?
You should wear a mask to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Here’s why:
Coronavirus has a long incubation period. People can have the virus without knowing it or having symptoms for about 4 to 5 days on average. This 4 - 5 day period of having the virus without showing symptoms is known as the incubation period. Some people can be in this incubation period for up to 14 days! Therefore, you could be walking around, infected with coronavirus and unknowingly spreading the virus to your friends, family, coworkers, and vulnerable people in your community. This is the main reason why you should wear a mask.
Coronavirus does not always cause symptoms. For COVID-19, data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation. So, in most cases, if you get the Coronavirus, you’ll be asymptomatic. If you’re asymptomatic, you can still spread the virus, so it’s important to wear a mask to prevent spreading the virus to your close contacts.
Wearing a mask prevents you from spreading the virus via respiratory droplets. When you talk, cough, sneeze, sing, yell, or breathe, you give off tiny respiratory droplets. These droplets carry the coronavirus and can land on surfaces or land in the noses or mouths or eyes of your close contacts. Wearing a mask puts a physical barrier between your nose and mouth and those around you, and therefore decreases the spread of droplets and the spread of coronavirus. If you want to explore this further, check out this blog post from Indian Express. Briefly, if you wear a mask it reduces the amount of bacterial and viral particles that you expel from your mouth when talking, as demonstrated in this image.
This PhD Scientist demonstrates bacterial growth related to wearing a mask vs not wearing a mask.
Why are bars being told to shut down?
Many bars in Michigan are closed or being ordered to close after outbreaks of coronavirus. There are four big reasons why bars are the best places to get coronavirus:
People drink at bars, and it’s difficult to wear a mask while drinking. Without a mask, it’s easier to spread Covid 19.
There tends to be loud music at bars, so people tend to raise their voices and speak more forcefully. This forceful speech tends to spread more respiratory droplets, which leads to an easier spread of coronavirus.
People tend to get closer to one another at bars - the less physical distance between people, the easier it is to spread Covid 19.
Bars are enclosed, intimate spaces, usually with poor ventilation. Many bars are windowless with low ceilings and poor ventilation systems. This can serve as a great space for a virus to circulate.
This is why bars like Harper’s in East Lansing have seen outbreaks of Coronavirus.
Here’s what Daily Detroit had to say:
Welcome to the holiday weekend, everybody. This is certainly a strange one, with coronavirus numbers once again on the upswing in Michigan and across much of the country, adding a complicated wrinkle to what is normally one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.
On today’s show, we make a house call to our friend Dr. Paul Thomas, founder of Plum Health Direct Primary Care in Detroit, for help answering your burning questions about COVID-19. We talk face masks, whether it’s safe to eat at restaurants or fly on airplanes, what to make of coronavirus liability waivers and more. And we’ll remind you that if you’ve got health-related questions about coronavirus, send ’em to us at dailydetroit@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to include them in future episodes with Dr. Paul. You can even send us audio of your question and we’ll try to work that audio into the show.
Also, we talk the latest, dispiriting COVID-19 data from the state and how we’re holding up from a mental health perspective more than three months into this weird, horrible quarantine that unfortunately shows little sign of ending anytime soon.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there!
-Dr. Paul Thomas with Plum Health DPC