We Don’t Have Enough Face Masks

This may be why some people in the U.S.—still at very low risk of contracting the new coronavirus—have newly begun wearing masks. Americans are not simply diving into and depleting global stock that could be needed elsewhere, but wearing masks in daily life. In the past few days I’ve noticed growing numbers on the streets of Boston and New York and New Haven, and on the T and subway and Amtrak in between, despite a lack of any new recommendation for their use.

Masks have been strongly suggested and even temporarily made mandatory in some places by the Chinese government, but no U.S. authority has done the same. Saad Omer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, says that it can’t hurt if healthy people simply choose to wear masks in the U.S., but if there’s a benefit at this point it’s likely psychological: “People want to feel empowered; there’s nothing worse than a lack of feeling of self-efficacy.”

At the same time, any unfounded sense of protection or immunity carries at least some possibility of detracting from effective preventive measures. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends: Wash your hands often, with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Disinfect frequently touched surfaces. Don’t carry around used tissues, even if they still have some usable real estate. Stay home as much as possible when in the pathogen-spewing phase of any respiratory disease—be it coronavirus, influenza, or other. Bringing a contagious disease to work or onto the subway poses a hazard to others that can’t be totally eliminated with a mask. And, maybe the most difficult recommendation: Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth. Most of us touch our faces several times every hour, mindlessly, and this is often how we catch viral illnesses. Despite never being especially close to anyone sick, we self-infect by rubbing our nose or eye after touching a mucous-misted surface.

The physical barrier of an elective face mask could help protect us from ourselves, by minimizing inadvertent face touching. But most of the value of masks is in cases and situations where they are clearly necessary, even critical. And in times of shortage, proper and judicious use becomes especially worth considering. In a café yesterday I sat next to a man wearing a surgical mask and coughing beneath it. But his commitment to the cause seemed low; the mask wasn’t covering his nose. The value of a mask worn incorrectly can plummet to nearly zero. This point was made clear by a widely shared video last week, in which Wing Hong Seto, an infectious-disease specialist at Hong Kong University, demonstrated proper technique. “It works; we’ve done many studies,” he says, but emphasized that fitting the mask tightly around one’s nose is crucial. (I debated the social value of correcting the man in the cafe but did not.)

When Seto says the surgical mask “works,” he is referring especially to the way medical-grade masks have an absorbent lining to trap what we cough or sneeze up. Hypothetically, any physical barrier will help minimize the amount of particulate matter one spews into the air; but a mask worn backwards or loosely tied loses much of its effect. As for the degree to which surgical masks worn by healthy people help prevent inhaling a respiratory virus, the evidence is less clear. CDC offers no certification to attest to exactly how much airborne matter is blocked by such masks, unlike N95 respirators. But a 2019 study in JAMA did find that doctors who wore surgical masks seemed to get the flu at no higher rates than those who wore N95s.

The real importance of the run on masks at this moment may be that it is emblematic of broader, uncomfortable truths about outbreak preparedness. Supplies of many basic medical products like masks and respirators rely on international trade, which becomes unpredictable during emergency scenarios. Imports could be cut off during a pandemic, either by border shutdowns or rising demand within a country. In the U.S., for example, only 5 percent of surgical masks purchased annually are made here.

State health departments do recommend that hospitals keep an emergency store of respirators, but only enough for very short periods. The New York Department of Health advises hospitals to keep “at least a three-day supply of N95 masks readily available for use in a variety of emergency situations.” This assumes that more will be available for purchase. But there’s no guarantee that will be true: During the 2009 flu outbreak, hospitals ran low on masks. CDC keeps a national stockpile for emergencies, but the latest reported numbers are lower than other countries’. The 2009 flu used up more than 75 percent of the stockpile.

Brown says that one of the people trying to place a bulk order with her was a buyer for a medical-device supplier, which alarmed her. “The boutique sector is totally unequipped to meet the needs of the population in an emergency,” says Brown. And critical questions of efficacy remain. The evidence that most masks now common in China can even meaningfully filter out air pollution, let alone viruses, is inconclusive, according to Wong Chit Ming at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. In the U.S., testing of efficacy of individual mask brands is up to the individual manufacturer—both to conduct and to share their results. Brown does this for Vogmasks, but the CDC doesn’t recognize such products as medical equipment, and so consumers don’t have a standardized system of certification to know which masks might be useful and which are glorified cheesecloth.

Brown is quick to say that the face-mask market is full of cheap products of unknown benefit. And even if boutique products like hers did clearly help prevent disease, her supplier is in South Korea—which is experiencing its own shortage of surgical masks. In the event of a pandemic that saw borders shut down, supplies of all sorts of masks could be expected to dwindle. Taiwan has already halted exports and is reportedly inspecting people at borders to ensure no one is smuggling N95 and surgical masks out of the country.

This threat of shortages of basic medical tools extends well beyond masks. In a serious pandemic, the U.S. is not prepared to be isolated for long. Much of the CDC guidelines for use of respirators involve rationing and judicious use, even in hospitals. Supplies more potentially vital than masks, including antibiotics, antivirals, and saline, are also mostly produced internationally. Even many of the vitamins that fortify our highly processed, white-bread diets come from China. This level of dependence is not generally considered a matter of national security, but some believe it should be.

Among the proposed solutions is the idea that hospitals could be required to purchase vital medical devices and drugs from companies based in the U.S. (and whose supply chains could endure a global shutdown). Another is that a supply of products necessary for survival could, like the public water system, be managed in a centralized way—with government agencies even manufacturing these essential products.

Both of those options would substantively alter the state of global commerce, and might be feasible for only a handful of wealthier countries. Many places simply don’t have the resources or capacity to be self-sufficient, nor would such redundancy of production lines make sense. Given such realities, the pertinence of an orchestrated international response in times of health crises becomes only more clear. The global medical community has the capacity to address extremely dangerous outbreaks. In isolation, most countries do not.