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Letters | Coronavirus prevention: why can’t doctors come to a consensus on whether we should wear a face mask or not?
- Some doctors in Hong Kong and Singapore disagree with the World Health Organisation that the healthy in general do not need to wear a mask
- In densely populated cities, people may not be able to maintain the recommended social distance and masks could protect them from droplets from infected people
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Why you can trust SCMP
As Singapore and Hong Kong see more Covid-19 community infection cases, it is troubling that doctors are divided over whether wearing face masks is helpful.
For example, the advisory issued by four doctors in Singapore urging the public to wear a face mask when going out was refuted by their Ministry of Health (“Coronavirus: cleaning your phone more effective than wearing a face mask”, February 13). We also see the same contrasting positions from the Hong Kong Society for Infectious Diseases, which is in favour of universal masking, and the Federation of Medical Societies of Hong Kong’s rehashing of World Health Organisation guideline that healthy people do not need to wear a mask.
Continuing to rely on the WHO’s assertion is not credible because Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore are among the world’s most densely populated cities, which affects how the disease spreads. In a densely packed community where person-to-person distance is often under one metre, a person could easily come in contact with droplets from an infected person.
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There has been excessive mention of the size of the coronavirus (0.12 micron) and the inability of the three-ply surgical face masks to filter it. This assessment is neither helpful nor scientifically sound. Viruses mixed in saliva or other secretions can form wet droplets up to the size of 100 microns when expelled from the human body following a cough or sneeze, which could directly land on a person, the ground or other surfaces.
A surgical face mask has an outer layer that repels liquid which could serve as the first line of defence against this. An attenuated droplet is also unlikely to disintegrate immediately upon impact into sizes smaller than 2 microns that the second layer filter cannot catch.
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