AFRICAN L'HOMME
Don’t fret, America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (abbreviated as CDC) has released a video showing you how to make your own face mask with items you can easily find at home. This tutorial follows from its official recommendation of using cloth face coverings in public.
The CDC’s reasoning behind wearing face-coverings is that you are at a wider risk of spreading COVID-19 by holding a casual conversation with a friend or neighbor. Because some COVID-19 carriers can be asymptomatic, meaning they show no symptoms, wearing a face-covering to cover ones face can help reduce the spread of the disease.
From the CDC’s announcement, “a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms… [and] can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity—for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing—even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms. In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings.”
In the video tutorial above, US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams shows how one can easily craft a face mask, by simply folding an old scarf, bandana, hand towel or cut cloth from an old T-shirt, and using rubber bands to secure it to your face; and “[i]t is critical to emphasize that maintaining 6-feet social distancing remains important to slowing the spread of the virus.”
Additionally, the CDC and AFRICAN L’HOMME does not claim that cloth face masks are 100% effective, but because of the scarcity of surgical masks and N-95 respirators in the US at the moment, “[t]hose are critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders.”
In an interview with Stat News, CDC Director Robert Redfield notes, “It’s not a decision to try to protect me from getting coronavirus. It’s to help modify spreading. And there is scientific data to show that when you aerosolized virus through a cloth barrier, you have a reduction in the amount of virus that gets through the other side.”
Source: Hypebeast, Mashable
Image Credit: CDC
