Question: I am currently in South Dakota where I would estimate that only about 1/3 of people are wearing masks indoors (at Walmart, etc). If I diligently wear my mask, how much protection do I get if they aren’t also wearing masks?
Answer: Thank you for wearing your mask and please keep doing so. Your mask wearing protects others, is likely to protect you, and helps to establish new social norms. As we’re all learning (many of us first hand), mask wearing varies dramatically by geography (Figure 1) and is highly correlated with political party affiliation. Indeed, a Gallup poll from July found that the majority of people across every demographic group reported wearing a mask in public very often or more frequently with one exception; “The one exception is Republicans, among whom a majority say they wear masks infrequently — either sometimes (18%), rarely (9%) or never (27%).”
When it comes to the protection masks afford, the consensus is solid that wearing a mask protects others by keeping respiratory droplets from spreading more widely (see Q&As of 6/29 and 6/22 #Face Masks). What’s less clear is whether and to what degree mask wearing protects the wearer. As discussed in our Q&A of 6/29, a meta-analysis published in Lancet found that wearing a mask dramatically reduced the risk of infection among health workers in hospital settings (absolute risk of infection 17·4% with no face mask vs. 3·1% with a face mask). It’s unclear, however, how applicable these risk reduction findings are to non-clinical settings. Like so much related to COVID, we need more research.
In the meantime, a group of medical doctors recently hypothesized in a perspective recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that wearing a cloth mask also benefits the wearer by reducing the amount of virus the wearer is exposed to and thereby “leading to more mild and asymptomatic infection manifestations.” While the idea still needs to be tested, it is nonetheless another interesting avenue to explore and points to yet another reason why universal masking needs to be a key component of pandemic response.
Figure 1: Mask Wearing in the United States (snapshot of mid-July, from NY Times)
