An achievable goal.

I’m reaching out to you because of your support for mask use.

Until we have a vaccine wide spread mask use,  social distancing and contact tracing is our best hope for suppressing COVID transmission.

I’ve attached a figure by L Tian et al.

Please forgive me if you are already familiar with the concept of R0. It refers to the number of infections each infection creates. If R0>1 we see exponential growth. If R0<1 we see exponential decline.

We can get to the top right hand corner of this figure where R0 is much less than 1, but only if we make it a goal to do so.

There are two variables that must be addressed to get there.

1) Widespread use. We know this is an achievable goal based on what’s happened in the Czech Republic and the Masks4All campaign

2) Highly effective masks. We should start immediately with the best improvised masks that we can, with the aim of improving the quality of masks for public use. The cost of providing everyone masks is minimal compared to the costs of prolonged lock down. We can’t supply medical grade masks to the public at present, but we can make it a goal and work towards achieving it as soon as possible. 

Please consider sharing:

https://www.change.org/universalmasking

Regards,
Matthew Butcher MD FRCPC