Your baggy mask isn’t going to cut it against Omicron, epidemiologist warns – CBC

As variant tilts the COVID landscape, everyone should be reaching for N95 respirators

Dec 19, 2021

After almost two years of living with a pandemic, you would think we’d all be mask experts by now.

But the COVID-19 landscape is changing rapidly, and the things we thought would protect us are suddenly in need of a serious rethink — including, and perhaps especially, masks.

Those cloth and blue surgical masks so many of us have been wearing? They’re unlikely to cut it against Omicron, says an expert.

We should all be upping our mask game immediately, warns epidemiology professor Dr. David Fisman of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“To be honest, we should have been doing this for a while now,” Fisman said in an interview with Shift NB, noting “we’ve known for over a year” that COVID-19 spreads through aerosol.

“And that’s really important because that means people get infected by breathing in these tiny particles.”

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/masks-covid-epidemiologist-fisman-1.6290760