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Which kind of face mask will best protect you against coronavirus?

Does it matter what sort of mask you wear? Yes. Different types of mask offer different levels of protection. Surgical grade N95 respirators offer the highest level of protection against Covid-19 infection, followed by surgical grade masks. However, these masks are costly, in limited supply, contribute to landfill waste and are uncomfortable to wear for long periods. So even countries that have required the public to wear face masks have generally suggested such masks should be reserved for health workers or those at particularly high risk.

but still suggests that face masks can contribute to reducing transmission of Covid-19. Analysis by the Royal Society said this included homemade cloth face masks.

Coronavirus mask guidance is endangering US health workers, experts say

With crucial protective gear in short supply, federal authorities are saying health workers can wear lower-grade surgical masks while treating Covid-19 patients – but growing evidence suggests the practice is putting workers in jeopardy.

But scholars, not-for-profit leaders and former regulators in the specialized field of occupational safety say relying on surgical masks – which are considerably less protective than N95 respirators – is almost certainly fueling illness among frontline health workers, who probably make up about 11% of all known Covid-19 cases.

healthy individuals, especially those with essential jobs who cannot avoid public transportation or close interaction with others, may need to start wearing masks more regularly.

While wearing a mask may not necessarily prevent healthy people from getting sick, and it certainly doesn’t replace important measures such as hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing,

Masks work by stopping infected droplets spewing from the wearer’s nose or mouth, rather than stopping the acquisition of virus from others. That is why the W.H.O. and C.D.C. recommend that people already infected with the coronavirus wear masks, to protect others who may come into close contact with them

Justice Neil Gorsuch hasn’t been wearing a mask at oral arguments this month. Justice Sonia Sotomayor—who is high risk of complications from COVID because she has Type 1 diabetes—has been participating telephonically.

the court failed to clarify when pressed on what the policy for masking actually was.

Gorsuch, and the other justices, had in fact been asked by Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask

public health experts are coalescing around Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call for a “national mask mandate,” even as they concede such an effort would require much more than the stroke of a presidential pen.

it is time to seriously consider a national mandate to curb the spread of the virus.

Mr. Trump is opposed to a mandate, and Mr. Biden has conceded that a presidential order for all Americans to wear masks would almost certainly face — and most likely fall to — a legal challenge.

Josh Mandel, who is running for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, wants you to know that he loves freedom. He loves it SO much that his campaign released a 10-second video on Twitter of him lighting a face mask on fire.

Masking -- the necessity of it, generally speaking -- was turned into a political issue by former President Donald Trump as the country battled the coronavirus pandemic over the past 16 months.

On the same day in the spring of 2020 that he announced the CDC guidance on mask-wearing, Trump was asked whether he would be wearing a mask. To which he responded: "I don't think I'm going to be doing it. Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens -- I just don't see it."

while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Mr. Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.

“It’s ironic that Senator Gazelka, as majority leader, was always the person most outspoken in opposing the governor’s emergency order and would state to us over and over again that Minnesotans would do the responsible thing,” said Richard Cohen, a Democrat who retired from the Legislature last month. “And now it is alleged that because of a caucus event, where apparently many people were not wearing masks, a caucus member became ill and then passed away.”

An owner of the catering hall, John Schiltz, said that his servers had worn masks and gloves throughout that evening, and that none had later tested positive. Although masks were offered to guests, state guidelines at the time allowed them to be removed at tables.Mr. Schiltz said the dinner was the only event any group had booked at his venue in November before he had to close on Nov. 20.

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

On March 3, Brian Kolfage tried to reach the U.S. government — through Instagram. The Air Force veteran, who’s best known for running the crowd-funded border wall project “We Build The Wall,” had stumbled into a new line of work: Medical supply middleman.

He’d posted a picture of a massive warehouse, filled with hundreds of boxes marked “3M.” They held 300 million N95 surgical masks, he wrote, just waiting to reach health professionals in need around the country.

In fact, the masks in the photo didn’t belong to Kolfage, and they weren’t for sale. Rather, they were sitting in a storehouse of supplies in Salt Lake City, part of a humanitarian shipment that, when photographed in January, was destined for a hospital in Shanghai

That changed in mid-May after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised vaccinated Americans that they could go maskless in most indoor settings. The next week, the store told employees that they could no longer ask customers to cover their faces. So mask use plummeted, and the anxiety of Ms. Wainwright and other workers shot up.

“We just feel like we’re sitting ducks,

More than a dozen retail, hospitality and fast-food workers across the country interviewed by The New York Times expressed alarm that their employers had used the C.D.C. guidance to make masks optional for vaccinated customers.

As Japan has confounded the world by avoiding the sort of mass death from coronavirus seen in the United States, I began to wonder whether the cultural affinity for masks helped explain some of this success.

now a convert, especially since Tokyo was placed under a state of emergency in mid-April. I bought handmade cloth face coverings from a Facebook friend in Okinawa. We wash them daily and line them with coffee filters. Even though the emergency declaration was lifted in late May, I still won’t let anyone in my family leave our apartment without putting on a mask.

In the early months of the pandemic, Japan seemed not to follow much of the conventional epidemiological wisdom, deliberately restricting testing and not ordering a lockdown.

In general, outdoor exercise, with or without a mask, seems to be safe, according to most experts.

“I think relatively little Covid-19 transmission would occur outdoors, except perhaps in large crowds,”

the senior author of a study published in Nature this month that looked at breathing, viral shedding and masks.

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.

it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.

Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.

Top White House adviser Anita Dunn Sunday defended President Joe Biden over his continued use of a mask outdoors – even though the practice appears to conflict with new and relaxed administration guidelines for fully vaccinated citizens.

fter months of stressing caution and sticking to restrictions – after a failure to do so cost thousands of lives under Trump – Biden now appears at risk of paying a political price for being too circumspect even though his initial caution proved successful.

Republicans are seizing on the controversy over masks to bolster their wider narrative that Biden and Democrats are too politically correct and using the power of government to infringe on the freedoms of Americans – a conceit that works for them on taxes to guns and public health to climate change.

Wearing a face mask will continue to be a requirement at airports, aboard commercial flights and on other public transportation across the country through the summer.

The federal mask mandate, which was set to expire on May 11, will remain in effect through Sept. 13, according to updated guidance issued by the Transportation Security Administration on Friday.

The rule, which also applies to buses and rail systems, was first put in place by President Biden shortly after he took office in January.

Having been introduced to the idea of wearing masks to protect themselves and others, some Americans are now considering a behavior scarcely seen in the United States but long a fixture in other cultures: routinely wearing a mask when displaying symptoms of a common cold or the flu, even in a future in which Covid-19 isn’t a primary concern.

Other leading American health officials, however, have not encouraged the behavior. The C.D.C. — which at the beginning of the pandemic advised against wearing masks, and only changed its guidance a couple of months later — does not advise people with flu symptoms to wear masks, and says they “may not effectively limit transmission in the community.”

Though masks proved effective in helping mitigate Covid-19 transmission, they now carry weight as symbols in the red state-blue state culture wars, with segments of the country seeing them as an affront to their freedoms and others considering them a demonstration of caring for others.

No part of the world has been as devastated by the pandemic as Latin America

Mexico, Brazil, Peru and other Latin American countries — hobbled by weak health systems, severe inequality and government indifference — have several of the highest deaths per capita from the virus in the world.

the outbreak in Latin American has not struck in waves. It hit furiously in the spring and has continued for months, with few of the respites savored elsewhere

The U.S. death toll from coronavirus has surpassed 250,000, including 1,700 reported Wednesday alone. Hospitalizations across the nation have exploded, with almost 80,000 Americans now receiving inpatient treatment.

Still, some governors remain unconvinced that mandatory facial coverings are a necessary tool in curbing the pandemic. 

Thirty-six states have some type of statewide mask requirement

A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.

For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets

The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.