In a comment on New England Journal of Medicine, Monica Gandhi and George W Rutherford of the University of California in San Francisco said face masks could function as a variolation to build immunity. and delay the spread of Covid infection.
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This possibility is consistent, according to experts, with a long-standing theory of viral pathogenesis, which holds that the severity of the disease is proportional to the viral inoculum (infecting amount of the virus) received.
Gandhi and Rutherford inferred that if viral inoculum is important in determining the severity of Covid infection, an additional hypothetical reason for wearing face masks would be to reduce the viral inoculum the user was exposed to and the subsequent clinical impact of the disease. “Since the masks filter some virus-containing droplets (with the filtering capacity determined by the type of mask), the masking could reduce the inoculum that an exposed person inhales,” the couple wrote in NEJM.
An experiment conducted in hamsters supported this theory and showed with simulated masking that the animals were less likely to become infected, or were asymptomatic, or had milder symptoms than unmasked hamsters.
“Vaccine hopes are pinned not only on infection prevention: most vaccine trials include a secondary outcome of decreased severity of disease, increasing the proportion of cases in which the disease is mild or asymptomatic would be a public health victory. Universal masking appears to reduce the rate of new infections; We hypothesize that reducing the rate of new viral infections would also decrease the proportion of infected people who remain asymptomatic, ”Gandhi and Rutherford wrote.
They referred to an outbreak in an Argentine closed cruise where passengers received surgical masks and staff with N95 masks. The asymptomatic infection rate was 81% in testing compared to 20% in previous outbreaks of cruises without universal blinding.
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Dr. SK Sarin, Director of Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences, said this article explains how 29% of the inhabitants of Delhi were antibody positive but had never had an infection. “The mask can allow a tiny amount of virus to enter and provide a vaccine-like effect, leading to the formation of antibodies without true infection,” Sarin said.
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Sarin added that this made wearing masks a priority while allowing people to move freely so that obtaining a small inoculum could act as a vaccine. Gandhi and Rutherford said in their research that the adoption of masking throughout the population was one of the reasons why some countries performed better in terms of rates of serious illness related to Covid.
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While face masks were immediately recommended in India for protection against Covid in March, recent data has indicated that face masks could also reduce the severity of the disease.
On Video: Masks Could Possibly Help Build Immunity: Study
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