Health experts will not ask Americans to remove the masks any time soon.
That’s the opinion of Eric Toner, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety. He has been preparing for an outbreak like the new coronavirus as part of his job for years.
Johns Hopkins practices virus simulations as part of its preparedness protocol, with the goal of providing public health experts and policy makers with a plan of what to do in a pandemic. One such simulation took place in October 2019, when Toner and a team of researchers launched a coronavirus pandemic simulation in New York, covering various scenarios on how residents, governments, and private companies would hypothetically react to the threat.
One thing that caught his eye: facial coatings are a vital defense to stop the spread of the virus. He believes that COVID-19 will not slow down in the United States even as states slowly reopen.
“There will be no calm in the summer with a big wave in the fall,” he said as part of CNET’s Hacking the Apocalypse series. “It is clear that we are having a significant resurgence of cases in the summer, and they will get bigger. And it will continue until we block things again.
The United States recently added about 43,000 positive cases of COVID-19 to its total of 2.9 million, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. Total deaths exceeded 130,000.
The toner, by contrasting the new virus with seasonal influenza, said that until there is a vaccine, the communities’ best defense to combat it is to create distance and wear masks.
“I think that with the use of masks and a certain degree of social distancing, we will be living with luck, with luck, for several years,” he said. “It is actually quite simple. If we cover our faces, and both you and anyone you interact with are wearing a mask, the risk of transmission is greatly reduced. ”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a senior official handling the U.S. COVID-19 response, recently said he was cautiously optimistic that there could be a vaccine against the virus by 2021.
For those who refuse to wear a mask in the meantime, Toner said they will find out eventually.
“They will get through it,” he says. “It is just a matter of how many people get sick and die before they get over it.”
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