VOLUME VI / ISSUE I / JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2022
WITH OMICRON, YOUR MASK BETTER MEAN BUSINESS
W
ITH ANOTHER CORONAVIRUS VARIANT RACING ACROSS THE U.S., ONCE AGAIN HEALTH AUTHORITIES ARE URGING PEOPLE TO MASK UP INDOORS. YES, YOU’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE. BUT GIVEN HOW CONTAGIOUS OMICRON IS, EXPERTS SAY, IT’S SERIOUSLY TIME TO UPGRADE TO AN N95 OR SIMILAR HIGH-FILTRATION RESPIRATOR WHEN YOU’RE IN PUBLIC INDOOR SPACES. page 86
“Cloth masks are not going to cut it with omicron,” says Linsey Marr, a researcher at Virginia Tech who studies how viruses transmit in the air.
ter that you could have had with prior versions of the virus that would have left you uninfected, there’s now a good chance you will get infected from it.”
Omicron is much more transmissible than coronavirus variants that have come before it. It spreads at least three times faster than delta. One person is infecting at least three others at a time on average, based on data from other countries.
True, a cloth mask can be a “marginally OK to maybe a decent filter,” Marr said; but with something as highly transmissible as omicron, just “OK” isn’t good enough.
“It’s very contagious,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And the kind of encoun-
Marr notes that preliminary data from scientists at the University of Hong Kong has shown that omicron multiplies 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant does. That study also found that omicron