Should You Still Wear a Mask Traveling? How to Decide
struck down the federal mandate requiring passengers on mass transit to wear masks. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends that passengers mask up while on planes, trains or buses, it is no longer a requirement.
When asked whether people should wear masks on planes, President Joe Biden replied: “That’s up to them.”The Conversation has been covering the science of masks since the beginning of the pandemic.
Masking may no longer be required on mass transit, but you can always choose to still wear a mask. For those worried about being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 or developing COVID-19, below are highlights from four articles exploring the benefits of wearing a mask and how to get the most protection from wearing one.A lot of the reason for wearing a mask is to protect others.
But early on in the pandemic, Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explained how masks can protect the wearer, too.“When you wear a mask – even a cloth mask – you typically are exposed to a lower dose of the coronavirus than if you didn’t,” Gandhi writes. “Both recent experiments in animal models using coronavirus and nearly a hundred years of viral research show that lower viral doses usually mean less severe disease.”Though it’s only one of many factors, “the amount of virus that you’re exposed to – called the viral inoculum, or dose – has a lot to do with how sick you get.
