Does wearing a face mask help protect against coronavirus? Making sense of the information surrounding face masks can be confusing. University of Utah Health Care’s Chief Medical Officer of Ambulatory Care Dr. Richard Orlandi talks about why it’s recommended to wear face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Interviewer: At one point, we heard homemade masks don’t help protect people against COVID-19. But now it’s recommended that we wear them. Dr. Richard Orlandi is from University of Utah Health. What’s changed?
Dr. Orlandi: We were thinking of them in terms of I’m going to put a mask on so you don’t get me infected. But we’re changing the way we’re looking at that, and really I’m going to put a mask on so I don’t infect you even if I don’t have any symptoms, because we now are understanding that people may be able to transmit this virus the day before or a couple of days before they really have that fever, muscle aches, shortness of breath, the coughing type of flu-like symptoms. That’s going to help so that when I go to the store, I’m not spreading it to everybody else. Now, if all of us do that, we’re keeping one another safe, and that’s a great way that we can show our citizenship, our care for one another.
Listen to the audio file here:
The Health Minute is produced by University of Utah Health.
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