Why Are Americans Still—Still!—Wearing Cloth Masks?
It’s long past time for an upgrade.
By Yasmin Tayag
Oct 4 2021
<https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/10/why-americans-wear-cloth-masks/620296/>
Every time I leave my apartment, I grab a mask from the stack by the door. After all these months of pandemic life, I’ve amassed a pretty big collection: Some are embroidered, while others bear the faded logos of the New York Public Library or the TV show Nailed It. What all of them have in common is that they’re made of cloth.
At this point, cloth masks are so ubiquitous in the United States that it can be easy to forget that they were originally supposed to be a stopgap measure. In April 2020, when surgical masks and highly coveted N95s were first in short supply, the CDC released its initial mask guidance and said cloth masks were the way to go for most people—noting that they could be sewn at home from old T-shirts. Even at that point, when the pandemic was full of unknowns, we knew that cloth masks, although far better than going maskless, weren’t as protective as other types. A growing amount of research supports the idea that our masking norms don’t make much sense: A recent study in Bangladesh, which has yet to be peer-reviewed but is considered one of the most rigorous to date to tackle masking, linked wearing surgical masks with a 11.2 percent decrease in COVID-19 symptoms and antibodies, while cloth masks were associated with only a 5 percent decrease. It’s no wonder that many other countries, including France, Austria, and Germany, shifted their mask guidance away from cloth masks toward those offering higher protection a long time ago.
We might have once hoped that vaccines would entirely obviate masking, but unfortunately, masks seem poised to stick around for quite some time. And yet, even as much of our approach to the pandemic has changed in the past 18 months, our approach to masking largely has not. So why are we still strapping pieces of fabric to our face?
Unless you work in health care, the CDC still recommends masks made with at least two layers of washable, breathable fabric. A big reason for this is that, yes, surgical masks are still in limited supply, according to the FDA, and so they must be prioritized for health-care workers. Though the shortage appeared to relent this summer, when widespread vaccination led to a dip in demand for both surgical and cloth masks, the rise of the Delta variant precipitated another major mask crunch.
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