Every day, more than 2,000 Americans die of COVID-19. Comparing the death toll of America to other countries who have the same, or even more in population is quite alarming. A new study provided evidence for a simple solution that can help America emerge from the lockdown and finally flatten the curve. Social distancing is one of them and the other? By simply wearing a mask.
Importance of wearing a mask
De Kai, an American computer scientist with joint appointments at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that people can go back to their normal lives if at least 80% of Americans wear a face mask.
De Kai cited Japan's contentious routine despite the pandemic since no lockdown was issued and all subways and businesses have remained open yet their death toll does not exceed 100 in a day. It is because the Japanese practice social distancing and everyone in the country wears masks.
The anti-mask group
According to the findings of the research paper, if 80% of a closed population were to wear a mask, the infection rates of COVID-19 would drop to one-twelfth the number of infections, compared to a live-virus population in which no one wore masks.
However, with the current happenings in the United States, forcing people to wear a mask is almost impossible. Pro-maskers asserts that the use of face coverings can diminish the spread of COVID-19, but some anti-maskers, including politicians, have insisted that there is no enough proof of the efficacy of face guards. Some even went as far as saying that wearing a mask places limits on one's right to free speech.
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The debate over wearing a mask is what drove De Kai to drop everything and help convene a group of scientists and academics. De Kai, who is the son of immigrants from China, said that he saw the country where he grows up and the country where his family lives and saw that not everyone is educated about the matter.
Asians, particularly East Asians, wear masks regularly to fend off pollution and germs, and it has been a part of their routine way before the pandemic. Americans, on the other hand, are not accustomed to wearing masks, and some are even insensitive as they stigmatized East Asians for wearing them.
The solution that De Kai came up with, along with his team. was to create a computer forecasting model that they call the masksi simulator. This allowed them to create scenarios of populations like those in Japan and others, and to compare what happens to infection rates over time.
Masksim will have programming used by epidemiologists to track outbreaks and pathogens like Ebola, COVID-19, and SARS. It will also have artificial intelligence to take into account the role of a chance of human behavior.
Aside from creating the masksim site, the team is also releasing a study that describes their model in full detail as well as their contention that the forecasts that masksims will make can support a growing body of pro-mask evidence.
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