Helen MacDonald

For example, trials have shown that people don't often wear masks properly or consistently.

But does that apply now?

The public are obviously quite fearful of coronavirus.

And in some areas of the world, particularly in areas of Asia, the public have become very accustomed to wearing masks for other reasons, whether that be infection or for protection against pollution.

Another consideration for COVID has been

that people are infectious.

We know that people are infectious before they get symptoms.

Some people have very minimal symptoms or no symptoms at all.

And so masks might have some use when people don't know that they're unwell.

But on the flip side, there could be some harms in the public using masks.

So in particular, they mentioned that if you start wearing a mask, you might start to feel sort of invincible and start to flout other infection control measures, which we know work like handwashing.

or decide to ignore government advice on social distancing.

And a final sort of resource constraint has been perhaps that the public shouldn't wear masks because healthcare professionals sort of need them more and we don't have enough of them to go around.

But the central point the article makes is that the precautionary principle might be useful to us in considering whether there should be a recommendation or a sort of case advance that the public could be advised to use masks in COVID-19.

And the idea of that is, is that basically in the face of uncertainty, you could err on the side of caution.

And they believe that policymakers should apply this precautionary principle and encourage people to wear face masks on the grounds that

that they have little to use and potentially something to gain and the main harms, the flouting of infection rules and ramping up of mass production for healthcare workers could be solved.

So I thought that was quite an interesting take on a debate that's been rumbling on in various forms for some time.

There's a harm if you don't wear a mask, you're saying?

You made a really interesting point, Carl, when we were talking about this before, just the types of trials that are going on, the explosion of trials that we've seen in COVID-19 and the number that are on drugs versus the number that are on things like masks or non-drug trials.