HOW MUCH IS A FACE MASK WORTH? TRY $3000.

 Every face mask worn consistently in public in the US is worth at least $3000 to society, a new study shows. Or, to put that differently, every American who chooses not to wear a mask is costing the rest of us at least that much.

Every face mask saves society $3000-$6000 / Every refusal to wear one costs society $3000-$6000

Photo Credit: Chad Davis

This eye-opening calculation comes to us from a team of medical, public health and economic experts at Yale University. You can find a preprint of their paper here.

The researchers cite several lines of evidence to arrive at their economic estimate:

--As of the date of their study, countries with pre-existing norms for mask-wearing by sick people experienced a 44 percent slower growth rate in Covid-19 cases and a 48 percent slower growth in the number of deaths than countries without such norms. These effects remained significant even when other possible factors were controlled for statistically.

Although the above statistics indicate that universal mask-wearing would reduce the rate of viral transmission by much more than 10 percent, the authors decided to use a 10 percent reduction as an extremely conservative estimate.

When they plugged that relatively minimal reduction into a widely used model for the progress of the pandemic along with commonly used estimates of the costs to society of premature or excess deaths, the result was a conservative estimate of $3000 to $6000 of benefit to society for every person who wears a mask consistently.

They add that this estimate is extra-conservative since it only looks at excess deaths and doesn't include the costs to society of hundreds of thousands or millions of sick people. ". . . our estimates . . . suggest that the effect of masks could be 5-6 times as large," they write.

The authors provide a separate analysis for the benefit of highly effective N95 masks for front-line health care providers, who, as we've learned, are at particularly high risk of contracting the SARS-NCoV-2 virus and passing it on. In addition, they are absolutely necessary to treat the sick and save lives. "Multiplying these factors together," they write, "the social value of each N95 mask for a healthcare worker could easily be more than a million dollars per mask."

The researchers conclude by pointing out that the availability of this simple, cheap and effective intervention is a rarity. "Outside of crises, policies do not exist where a few dollars of expenditure per person can produce thousands of dollars in benefit. We are in a rare moment when such benefits are achievable--this is an urgent crisis and action is necessary."

As we know, there is still no universal mask-wearing mandate from the federal government, nor is there likely to be one as long as Trump remains in office. However, according to a National Geographic assessment, 44 states have mandated mask-wearing under at least some conditions, and 74 percent of Americans polled say they "always" wear a mask when out. Unfortunately, many Republicans continue to receive the opposite message from the President and from conservative media. As a result, while 84 percent of self-identified Democrats say they always wear a mask, just 66 percent of Republicans say they do. 

The largest gap--a 22 percent difference--is between Democratic and Republican women, reporting 89 and 67 percent mask wearing respectively.

Once again, if every missing mask is costing the rest of us $3000 to $6000, not to mention needless illness and, tragically many lives lost, those differences in willingness to wear face masks in public are costly indeed.

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REA

TO MASK OR NOT TO MASK, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Two new studies make this question much easier to answer than Hamlet's dilemma. If we all wear face masks in public, that alone will go a long way towards choking off the coronavirus pandemic.

Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Academy A, epidemiologist Richard Stutt and colleagues at the UK's Cambridge and Greenwich universities modeled 18 months of the pandemic with different levels of mask-wearing effectiveness.

Students wearing face masks (and saving lives)

Credit: Gustavo Fring

Not surprisingly, the biggest impact on the virus came when 100 percent of the population wore masks that were highly effective both in keeping infected people from expelling virus-laden droplets and protecting healthy people from inhaling them. The models showed that that combination could push the infamous R-value--the number of infections an infected person passes on--below 1, and so snuff out the pandemic.

Even more encouragingly, even if the masks were just slightly more than 50 percent effective, or if only slightly more than 50 percent of the population wore them, that crucial R value could be pushed below the magic number 1.

Here's the striking bottom line of this study, assuming face masks that are 50 percent effective:

"We note that 100% facemask adoption without lock-down achieves a greater reduction in the final size of epidemic, a lower 'total removed' and a lower peak of active cases than lock-down without facemasks."

Let me repeat that. According to their models, if everyone wore face masks, that would be more effective in limiting the size and impact of the epidemic than a total lockdown. If we compare the social and economic impacts of universal face mask-wearing to a full-scale lockdown, there's no contest. Wearing a face mask is a significant nuisance, but it allows most activities to continue--as we see in many Asian countries where face masks are a normal part of life. Lockdowns, as we've seen, are immensely life-changing and economically devastating.

A second research team, reporting in the equally prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the spread of the coronavirus in three of the worst-hit parts of the world, Wuhan, China, Italy and New York City. The researchers tracked the course of the epidemic in each location as different measures were put in place to try to control it.

Their conclusion was striking--mandated face covering was ". . . the determinant in shaping the trends of the pandemic." Renyi Zhang, at Texas A&M Univeristy, and colleagues, calculated that face masks alone prevented 78,000 COVID-19 cases in Italy between April 6 and May 9, and over 66,000 in New York between April 17 and May 9. Given the percentage of diagnosed COVID-19 patients who died in Italy and New York, wearing face masks likely saved more than 15,000 lives in Italy and New York City during those weeks.

This research team's bottom line:

"We conclude that wearing face masks in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission, and this inexpensive practice, in conjunction with simultaneous social distancing, quarantine and contact tracing represents the most likely fighting opportunity to stop the COVID-19 pandemic."

Again, note that wearing face masks in public, maintaining a safe distance from others, quarantining people who are infected and tracing their contacts, while challenging are still far less damaging to normal life and to the economy than lockdowns.


So, two separate studies using completely different methodologies came to essentially the same conclusion. Wearing face masks in public can be extremely effective in snuffing out this world-shaking pandemic.

I'm wearing my mask whenever I step out my front door. Please do all of the world a huge favor and wear yours too!

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Here's a link to another researcher who has reviewed the research literature and comes to the same conclusion. Jeremy Howard, a distinguished research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, clarify that masks work by keeping most virus-carrying droplets from being expelled into the environment. Again, the more people who wear them, the safer we all are.

REA