Masks are awkward and can be uncomfortable. Face shields—which shield a person’s face with a clear curved plastic panel—are more comfortable, easier to put on and take off, reusable, and easy to clean. Research on face shields is limited but promising.
Research on face shields is limited but promising. In a 2014study, researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health placed a face shield on a breathing robot and had another robot 18 inches away “cough out” flu virus. The shield prevented the breathing robot from inhaling 96 percent of the virus within five minutes.
But face shield proponents argue that based on the laws of physics, shields will likely protect others. Everything that flies out of your mouth is “going forward, and it’s hitting a giant piece of plastic,” Dr. Perencevich says. “It just physically can’t go through.” Dr. Perencevich and others are now designing studies to help address this issue, but he says it’s difficult for research like this to get funded. “We’re more interested as a society in treatment than we are in prevention,” Michael Edmond, M.D., a hospital epidemiologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, who co-authored thecommentary with Dr. Perencevich, tells SELF. “There’s never money to do this kind of work. It’s never been prioritized.
Some people are skeptical of shields because they are open on the sides and bottom. But these openings may not pose much of a problem. Research suggests thatvia large droplets expelled out of a person’s mouth or nose, which are pulled down by gravity within a radius of six feet. Shields prevent close-by expelled viruses from hitting another person’s face before they fall.
To get in through the shield’s openings, the virus would need to linger around in the air in smaller particles known as aerosols and eventually meander around the shield’s sides. But “the patterns of spread of [COVID-19] suggest that aerosol is unusual,” David Fisman, M.D., an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, tells SELF. Some studies have
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