I’m spending the spring/ summer in Mexico and I see a lot of people wearing surgical masks. Mostly people working in food service and in some stores. Every single person I see has the mask covering their mouth but not their nose. Is this doing anything? If they’re wearing for their protection don’t you have to cover your nose too?
It’s for your protection, not theirs. I think the general idea is that coughing is bad, hence only the mouth needs covering.
That’s no protection if the wearer sneezes, as a sneeze can expel mucus through both the mouth and nose. Both orifices should be covered. I know when I go to dialysis, both the tech and I wear masks over our mouths and noses when I’m being hooked up to or disconnected from the machine.
Totally agree.
I’ve seen the not-covering-the-nose thing on PBS medical shows and such a lot lately.
Yeah, that’s not right.
Go to Japan and you’ll see about 25% of the people there were medical masks. It has become a cultural fixture there and many other Asian countries, and sounds like it is spreading to other parts of the world.
There is no one specific reason for the proliferation of this behavior that began when SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) broke out in China in the early 2000’s. The continued reasons for people wearing medical masks in public range from:
- Wearer doesn’t want to catch illness
- Wearer has illness and doesn’t want to spread
- Wearer is self conscious about appearance
- Wearer is shy and fewer people interact with people wearing masks
- Wearer believes the masks are fashionable
I get why people are wearing masks, it’s the covering the mouth and not the nose that’s baffling me. Granted I’m seeing this in Oaxaca, Mexico. Maybe it’s a peculiar thing that’s only happening there.
In Japan, it’s mostly during the pollen season for the sugi tree. The mountains were deforested during WWII, and replanted with sugi. Unfortunately, during the pollen season it can be really bad. I was fortunately to have lived there for 24 years before I developed an allergy to sugi pollen.
There are a number of people who will wear masks for other reasons, including the occasional wanted person attempting to avoid capture, but the biggest reason is allergies.
Because of the actually necessity of the masks, they are worn covering the nose as well as the mouth.
My wife (Japanese) tells me to wear them whenever I have a cold. The issue is that the masks tend to be snug around my chin, while I have a big schnozz and wear glasses. The result is that my glasses fog up when I exhale, so I pull it down when I need to read something (which is pretty much all day at work). On top of that, it just tends to slip downward over the course of the day anyway.
No, I’ve seen it in work environments. It generally comes from people not understanding that the mask is doing jackshit unless it covers your nose; yes, they do fog up glasses (they do not fog up goggles, which after all are what one should wear for safety). In the same work environments I’ve seen hairnets which did not cover all hair and beard nets which were large enough to cover the wearer’s beard fully but which barely covered the chin.