Double Masking

 

                Several leading “health experts” recently began recommending that people wear two facial masks instead of one to protect themselves and others from the various strains of coronavirus now flitting about the fruited plain. “Double masking,” they say, is best achieved by placing a cloth mask over a surgical one. The unavoidable Dr. Fauci himself bestowed his imprimatur on multi-masking in an interview with NBC's "Today” show. Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor told the hosts, "If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.” (I’m sure condom manufacturers are happy to hear that.)

              Dr. Jay Varma, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio's senior adviser on public health, also recently spoke in favor of multiple facial prophylactics. He noted, "If you have the opportunity to wear more than one mask, it is more likely that it's going to be helpful than it's going to be harmful. In fact, myself, I now am starting to wear a surgical mask covered by a fabric mask.” He added, "More is probably better.” Indeed! If “more than one” is better than one, how many is truly enough?

              But wait, there’s more! (Remember, more is better.) Linsey Marr, another expert in virus transmission and a professor at Virginia Tech University to boot, told AARP: "A mask is like an obstacle course for particles to get through. Adding a second mask increases the chance that the particle will be trapped before it gets through." A mask is also an obstacle course for air and oxygen to get through, but breathing is probably overrated anyway. If one has two lungs, why not two masks?

              For that matter, if one wants to be really safe and is a bit of an overachiever, why not wear four masks, doubling the doubling?! That’s gotta be twice, um, four times better than a single mask, right. Maybe more if each mask adds an exponential effect.

              It turns out I am on to something. Dr. Scott Segal-- chair of Anesthesiology at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina-- recently told NBC news that we should consider wearing four face masks at once. We’ve gone from “two weeks to flatten the curve”…to we must all wear masks everywhere we go…to wearing two masks would be better……to “maybe four masks would do the trick.” Is this the new normal?

I hereby propose that football, hockey and basketball players should be mandated to wear at least four masks, as they are at heightened risk of spreading the disease due to extreme physical exertion and consequent heavy breathing.

Better safe than sorry. That way we can all breathe easier. Right?