Several infection control experts believe the more tightly fitting P2 or N95 masks should be subsidised or made free by the government.
Industrial respirator masks should be widely adopted by the public to counter the explosion of Omicron cases in Australia because cloth and surgical masks, while much better than no mask at all, allow particles with COVID-19 to spread.
Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists president Kate Cole said she wasn’t sure why higher-quality masks for the public hadn’t yet been embraced by governments to stem the spread of infectious COVID-19 variants. “While it might stop really large droplets potentially being inhaled or exhaled, we know that we generate aerosols that are incredibly small and so aerosols that small will likely not be trapped in a cloth mask efficiently.”The single-use respirator masks are still fairly widely available in Australia, though they are more expensive than surgical masks , prompting calls by Ms Cole and others for them to be discounted by the government.
, the head of Monash University’s epidemiological modelling unit, Associate Professor James Trauer, called for high-quality masks to be widely distributed to the public.Occupational physician Malcolm Sim, who has served on infection control groups for the state and federal governments, said he didn’t believe subsidising respirator masks was the highest priority, given the competing demands for funding. He said would probably rank support for rapid antigen tests higher.
Professor Sim said he was also concerned people still didn’t understand the higher risk posed by indoor environments.
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