Published by Peter Tippett MD PhD, CEO careMESH; Chairman DataMotion; ex Presidential Advisor; Norton Antivirus creator

Saving Your Health, One Mask at a Time

Saving Your Health, One Mask at a Time

We all hear the same things: wash your hands, don't touch your face, stay at home, stay 6 feet away from others. Viruses live on boxes and plastic and doorknobs and... EVERYWHERE.

How does the average person decide what measures to follow unless they truly understand how these things work or have a clear set of “rules” they can abide by?

I am an Internal Medicine-certified, Emergency Room MD with a PhD in Biochemistry. I have also spent much of my professional life in the high-tech world helping people understand how risk, infection, and the growth of infection behaves. So I thought it might be helpful to folks in my network to explain how personal protection from a virus like SARS-CoV-2 (the formal name of the virus that causes COVID-19) actually works, how any given measure individually lowers risk, how various countermeasures work together, and most importantly, to give you some simple guidelines for day-to-day living in this new COVID world.

Bottom Line on Masks & Gloves:

• Wear a mask when you are in “exposure” zones (mainly places with other people).
• Treat your home, car, and yard as safe places (no mask or gloves).
• Be on high alert on what you are doing with your hands when you are in “danger zones.” This is when you must not touch your face.
• Consider wearing gloves (even winter gloves or work gloves can be helpful) but only for short periods of time and only when in “touch exposure” danger zones.
• Remove your gloves (and mask) when you return to your safe place.
• Wash your hands every single time you take off your gloves or mask or move from a danger zone back to a safe zone.
• When you are at home and after washing up, you can relax, scratch your nose, rub your eyes and floss your teeth…without worry.

Protections Work Together

All protections or countermeasures are only partially effective. For example, wearing the seat belt in your car reduces the likelihood of dying by about 50% compared with not wearing it. You can think about that as horrible (“it will fail half the time!”), or as great (“it cuts the risk of dying in half!”). For everything we care about, in all aspects of life, we solve this “risk” problem by using countermeasures together to improve their collective effectiveness. Independently, air bags reduce the risk of dying by about 30-40%. When added together with seatbelts, they are synergistic and reduce risk together by 65-70%. We add licensing, speed limits, anti-lock brakes, police enforcement and other things to achieve very good risk reduction (well into the upper 90s). We need to be even more careful when we drive in more dangerous situations, such as in a snowstorm. Protecting yourself (and society) from COVID works exactly the same way—you just can't see the snow.

Getting Infected is Not “Black and White”

A tiny number of virus organisms placed in the back of a person’s throat one time is not likely to lead to the average person getting “sick” with COVID. If we placed a tiny number of live viruses in the throats of 1,000 people, less than half would probably get sick. If we placed 1,000 or 1,000,000 viral organisms, the average person probably would get sick. And if we placed a tiny number of organisms 10 or 100 times in a week, the average person would also likely get sick because of the multiple exposures. This is because even in your throat, your body has protective countermeasures such as mucus and cilia and your blood and other fluids likewise have generic immune and other protections. They are just not as strong as we need them to be. Even as people get and recover from COVID or get a future vaccine, 100% of the population won't be 100% protected, but collectively we will be safe.

Your nose reduces the risk of viral particles getting to your throat. A mask reduces the risk of the viral particles getting to your nose, and social distancing reduces the risk of them getting to your mask. Together, these countermeasures work very well.