The CDC is still recommending that children under age 2 not wear masks. “We have known for many months that COVID-19 is airborne and therefore, a simple cloth mask is not going to cut it,” Leana Wen, MD, an emergency doctor and public health professor at George Washington University, said last month. The Mayo Clinic, for example, now requires all staff and visitors to wear N95 or KN95 masks. The agency is catching up to health experts who in recent months have recommended ditching cloth masks for N95 respirators or 3-ply surgical masks as a defense against the highly transmissible Omicron variant. The new guidance says specially labeled “surgical” N95 respirators should be reserved for health care workers. ![]() Previous guidance raised concerns about supply shortages of those masks. Members of the public should consider wearing N95 and KN95 masks in certain situations, such as in crowded public places, the guidance says. “Loosely woven cloth products provide the least protection, layered finely woven products offer more protection, well-fitting disposable surgical masks and KN95s offer even more protection, and well- fitting NIOSH-approved respirators (including N95s) offer the highest level of protection,” the CDC says. “To protect yourself and others from COVID-19, CDC continues to recommend that you wear the most protective mask you can that fits well and that you will wear consistently,” the CDC said in its first updated mask guidance since last fall. The CDC update doesn’t come out and say Americans should avoid cloth masks but clarifies that some kinds of masks work better than others. ![]() ![]() Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance on face masks, saying loosely woven cloth masks offer the least protection against COVID-19 and N95 and KN95 masks offer the most.
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