Masks must stay on for now, docs advise

Two top doctors have warned Barbadians not to expect the mask mandate to be lifted in any hurry.

While a number of American states and Britain move to reinstate indoor mask mandates amid high vaccination rates there, infection control expert Dr Corey Forde and Barbados Association of Medical Practitioner (BAMP) president Dr Lynda Williams suggested it would be ill-advised for Barbados to end its mandate at this time.

The advice came during the second town hall meeting on COVID-19 vaccines and testing at the Princess Margaret Secondary School, Six Roads on Wednesday evening.

Since February 3, mask wearing in Barbados has been mandatory except for those who cannot wear a face covering as a result of a physical condition or other special circumstances.

In her response to an online viewer, Dr Williams stressed the importance of the mask as a barrier to person-to-person spread of the virus.

She said that Barbadians’ best bet to stave off any major calamity is to continue wearing masks, practising good sanitization and social distancing, since less than 50 per cent of the total population has been inoculated and especially due to the rise of COVID-19 variants.

Dr Williams said: “The reason why you can see in some other countries that they have reduced the wearing of masks is because of the level of vaccination and the decrease of spread of vaccinated persons.

“Now what we knew originally, especially with the Alpha and the other early variants, was that the vaccination was extremely effective at reducing transmission. In fact, people who got vaccinated were 80 per cent less likely than the unvaccinated to pass the virus between them. However, the Delta variant has challenged that now. And what they realized very quickly was that the Delta variant was more transmissible than the previous variants.

“So, you had to go back to having a barrier even where people were fully vaccinated. What we don’t know yet is how much reduction in transmission the vaccine gives against the Delta variant. We know that it is going to be less than it gave against the Alpha variant… but it is not that it is reduced to nothing,” she added.

Therefore, Dr Williams said, people who are fully vaccinated still have a lower risk of passing the virus between each other.

“But we feel that the mask is still an important barrier even at this time,” she insisted. “Until we gain more information and we gather more evidence, masks are still a very important barrier. And so, at this time in Barbados where we have roughly 30 per cent of the population vaccinated there is no real reason for us to reduce the mask mandate.”

Dr Forde drew reference to several Asian countries in which wearing masks had been the norm even before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

He said: “I think this debate about masks will go on and on. I quite remember at the beginning of this outbreak we were trying to figure out ‘is a mask good? What type of masks?

“I think the evidence is really clear for this one. It is simple. If I cough or I sneeze it holds the particles in and it stops them from going forward…. It doesn’t always annihilate it but it decreases that risk. If I add a face shield to that, for example, it further eliminates the risk.”
(KC)