After the confinement which should end on May 11, 2020, the French population will be forced to wear "general public" masks to go out. In other words, fabric masks for the most part. Pulmonologist Bertrand Dautzenberg made an unexpected statement on this subject, believing that wearing cloth masks would be as effective as wearing an FFP2 mask in front of someone who does not have a mask.
While masks were deemed non-essential by the authorities at the start of the epidemic, the situation seems to have changed since then. Now, wearing a fabric mask is more and more common. This will be even more the case after May 11, 2020, the announced date of the end of confinement. For the past few weeks, various tutorials have been popping up on the web for making your own mask. Nevertheless, that of the French Association for Standardization (Afnor) seems to have met with some success with more than 500,000 downloads.
For pulmonologist Bertrand Dautzenberg interviewed by France Info on April 17, 2020, this is a very good thing. The person concerned even went so far as to declare that "if everyone wears a cloth mask, then it will be as effective as wearing an FFP2 mask" . When you know the relative effectiveness of fabric masks in the face of viruses, it seems complicated to take this statement seriously.
Bertrand Dautzenberg assumes that these fabric masks protect against the projection of at least 70% of droplets. He explains to France Info:"If the person who has the Covid-19 has this mask, instead of emitting 100 sputters, it will only emit 30. And if the other person in front of him also has this mask, then there will only be less a third of the postilions. So there will be 8 to 9 postilions out of the 100 at the start. So an overall efficiency of the two masks of 90% which is equivalent to the best performing masks » . For him, two people discussing face to face while each wearing a cloth mask is therefore no less dangerous than another scenario where one of the people wears an FFP2 mask and the other no mask.
Everyone will have their own opinion on the communication from the French pulmonologist. However, everyone knows that in Asia, approved masks are part of the daily life of a large part of the population. However, this allowed a very limited contamination in most countries. In France, it is impossible to allow the entire population to wear such a mask. And for good reason, the hospital staff themselves are in difficulty at this level. In other words, we have to face the facts:wearing a fabric mask is always better than wearing nothing at all.
Finally, let's remember that the shortage of approved masks in France is almost a state scandal. In 2009, our country had a large strategic state stock:one billion surgical masks and 900 million FFP2 masks. In 2017, there were only 700 million ! Between budget cuts and changes in logistics, the management of the strategic state stock has been a real fiasco over the last decade.
