Compulsory face masks in offices ‘will be taken into consideration’ by ministers in a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus, Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick has said.
Face coverings were made mandatory for workers in pubs, bars, shops and restaurants in England last month as the Government tried to get a surge of infections under control.
Ministers in Scotland recently met to discuss whether rules on wearing masks in public settings should be extended to offices.
Asked whether the same could be done in England, Jenrick said: ‘Some workplaces are asking their employees to do so voluntarily.’
‘It does have some benefit. So, I’m sure, as with other things, that will be taken into consideration by the Health Secretary and the chief medical officer, but we don’t have a plan today to take action in that respect.’
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It marks a shift in the Government’s mood from July, when Matt Hancock ruled out the suggestion of mandatory face masks in office buildings, the Telegraph reports.
At the time, he said: ‘No, that isn’t going to happen, and the reason is that in offices you tend to spend a lot of time with the same people, and so the way to stop the spread of the virus in offices is to have social distancing, either two metres or one metre plus mitigations in place.’
However since then, more evidence has emerged suggesting that although masks do not make people completely invincible, they might help soften the blow of coronavirus.
A study in August by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering found that someone standing two metres from a coughing person with no mask is exposed to 10,000 times more droplets than someone half a metre from someone coughing and wearing a covering.
While masks are effective at catching larger sized droplets, smaller droplets – known as aerosols – can remain airbourne for hours – and can pass through masks more easily.
Nonetheless, if the majority of Covid-19 particles are absorbed by a carrier’s face covering and only a few reach someone else, they are much less likely to become seriously ill or develop long term health complications.
A study published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that masks could be inadvertently giving immunity to their wearers.
Further research in the Lancet suggested that more people are dealing with a lower ‘viral load’, resulting in milder or asymptomatic cases.
This process is known as ‘variolation’, the practice of infecting people with low doses of a pathogen in the hopes of triggering an immune response.
Researchers say masks could help facilitate this and ‘thereby slow the spread of the virus’ until a vaccine or cure comes along.
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