After a lot of discussion and debates, the UK government has actually changed
its advice for people on face coverings, and they're saying that when you're on
public transport or in small shops where you can't keep your distance from other people,
you should actually cover your nose and mouth with some sort of cloth covering.
Though specifically not a face mask.
It's worth noting that Wales is not recommending face coverings because
they're not yet convinced they're useful.
The real anxiety is that if they recommend us to use face masks,
people will actually get hold of N95 respiratory masks or surgical masks
that are actually in severe need for health workers and also care workers.
The Centre for Disease Control in the United States and the Department of Health
in the UK both say that the sort of face covering you should be using
is made of a couple of layers of cotton and cloth.
On both their websites they give you detailed instructions for how to do this.
They suggest that you should cut up an old t-shirt ...
it's two layers of cloth that's important.
The reason for wearing some sort of face covering is not to protect yourself,
it's in order to protect other people from you if you happen to be infected.
The material will catch the droplets that contain the virus from any sneezing
or coughing, or even from you talking.
What it won't do is protect you because the viral particles coming at
speed from somebody else who's not got a mask on, are likely to go through
the fabric that you have in front of your face and nose.
So you have to be very careful how you put it on and how you take it off again.
You need to wash your hands before you put it on and wash your hands again
when you take it off.
And when you take it off you need to wash it straight away or put it in
the washing machine, whatever.
As we've always been told, we shouldn't touch our faces if we can possibly help it.
That same goes for masks; once it's on you shouldn't touch it because
if you have got virus on your hands then that will be transferred to the mask,
and it could go through the mask and into your nose and your mouth.
If you push it about or touch it in any way, then really it needs to go in
the wash and you need a brand new mask.
Unlike some other countries, there's no recommendation that we should be wearing
masks the whole time when we leave the house.
You don't have to wear them in the park, you don't have to wear them outdoors at all
or even in large stores like supermarkets where you can keep your distance.
They're only being recommended, in fact, for where you can't keep your distance
so that's in small enclosed spaces.
I've seen people in swimming goggles at the supermarket, and certainly people
wearing rubber gloves.
So with gloves, for instance, it's all very well to put them on but then if you're
touching your face with the gloves, I'm afraid you can get infected just as easily.
Goggles are not so useful because, unlike a cloth face covering,
you can't just wash them every night.
You're going to be putting them on and pulling them off quite a bit,
they're quite uncomfortable and hot to wear sometimes, so that
really won't help because you'll get virus on your hands again.
The recommendation is that children under two should not have face coverings
because it could interfere with their breathing.
Children of primary school age actually shouldn't wear face coverings unless
they're being supervised by an adult.
Also, people with respiratory problems so conditions, perhaps, like asthma
really shouldn't wear them again because they could have breathing problems.
There are two reasons why the government has really delayed recommending any sort
of face covering ... one is that the health care workers need them far more
than anybody else, but the second reason is that everybody worries that we would all
get complacent if we had a mask and think we're protected and think we can
get close to people when, in fact, we're not protected and we really shouldn't.
Wearing a mask is no way as effective as social distancing itself and also
washing your hands the whole time, so those two key messages we were given
to start with are far more important than wearing any sort of face covering.
This is just a recommendation still, it's not mandatory, and there are a lot
of areas of our lives in which we won't wear face masks at all but there are countries
where people are wearing them all the time, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, for instance,
and many of those countries actually have been wearing them a lot since the advent of SARS,
so they have far more of a habit of doing that and they've seen the usefulness of them too,
but I don't think that we're going to be wearing them forever, we will eventually
come out of all of this, thank goodness.