Indo-U.S. Collaboration Shows Value of Face Masks in Curbing COVID-19 Spread
November 9, 2022 Face masks play a valuable supportive role in the fight against COVID-19 and air pollution.
A recent collaboration between a team from the Nonwovens & Advanced Materials Laboratory at Texas Tech University and an undergraduate student from Bengaluru, India has shown that the mask mandate in India helped reduce the number of daily COVID-19 cases.
Cotton face coverings, surgical masks, and N95 types are being used by the public in India.
The work did not isolate the influence of different type of face masks as there were no specific data available on this aspect. The public uses different face masks depending on availability and choice.
Building on over two decades of outreach effort to promote the technical textiles sector in India, I asked Shreyas Ganesh, a computer science major from PES University in Bengaluru, to work on the project this past summer to analyze the effect of mask mandates on COVID-19 from January to May 2022.
During the mask mandate period (Jan. 1 to Mar. 31), the usefulness of masks in reducing the spread was visible after some period as expected due to the nature of the virus. During this 3-month period, there was an average decline of about 2,920 daily cases. As the mandate was lifted during Apr. 1 to Apr. 23, cases per day spiked from a period of decline in the previous months. When the mandate was reinstated, data indicated a decline in daily cases, showing the positive effect of masks as a supportive countermeasure.
Vaccination is a proven preventive measure against viral communicable diseases such as COVID-19. As viruses like SARS-CoV-2 can mutate into different variants, additional measures such as the use of face coverings prove useful.
This work has recently appeared as the cover article in the October 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industry’s Open Access TAPPI Journal. The journal recognized the collaborative study with the Indian flag’s tricolor background on the cover.
The work highlights the value of advanced textiles such as filters in enhancing human health, as well as the need for multidisciplinary research efforts to grow the global textiles industry.
The United States Department of Defense and Cotton Incorporated are funding multiple research projects looking at functional and sustainable advanced textiles. Recently, India’s Ministry of Textiles through its National Mission on Technical Textiles is supporting multiple research projects to boost the advanced textiles sector.
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