Cloth Mask Use and Removal

- You've probably been hearing a lot about wearing cloth masks, and how they can help reduce the spread of respiratory droplets, meaning, little bits of saliva as you're speaking, or if you're sneezing or coughing.

But it's important to make sure that you're handling and wearing the mask correctly so that you're not cross contaminating.

And that's when you spread contaminants from one surface to another.

So here's an illustration of what that might look like.

If you're wearing your mask, and you sneeze or cough into it, and get respiratory droplets on the inside, if you're wearing the mask, and are adjusting the front, touching the front of the mask to pull it down.

Or if you remove the mask by pulling on the front of it to take it away from your face, we're potentially touching the most contaminated surfaces of the mask and increasing the chance that we can spread any virus that we have on our hands to other surfaces, and therefore to other people.

So the correct way to wear and take care of your mask is to first wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds because we're gonna be touching our face, we want our hands to be clean.

Then we put the mask on and make any adjustments right at the beginning when our mask is clean, and our hands are clean.

And then we don't want to touch it.

We want to leave it alone as much as possible.

If you have to touch your mask to readjust it, make sure you wash your hands with soap and water immediately after you do that.

When you're ready to take your mask off, you want to touch it at the least contaminated point which is back at the ear tabs or on the straps.

You want to avoid pulling it away from your face from touching the part in the front where it's most contaminated.

When you take your mask off, you want to put it in a place that's not gonna contaminate clothing or any other surfaces.

And you want to make sure you wash your mask after each use.

Now if soap and water are not available, because you want to wash your hands after you take the mask off, as well, if soap and water are not available at any of those points when you need to be washing your hands, you can use an alcohol based hand sanitizer.

But a good old fashioned hand wash is going to be the most efficient at removing contamination, things like viruses from your hands.