Q&A: Pandemic Expert on Ohio Valley Mask Orders, School Reopening

Dr. Gerald Keusch is a professor of medicine and international health at Boston University, and the director of the Collaborative Research Core at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory. He answered your questions back in April, and joined us again to discuss masking orders, school reopening, and the politicization of science.

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Ohio Valley ReSource: Thank you for joining us. To start with, are thoroughly-followed mask orders enough on their own? Or do they need to be combined with other measures, like contact tracing, in order to get the job done?

Dr. Gerald Keusch: Just today (Thursday), two things appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. One was a brief report from two of the major academic medical centers in Boston. In March, as cases were really taking off here, Massachusetts General Hospital And Brigham and Women’s Center implemented a mandatory mask order for everyone in those two institutions. And then they tracked what happened. And what they saw was, within 10 days, the rates of infection dropped. This was accompanied by an editorial, which said that the research clearly shows that even in a high-intensity setting like a hospital, masks alone have a significant impact. 

Now, there’s been a lot of discussion: Are these masks simply altruistic? Are you just reducing your delivery of particles out into the environment? Or are you also protecting yourself by wearing one? We now can say that it’s both. And it’s so simple, so easy to use. 

But it doesn’t take much to figure out why we’ve seen so much resistance to the use of masks. We have failed, at the highest levels of this government, to impose a common message. We have diminished the reliability of information, and we’ve empowered people who don’t know what they’re talking about, like economic advisors to the president, to capture the agenda among some portion of our population. 

So there’s no question in my mind that the universal use of masks in public spaces is an effective, simple, cheap behavioral tool. This is totally separate from the value of contact tracing and spacing, both things that are relatively easy to do and were neglected during our initial reopening. The problem is that, like everything on the public health side, we’re unprepared to do it effectively. These measures are all interconnected, and they all need to be in place to get this under control.