As B.C. ended its mask mandate on Friday, many people were still choosing to don a face covering, but how strong is that protection if no one else is wearing a mask?
It depends, says infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch at Toronto General Hospital and an associate professor in the department of medicine at the University of Toronto.
“A lot of it’s going to be very situationally dependent,” Bogoch said.
“Who are you around? What type of environments are you in? How long are you in that environment?” he said.
“I don’t think it’s reasonable to say a mask lowers your risk by X per cent because there’s just too many variables at play.”
At the Royal Bank branch in Esquimalt on Friday, tellers were wearing masks as well as the majority of patrons.
The same scene played out in many coffee shops and grocery stores in Greater Victoria — staff in masks and most customers.
The reasons people gave for keeping a mask on included protecting themselves from possible infection given the highly transmissible virus is still circulating, wanting to ensure they don’t pick up the virus and pass it on to vulnerable family and friends, and wanting to protect others in society.
“If you want to protect yourself, there’s multiple things you can do: Masking, vaccination, better ventilated room, fewer people, avoiding the three C’s — close, crowded, confined setting,” said Bogoch.
Bogoch, in Ontario where the mask mandate is also to expire soon, said personally he would have preferred having mask mandates stay around a bit longer, certainly until after spring break and until there were stronger signs of a continued decline.
“Personally I would have rather waited a little bit longer and maybe kept them in certain additional settings like schools,” said Bogoch.
“I appreciate we can all look at the same data and come to different conclusions, that’s not unique to masking,” he said. “I just think it would have been reasonable to keep the masks a little bit longer but I fully understand that there’s other opinions.”
Many studies have tried to quantify the level of protection a person gets from a mask, said Bogoch, but all of those studies had significant weaknesses.
“I usually just frame it as the mask will provide you with some degree of protection — they’re certainly not perfect but it’s a helpful layer of protection,” he said.
“It’s just tough to quantify.”
