Britain is the worst-hit country outside of the US and Brazil. But it STILL won’t wear masks
LONDON - Walk into any busy store in England or board a train on London’s cramped underground system and you will see dozens of people unmasked. And you can forget about face coverings at recently reopened pubs... that’s about as likely as a free pint of beer.
This despite the UK being one of the world’s worst-hit countries by coronavirus -it stands third behind Brazil and the United States -- with almost 45,000 fatalities. And apart from catastrophic death tolls, the three countries at the top of the pandemic chart are those in which people resist wearing masks. Now, in the same week the World Health Organization confirms there is “emerging evidence” of airborne transmission of the coronavirus, senior scientists are urging Britons to take up mask wearing, as two new reports highlight the potential effectiveness of facial coverings.
“The UK is way behind many countries in terms of wearing masks,” the head of Britain’s national academy of sciences, the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan said Tuesday. He claimed not wearing a mask should be regarded as antisocial as drink driving and reasoned that there is a “growing body of evidence that wearing a mask will help protect others -- and might even protect you.”
His comments came as a review of global scientific research on mask wearing was published by a multidisciplinary group convened by the Royal Society -- Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE). And in the United States, a new study showed that one of the main drivers of cases now could be “silent spreaders,” or people who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic.
( CNN )