Correction to Aerosol Filtration Efficiency of Common Fabrics Used in Respiratory Cloth Masks

A Citizen Science Facemask Experiment and Educational Modules to Improve Coronavirus Safety in Communities and Schools

“…Governments that led initiatives against COVID-19 have reversed orders on facemasks as "mandatory" due to protests, highlighting that cultural acceptability is necessary for the success of any measure intended to control COVID-19. The science of facemasks is straightforward (12), facemasks stop (97.2-99.7%) droplets dispersion (12)(13)(14)(15). Thus, the reversal of mask-wearing mandates leaves education and self-awareness as our ultimate strategies to ensure equitable and sustained public droplet safety.…”

“…Clear guidance and the dissemination of factual information in the community is needed as part of citizen science and education campaigns. Contributing to such educational strategies to inform and incentivize the public, our laboratory recently determined that textiles, when used as 2-layer-covers, can reduce the contamination of the environment with bacteriacarrying droplets by 99.7%, which also fully protects germfree mice when their cages are covered with 2-layer textiles (13,14,49). To share this important finding with the public, we created an educational module on the effectiveness of facemasks, described in brief below and freely accessible in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese at https://sites.google.com/kent.edu/ face-mask-challenge/face-mask-challenge-home, which address many regions facing severe rates of COVID19 infection.…”

“…As a response to this call, an educational exercise and citizen science project is presented here to promote discussion and greater awareness of facemask effectiveness by providing an innovative hands-on activity. Based on a validated spray simulation method (13,14), community members can observe first-hand how textile barriers stop the dispersal of colored droplets, made with coffee for instance, or stop the dispersal of germs using solutions containing microbes safely present in foods like yogurt or garden soil. The educational module contains four experiments of varying difficulty and is freely available as an archive of latest versions and community contributions (https:// github.com/axr503/education), as a website in multiple languages (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, specifically developed for this project, or amenable for automatic translation via online search engines such as Google Chrome, see also Figure 1G-H for direct smartphone access) at https://sites.google.com/kent.edu/ face-mask-challenge/face-mask-challenge-home or as 'ready-toprint' PDF module files for direct public access in four languages (see Supplementary Materials).…”

“…The online data submission form where the citizen scientists (adults, supervised children, or teachers) can share the results of their experiments with the global community, and see the aggregate responses globally or for their respective languages, is available at https://bit.ly/facemaskchallengedata. This project is inspired by recent spray-simulation research that shows the effectiveness of cloth covers in reducing the contamination of the environment by liquid droplets (13,14). Facemasks drastically cut environmental contamination to <8 cm (>99.7% reduction, if two-layers are used) compared to a radial area of contamination of 2 m if we do not wear droplet barriers (13,14).…”

“…This project is inspired by recent spray-simulation research that shows the effectiveness of cloth covers in reducing the contamination of the environment by liquid droplets (13,14). Facemasks drastically cut environmental contamination to <8 cm (>99.7% reduction, if two-layers are used) compared to a radial area of contamination of 2 m if we do not wear droplet barriers (13,14). Our module also helps demonstrate how many droplets people release into the environment during normal speech.…”