Should Quebec recommend or require wearing a mask?
A woman wears a medical mask on the subway.
With the rise of many respiratory viruses and the arrival of the holidays, wearing a mask seems to be inevitable in order to protect seniors and children and thus stem the backlog in the health care system. Yesterday, Ontario followed suit by recommending that the public wear a mask without making it compulsory. The College of Physicians of Quebec has also come out in favor of the return of the mask in public places.
For the professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal, Roxane Borgès Da Silva, Quebec should “strongly recommend” wearing a mask in enclosed spaces.
“We find ourselves in a situation where we have a lot of viruses circulating and not just COVID-19, wearing a mask is a very effective and not very restrictive measure, she said. To avoid having a lot of sick people and overloading our already strained healthcare system, strongly recommending the wearing of masks is something that should surely be done by the government.
On November 3, the national director of public health, Dr. Luc Boileau addressed the “common sense” of the population by inviting them to wear a face covering as soon as symptoms appear. .
To protect both our children, but also our older people, we must try to put the mask back on as much as possible when we are in public.
Roxane Borgès Da Silva, professor at the School of Public Health of the 'University of Montreal,
Roxane Borgès Da Silva explains that it is indeed the overprotection of children over the past three years and not a loss of immunity that is at the origin of this increase in pediatric hospitalizations .
“During the pandemic we had much less contact and protection with masks was imposed even in schools so the viruses circulated much less, she explains. The overpressure of the mask and the multiplication of contacts is a fertile ground for viruses to circulate, whatever it is, and it’s not that we haven’t lost immunity.”
The Ministry of Health and Social Services has yet to respond to Metro at the time of this writing.
