Orangebronco

Dr. Kohn, I keep reading about local community sewing groups hand-sewing masks for medical personnel to help them with the current mass shortages. I suspect these are neither effective or acceptable, yet there continue to be requests (via Facebook and things like the NextDoor app) for sewers to come forward to mass produce these. These groups claim the hand-sewn masks are at least 50-80% effective, which is "better than nothing" and that hospitals and medical offices are grateful to get them. What are your thoughts about this?

Thank you for taking the time to answer questions. Yeah, I think people have wonderful intentions and I applaud them for wanting to help, but I think they might be inadvertently doing more harm than good (if it's actually true as they claim that medical offices are begging them to deliver these). I've questioned them about the efficacy as well as pointed out that medical personnel in hospitals are not accepting these for all of the reasons you've pointed out, but they continue to insist that they are in dire need and are recruiting people to mass produce them.