To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic

Steffen E. Eikenberry; Marina Mancuso; Enahoro Iboi; Tin Phan; Keenan Eikenberry; Yang Kuang; Eric Kostelich; Abba B. Gumel

With social distancing orders in place, essential service providers (such as retail workers, emergency services, law enforcement, etc.) represent a special category of concern, as they represent a largely unavoidable high contact node in transmission networks: Individual publicfacing workers may come into contact with hundreds or thousands of people in the course of a day, in relatively close contact (e.g. cashiers). Such contact likely exposes the workers to many asymptomatic carriers, and they may in turn, if asymptomatic, expose many susceptible members of the general public to potential transmission. Air exposed to multiple infectious persons (e.g. in grocery stores) could also carry a psuedo-steady load of infectious particles, for which masks would be the only plausible prophylactic [10] . Thus, targeted, highly effective mask use by service workers may be reasonable. We are currently extending the basic model framework presented here to examine this hypothesis.