U.S. to open cache of free N95 masks

400 million face coverings to ship to select sites for public distribution

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will begin making 400 million N95 masks available for free to U.S. residents at thousands of pharmacies and other locations starting next week.

With the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus spurring record levels of infections and hospitalizations, public health experts have repeatedly said masking, especially with superior-quality products, is an important tool to control spread of the airborne virus.

This will be the largest distribution of free masks by the federal government to the public since the covid-19 pandemic began.

The N95 masks will come from the government’s Strategic National Stockpile. U.S. officials are starting to ship

masks at the end of this week.

The White House said the masks will be made available late next week at pharmacies and community health centers that have partnered with the federal government’s covid-19 vaccination campaign.

The program will be fully up and running by early February. There will be three masks available per adult.

Also, “we anticipate making additional, high-quality masks for children available in the near future,” said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement.

Details were not immediately available on the specifics of the program, including the sort of masks to be provided, whether kid-size ones will be available and whether the masks could be reworn.

The White House said that “to ensure broad access for all Americans, there will be three masks available per person.”

N95 and KN95s are known as respirators that filter out most virus particles and come with markings to indicate they are authentic. Both types of masks must form a seal to the face to work properly.

The announcement comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday updated its guidance on face coverings to more clearly state that properly fitted N95 and KN95 masks offer the most protection against covid-19. Still, it didn’t formally recommend N95s instead of cloth masks.

The best mask “is the one that you will wear and the one you can keep on all day long, that you can tolerate in public indoor settings,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said last week.

N95 or KN95 masks are more widely available now than at any other time during the pandemic, though they are often more costly than less-protective surgical masks or cloth masks.

The United States has more than 750 million N95 masks in the stockpile. Unlike earlier in the pandemic when severe shortages of personal protective equipment affected hospitals, forcing hospital staffs to make homemade face shields and use bandannas, an ample supply of high-quality masks exists for health-care workers, officials said. Those masks are also widely available to the public online and in stores.

Special surgical N95 masks are reserved for health care workers and will not be given out, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday. The department maintains supplies in the stockpile.

Signs will be displayed prominently at locations to instruct consumers on how to use the masks, the Health and Human Services official said.

MASKS AS DEFENSE

Outside experts, including former CDC director Tom Frieden, for some time have urged the use of N95 masks, noting that wearing such masks is particularly important for people who are older or immunocompromised, especially if those around them are not masked.

Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at Boston University researching health policy, said every Group of Seven country has a mask mandate or widespread mask-wearing except the United States.

“After surges in July, November, and December, we should expect to see more surges and know that new variants could evade vaccines,” Raifman said in an email. “We should prepare to have enough N95 and KN95 masks and tests for everyone in future surges. We should implement data-driven mask policies so that mask policies automatically turn on and better protect everyone and our society during surges.”

While N95 respirators offer the strongest protection, some experts said the masks can be difficult to breathe through and come in different sizes.

“For most of us, we really feel a well-fitting mask is the key point,” said Ann Marie Pettis, president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Double-masking, or using a mask fitter or brace over a mask, can often provide a snugger seal, she said.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethics specialist who advised President Joe Biden’s transition team on the coronavirus, has argued that masks offer additional protection while normalizing the use of face coverings.

In an interview Tuesday, Emanuel stressed that high-quality masks such as N95s are essential to ward off the fast-moving omicron variant.

“[Having] everyone wearing N95 masks is the single biggest thing we could do to reduce transmission,” Emanuel said. “It reduces what’s going out, and it blocks what’s coming in.”

Emanuel requires his students to wear N95 masks in class, handing out fresh masks every month and paying for them out of his research budget.

In articles this month, Emanuel and other former Biden advisers called on the administration to make high-quality face coverings “readily available to all US residents for free or very low cost.”

After the articles’ publication, Biden officials last week met with Emanuel to discuss his recommendations.

“This is a big step forward,” Emanuel said, hailing the Biden administration’s announcement. “It’s taken two years, but it appears we’re getting it right, finally.”

Anne Miller, executive director of Project N95, a nonprofit organization that distributes free N95s and children’s masks in the United States, said in a statement that the group supported the White House decision, calling it “an unprecedented move to help protect the American public.”

Although there is now no shortage of the masks, she said, access to them has not been universal because of cost and lack of awareness.

PREVIOUS INFECTION

Previous infection with the coronavirus appeared to provide stronger protection against the delta variant than did vaccination in a large sample of patients, the CDC reported Wednesday.

But in the long term, vaccination still offers the best defense against the virus, the researchers said.

The data was gathered before the widespread rollout of booster shots and the emergence of the omicron variant, so the findings may not be relevant to the current surge, the agency cautioned.

“These findings cannot be generalized to the current omicron wave,” Benjamin Silk, a public health researcher at the CDC, told reporters Wednesday. “It’d be like comparing apples and oranges.”

By the end of November, 1 in 6 U.S. deaths from covid-19 were occurring in New York and California. Scientists analyzed testing, surveillance and immunization data from the two states to gauge the level of protection offered by vaccines and previous infection.

Unvaccinated people were at the highest risk of infection or severe illness with covid-19 throughout the study period, the scientists found. But the relative protection afforded by vaccination or previous infection changed with the arrival of the delta variant.

During the week beginning May 30, 2021, vaccinated people who had not experienced covid-19 had the lowest risk of coronavirus infection and hospitalization, followed by unvaccinated people who had been previously diagnosed with covid-19.

By the week beginning Oct. 3, however, vaccinated people with previous diagnoses fared best against the delta variant. Unvaccinated people with histories of covid-19 also had lower rates of infection and hospitalization than those protected by vaccines alone.

The data is consistent with trends observed in international studies, the researchers said.

Waning of vaccine-derived immunity may explain why vaccinated people were less protected from infection with the delta variant than those who had previous diagnoses, the researchers said.

A recent study of employees at the Cleveland Clinic suggested that while vaccination does not add much benefit to a previous bout for the first many months, it may offer better protection against symptomatic illness over the long term than does immunity from a previous infection.

“The totality of the evidence suggests really that both vaccination and having survived covid each provide protection against infection and hospitalization,” said Eli Rosenberg, deputy director for science at the New York State Department of Health.

But having covid-19 carries significant risk, so “becoming vaccinated and staying up to date with boosters really is the only safe choice,” he said.

GLOBE’S CASES UP 20%

The number of new coronavirus cases globally rose by 20% last week to more than 18 million, marking a slowdown in the surge caused by the omicron variant’s spread, according to the World Health Organization.

In its weekly report on the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said the number of new covid-19 infections increased in every world region except for Africa, where cases fell by nearly a third. The number of deaths globally remained similar to the previous week, at about 45,000.

Confirmed covid-19 cases jumped by about 50% the week before last, and earlier this month, the WHO reported the biggest single-week increase in cases of the pandemic.

WHO reported late Tuesday that Southeast Asia had the biggest rise in coronavirus cases last week, with the number of newly infected people spiking by 145%. The Middle East saw a 68% weekly rise.

The smallest increases were noted in the Americas and Europe, at 17% and 10%, respectively. Scientists said last week that there were early signs in the U.S. and Britain that omicron-driven outbreaks have peaked in those countries and that cases could soon fall off sharply.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that the highly infectious variant “continues to sweep the world.” He said it was “misleading” to consider it as causing mild disease, although studies have shown omicron is less likely to result in severe illness or hospitalization than its predecessors.

“We are concerned about the impact omicron is having on already exhausted health workers and overburdened health systems,” Tedros said.

He acknowledged that some regions appear to be out of the worst of the latest omicron wave but warned that “not all countries are out of the woods yet.”