CATER Mask Decisions

January 7, 2021

Clean Bubbles are the Short Term COVID Solution

Masks will Steadily Reduce Risk

Essential Role of Mask Suppliers

Contagious Variant Spreading

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Clean Bubbles are the Short Term COVID Solution

More than 1% of people in the U.S. and several other countries are presently infectious. The percentage is growing in most countries as the new variant virus spreads. Governments can react by further restricting activity with lockdowns and restricted access.  But there is another option which is the Clean Bubble

There are laws which limit the individual occupancy in a store or school to 25%. This means that 25% of the virus load is still present. With products which are available now and are not prohibitively expensive 99% of the virus can be captured. So the Clean Bubble will be equivalent to a building with just 1% occupancy. The 99% virus reduction compares favorably to any other option whether it is vaccines at 94% or partitions at a paltry 10%.

The foundation of the bubble is tight fitting efficient masks. In areas where it is inconvenient to be wearing the masks or where excessive crowding is likely fan filter units and air purifiers are needed. All space needs to be monitored for particulate and CO2. Any entrant to the safe bubble will be scrutinized to insure that his mask is the correct type and worn properly.

Clean bubble example: A large department store operates a safe bubble. Any entrant to the store will be checked to see that he has a certified mask and that it is being worn properly. If the entrant does not qualify he can enter a store area with high air filtration efficiency where he can buy a mask of the right design and size. The store will offer quantitative fit testing and provide him with certification.

If there are 2000 people in the store on average twenty of them will be infectious. The challenge for any protective device is that the position of the transmitter and recipient keep changing. A partition has zero impact if the transmitter is upwind of the recipient. The virus like perfume just flows around the partition.

The one protective device which is always between the transmitter and recipient is the mask. In fact when both are wearing masks there are two protection devices in between. Masks are now available  with 90% Fitted Filter Efficiency (FFE). If both transmitter and recipient are wearing 90% FFE masks the virus risk is reduced  by 99%.

Installing MERV 16 or better filters can capture 98% of the virus passing through but it will not necessarily be between transmitter and recipient but it could add an additional 0.5% risk reduction to  99.5% .

General Area Risk Reduction

This brings the total risk reduction in the general areas to 99.5%.

Assume that the average customer spends 5% of his time in the food court. The odds are that one infectious person will be in the food court area.  If everyone is wearing their masks in food lines and only removing them when at the dining tables, the risk is further reduced.

Assume the dining area has ceiling fan filter units which result in an 98% virus capture but only 80% effectiveness due to the position of the transmitter relative to recipients. The transmitter has his mask off in the food court a total of 2.5% of his store time. 80% of the virus is removed. So the additional risk is 0.5%.

Therefore the total risk is 1% compared to a store with no protection. The bubble is relatively safe compared to any other practical alternative

Masks will Steadily Reduce Risk

The above example was based on 20 infected people in a group of 2000. If everyone wears a tight fitting efficient mask routinely the ratio of infected people will quickly fall from the 1% level. When the infectious rate drops to 2 per 2000 the infection risk is reduced to 0.1% compared to the present.

Essential Role of Mask Suppliers

Billions of people around the world are wearing inefficient loose fitting masks.  If everyone were wearing tight fitting, efficient masks schools, fitness centers, and office buildings  would be 70 times safer than they are now.

A Clean Bubble initiative will result in the widespread use of Comfortable, Attractive, Tight fitting Efficient CATER masks. Temporary reliance on upgraded disposable masks with components to insure a tight fit will also be needed to create the clean bubbles. Use of poor disposable (Poor D) masks will gradually disappear.

A huge market of hundreds of billions of dollars will be created very quickly. The route to market will be radically changed. Presently masks are sold on line without credible information relative to performance. With the Clean Bubble initiative, each Clean Bubble operator will be involved in mask selection.

Meat processors, airlines, department stores schools. office buildings movie theatres and other building operators will be tasked with making sure that each entrant has a mask which not only has the performance characteristics but is also being worn properly. The result will be that most masks will be sold through the Clean Bubble operators rather than on line.

McIlvaine is identifying the likely safe bubble operators, the numbers of masks they can sell, and the way they will be sold.  For an example, a large university can create a safe bubble on a campus where students, faculty, visitors, and service personnel can total 100,000 people. The masks can be sold in the University Store along with a service to help select the right size and  provide fit checking.

Fitness centers can provide fit testing and provide certificates that an individual is wearing the right size of qualified mask. They can also provide fit testing for other Clean Bubble operators in their vicinity.

Meat processors, nursing homes, airlines, hotels, and other facilities where people congregate will combine screening with provision of masks.

The McIlvaine Company with the Mask Supplier Support Program is providing guidance on the Clean Bubbles, identification of Clean Bubble operators around the world and methods to successfully market masks. For more information on the program contact Bob McIlvaine at 847 226 2391 or rmcilvaine@mcilvainecompany.com.

Contagious Variant Spreading

The more contagious coronavirus variant that has brought Britain to its knees in recent weeks is showing signs that it is spreading widely throughout the United States, health officials and experts said this week.

So far, the reported cases have been mostly isolated: one in New York, one in Florida, one in Georgia and two in Colorado. But California has been another story, with 32 cases of the variant now reported in San Diego County.

"I would be surprised if that [number] doesn't grow pretty rapidly," Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, told the Washington Post on Wednesday.

An official from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed.

"Here at the CDC, we're definitely taking this seriously, and we're assuming for now that this variant is more transmissible," said Greg Armstrong, the leader of the CDC's strain surveillance program. The British variant "is probably not in every state at this point, but I think in a lot of states."

While the variant shows no signs of being more deadly than the original version of the virus, it could send more people into hospitals, up the number of COVID-19 deaths, and prolong the effort to reach herd immunity in this country, the Post reported.

Herd immunity will be reached when the virus encounters enough people with immunity that it dies out. Unfortunately, the percentage of people who need to be immune for a population to achieve herd immunity is higher for more infectious pathogens.

"We are in a race against time," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. "We need to increase our speed in which we act so that we don't allow this virus to spread further and allow this variant to become the dominant one in circulation. The clock is ticking."

In addition to the herd immunity issue, any variants could limit the power of antibody treatments because those treatments are so narrowly focused.

The implications for vaccines are less clear in the long run because the virus will continue to mutate, though the consensus is that the new coronavirus vaccines will likely still work because they trigger the creation of a broad array of neutralizing antibodies and other immune system responses. In addition, the mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna can be altered if necessary, the Post reported.

Still, the need to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible has become more urgent, and some scientists have argued that cutting doses in half or delaying the second dose might be necessary to reach that goal. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week said it would stick with the two-shot dose backed by randomized clinical trials.