Face masks Can Save 1 Trillion Dollars for American GDP
with rapid growth of corona virus cases in United States of America and count reaching 2.5 Million patients last week, putting millions of Americans lives under Health, Safety & Economic Risk and with Houston, Arizona & Texas becoming new covid19 hotspots, Politicians and CDC officials along with public health & safety policymakers realize the time has come to launch A nationwide health policy on mandatory usage of facemasks and slow/stop the spread of this strain before it becomes too late
Prof Jason Abaluck, PHD & Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University along with Prof Judith Chevalier- Professor of Economics and Finance at Yale University, Prof Edward H Kaplan – Professor of Public Health, Yale School of Public Health, Albert Ko,MD.Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, Yale School of Public Health, Sten H. Vermund, PhD. Dean and Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health & Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine, Recently authored A white paper to measure effectiveness of homemade cotton washable and reusable face mask in effectively mitigating the danger posed by what can now easily be termed as the biggest health crisis faced by the world in the modern era .
The research report findings confirm Economic benefits to the tune of USD 3000-6000 for each additional face mask worn by the public and even bigger impact comes in the form of medical face mask made available to the doctor’s, nurses and hospital frontline staff where there’s urgent and imperative need to safeguard their health to continue giving uninterrupted care and medical help to ever growing inflow of virus infected patients to hospitals
Another critical trend emerged out of this research paper, where to stop the hoarding of medical masks by various states due to limited supply of these medical masks can derail the entire effort of virus containment, As Dr. Jerome Adams, The surgeon General of America tweeted that if the doctors and nursing staff can’t be provided with right masks and other PPE safety kits while taking care of patients in health centres then it puts them and the entire nation under severe and grave danger, hence the need to make non medical and cotton face mask available to the general public to prevent the spread of covid19 virus into communities
ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF FACE MASKS :
To measure the economic importance of masks , the research team went down to measure how masks closed down the transmission of Corona virus and value of reductions in number of cases of virus spread
The below figure 1 shows confirmed positive tests for COVID-19 in all countries with at least 5 million people for which at least 8 days of data are available after the first day with 100 reported cases(select countries are labeled).7Time 0 is the first day with 100 cases, the figure throws the growth of the epidemic thereafter. Countries with pre-existing norms that all sick people wear masks are highlighted in color blue, countries which do not,but later required masks for infected individuals for the entire population are highlighted in color green, and countries with no mask norm and no official recommendation as of March 29, 2020 are shown in color orange
The pattern in the figure is quite stark: countries with pre-existing norms that sick people should wear masks–including South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan–have been among the most successful in slowing and containing the spread of the corona virus .The average daily growth rate of confirmed positives is 18% in countries with no pre-existing mask norms & drops drastically to 10% in countries with such rules. This evidence though is far from conclusive :norms do not perfectly predict the actual availability of face masks and use,these nations/leaders/policymakers may have rolled out other policies which helped them contain the spread of the epidemic(such as widespread testing of samples in South Korea),and infection rates are incorrectly & imperfectly measured and may appear higher in countries with more testing among other factors
Another research report by Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist at The Goldman Sachs and his team confirms that face mask mandate nationwide in America could potentially substitute for lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% or equivalent of USD 1 Trillion Dollars from GDP of USA
The Goldman Sachs report makes note @ the current arbitrary face mask policy adopted by the United States in comparison with many Asian & European nations , which have rolled out strict policies regarding forced & mandatory adoption of masks wearing guidelines for their citizens is putting the American Economy under huge strain already
The research team of Goldman Sachs wrote – “Our numerical estimates are that cumulative cases grow 17.3% per week without a mask mandate but only 7.3% with a mask mandate, and that cumulative fatalities grow 29% per week without a mask mandate but only 16% with a mask mandate”
Applying those figures to the entire America, the researchers expect that such a mandate could substantially slow the daily growth rate of new coronavirus patients , from roughly 1.6 percent to 0.6 percent. To get an equivalent effect from an economic shutdown, you’d have to subtract 5 percent from GDP.
Policy Suggestions and Recommendations by The Yale University Research Team to Federal Government :
- Incentivise and reward manufacturers of medical masks
- Priority Distribution & uninterrupted supplies of medical masks to hospital frontline personal and doctor’s
- Politicians should wear masks in all public places themselves to become role models and advocate benefits of masks to general public
- Forced adoption of mask wearing habits by all citizens in public places, irrespective of showing symptoms or being asymptomatic
- Educating citizens through social media, newspapers, TV commercials, banners etc about mask wearing being A complement to social distance measures and not substitute
- creating awareness in public that masks wearing is critical and essential to safeguard their own health as well as safety of their family members, children, neighbours, communities and fellow citizens
- Encourage corporations and HNI’s to generously donate masks to underprivileged sections of society
- Finally the most important message, few dollars of expenditure on masks can result in saving, benefits & contribution to nation’s economy to the tune of thousands of dollars