Be Smart. Halve Your Risk
This advice that has been repeated to us since early in the pandemic:
- Wear a mask
- Maintain social distance
- Wash your hands regularly
Although this advice smacks of common sense, it is still flagrantly ignored by some. On an almost daily basis, we get patients who complain about having to wear a mask for a whole 30 minutes. Wearing a mask is not just to help protect you, it’s also to protect others. So yes, we require you to wear a mask.
Facts Support Wearing A Mask
In the USA, COVID is essentially out of control and sadly wearing a mask has become a political issue, even though expert scientists have developed many models and forecast that over 100,000 lives could be saved in the next few months, if everybody just wears a mask. That’s as many US troops who died in fighting from the D Day beaches in 1944 to Berlin in 1945. Deaths that are mourned to this day. And now its ok, and all for the sake of wearing a mask? Really?
Ok, this is not the USA, but look at the size of the numbers and consider this in our own country. Every time I go shopping I see many not wearing masks. We are thus not immune to the same fate.
Double Your Risk
For those who are unconvinced, a recently announced real world study has proven the benefits of wearing a mask. In the state of Kansas, the state governor recommended mask wearing on 3rd July. Some counties in the state followed the recommendation, others didn’t. Two weeks were allowed to let the change take effect. Since then those counties where masks have been worn have stayed level on the number of new cases. Those who chose to ignore the advice have gone up and continue to go up. Right now, the number of cases in counties not requiring mask wearing is DOUBLE those who do. This is not a small study. It’s based on nearly 3 million people.
The facts are simple.
Not wearing a mask doubles the risk for you and for those around you.
Safety always comes first for you and our staff. We require that anybody in the clinic wears a mask. Our staff wear full PPE all day, so asking you to wear a mask for the short time you are in our clinic to help protect everybody is not an unrealistic expectation. Your help helps keep us open and thus allows us to continue to help you.
We strive to make our clinic as safe as it can be and it’s most certainly safer than the many other environments that we all need to visit to exist.
We are here to help you and we will do our part to be as safe as we can be. We need you to do your part as well, not just by wearing a mask while at the clinic, but also by living as safely as you can by following simple common-sense advice. That way, you keep yourself, your family and your friends safer as well.