#CoverYourNose — Mask Adherence Study at UC San Diego (PreRegistered)

3 min readJan 19, 2021

Men are more nose-agnostic than women

#WearAMask over your nose as that’s more consequential to infection — both infecting yourself & you infecting others — than the mouth (Booth et al., 2005; Farzal et al., 2019; Hou et al., 2020; Teunis et al., 2010).

Someone who gets infected with #COVID while they #WearAMask is more likely to have a mild infection whereas someone infected while not wearing a mask is likely to be a severe case due to a higher deposited dose (Gandhi et al., 2020).

Table of Contents (click to Fast Travel)

· UCSD Observational Study of Mask Adherence #TritonPride
· Cover Your Eyes / Wear Your Glasses

· The Two Masketeers
→ Dual masking Among The Secret Service (Inauguration Day)

UCSD Observational Study of Mask Adherence

At UC San Diego, one of America’s leading universities in handling COVID19, a pre-registered observational study of mask adherence conducted on campus between August & September by Cristina Diaz, Catherine Phan, & Jarryd Willis (2021) found that even among men who were wearing a mask, they were less likely to cover their nose than women.

Nose-agnostic mask behavior was far more prevalent among men than women on campus, χ2 (1, N = 376) = 8.56, p = .003.

I don’t know who needs to hear this right now…
but the nose is the main target of SARSCoV2, and studies have reported a higher COVID-19 viral load in nasal swabs compared to throat swabs (Gallo et al., 20; Zou et al., 20).

Cover Your Eyes / Wear Your Glasses

Though glasses aren’t goggles, many #UCSD students switched from contacts to glasses last year to reduce eye exposure to #COVID19 (& contacts require more handwashing).
Also, glasses help secure the top of the mask over the nose.

Higher viral load = more severe case = lower chance of survival = wear a mask & cover your nose

Be good to each other — This too shall pass

(and consider wearing 2 masks like President Biden)

The Two Masketeers

Dual masking Among The Secret Service (Inauguration Day)

As depicted in the images below, my double masking trend seems to have caught on with the Secret Service too.

“Calculations for hypothetical cloth stacks with similar pressure drop as observed for a surgical mask revealed that by stacking adequate numbers of layers of the various sample materials it is possible to obtain decent filtration efficiency using cloth materials” (Drewnick et al., 2021)