Saskatoon doctor offers advice on caring for masks

Masks have become a normal thing to see or wear during the COVID-19 pandemic and Dr. Carla Holinaty is offering some tips for mask upkeep.

Holinaty, a family physician in Saskatoon, joined the Greg Morgan Morning Show on Tuesday to answer some questions from the show’s Facebook page.

As things open up and more and more people head out, Holinaty said masks are an important thing to have on.

“I think masks are very important and we’ve seen lots of data that shows us that it helps decrease spread from person to person. Your mask protects other people and other people wearing a mask helps protect you. If everybody’s wearing a mask, that’s where we see the most protection,” Holinaty said.

She said people need to change their masks when they become damp, especially if they’re homemade cloth ones. It’s also important to wash them after every use.

“When you’re taking (your mask) off, you want to take it off just by those ear loops and put it into something like a plastic bag right away so that it’s not going to contaminate anything else with any particles it has on the outside and once home, straight into the washing machine on a hot cycle if you can and with regular laundry soap,” she said. “If it can go into the dryer, the heat from the dryer will help as well.”

While the virus has shown it can survive on surfaces, Holinaty said the most likely way the virus transfers from person to person is through the particles in the air.

“The virus is a pretty robust germ and it’s showing us that it can live pretty well on surfaces. It’s about how we get things from surfaces into us,” Holinaty said. “Hand-washing is really, really important to help prevent that spread.”

There also are concerns from parents over how safe sports like hockey will be now that they’re being allowed to resume.

Holinaty said with a sport like hockey, it’s tough to predict exactly how big of a risk COVID will be during games.

“It involves a lot of heavy exercise and when you exercise, you breathe more heavily and you generate more of those droplets that spread the contagious particles,” Holinaty said.

“Putting on a full facemask definitely would block most or some of those particles, but it’s probably not going to be able to block everything just with how heavy people are living.”

If a person does need to visit a doctor’s office, Holinaty said it’s tough to predict how long they would need to wait because many different emergencies could be taking place, even non-COVID-related ones.

“We do our best to be on time but sometimes we have an emergency that delays us,” she said. “So if the person before you is having a heart attack, we do our best to keep them safe before we move on to other things.”