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What’s the Deal With Neck Gaiters?
There’s debate over whether the popular running accessory can be a replacement for a mask
Step outside during the pandemic, and you’ll (hopefully) see people in a wide variety of face coverings: colorful cloth masks that loop behind the ears, cowboy-inspired bandanas, the rare N95. Occasionally you’ll see a tube of fabric encircling a neck and pulled up over the nose. This is the neck gaiter or buff, favored by athletes for its breathability — and by some face-covering proponents for its convenience.
Research published this week thrust neck gaiters into a harsh spotlight, raising concerns about their effectiveness in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. The research, published in the journal Science Advances by a team at Duke University, investigated a new, cheap method of assessing the effectiveness of face coverings using a setup involving a cellphone camera and an inexpensive laser. In testing this method — the idea is that the laser allows one to visualize and record the movement of any droplets expelled through a face covering when speaking — a speaker in the study wore 14 different types of face coverings, one of which was a neck gaiter, and said the phrase: “Stay healthy, people.”
Some of the findings were unsurprising: N95 masks, used by health care workers, were the most effective, allowing less than 0.1% of particles to be transmitted. Surgical masks were similarly good at blocking particles. The researchers established 100% to be the baseline amount of particles emitted when not wearing a mask.
The neck gaiter, meanwhile, allowed the transmission of 110% of particles. In other words, wearing a neck gaiter resulted in the emission of more particles than one would expect from a person talking normally. Interpretations of this result in the media, notably the write-up in the Washington Post, took this to mean that wearing a neck gaiter might actually be worse than not wearing a mask at all. Co-author Martin Fischer, PhD, of Duke’s chemistry and physics departments, says in a video produced by Duke that it “might be counterproductive to wear such a mask” as the neck gaiter examined in the study. That the reason the neck gaiter might have produced more particles is because the fabric it’s made of might break up big…
