EGI

by Marcel Müller (M.Sc. Biological Sciences) Contact: marcel_mueller@mail.de Epistemic Status: I am not a virologist and this is not medical advice. That said I am fairly sure about the core claims of this piece, though there may be unknown unknowns I overlooked. I think that among everything I have heard so far this is by far the most promising strategy to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 without crippling economic damage and / or millions of deaths. You have permission to distribute this wherever you think it might do good and I actively encourage everyone to do so. This is written form a European/German perspective since I live in Germany but should apply in most places with few changes necessary. Abstract SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a novel pandemic virus threatening to cause a world wide health and economic crisis. While measures have been put in place to temporarily slow the spread of the virus, a workable, economically feasible, long term strategy is needed to deal with the situation, to avoid both millions of deaths and severe economic disruption. All strategies for dealing with the pandemic need to rely on controlling the spread of the epidemic by reducing Reff either by generating immunity or by reducing the number of contacts within the population. Therefore it is crucial to discuss the best ways of reducing Reff. Economic lockdowns, school closures and social distancing are measures that were easy to implement but not necessarily optimal. I propose the widespread use of reusable high quality (European P3 standard equivalent) particle filtering masks in both healthcare and community settings to reduce the risk of infection during contacts sufficiently to allow lifting of most other restrictions while still achieving continued exponential decay of new case numbers. Introduction In the last months of 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a novel zoonotic virus on a wet market in China. It quickly spread through the country and then through the rest of the world, threatening