And apparently local leadership decided to add to. Sigh.

I’m going to talk about something slightly different today. Here’s a thread on the trouble with neck gaiters.

If you look at lots of the homemade mask guidance, you’ll see they always recommend woven cotton. Why? https://twitter.com/Accidental_E9/status/1247530152185057282

I’m not a medical pro, but I do have a decent bit of experience working with different fabrics. There’s two major reasons.

1) knits (like T-shirt fabric) are just a pain to work with. I suspect there’s also something to do with larger gaps between threads as fabric stretches.

2) you need fabric you can sterilize to #KillTheVirus . Cotton can be easily laundered in hot water, put into a hot dryer, steam iron... it handles all of those wonderfully! (Note: this is why prewashing fabric is essential - need to get shrinkage done).

Neck gaiters are not made of cotton. They’re usually made of some sort of rayon. What is rayon? It’s basically extruded plastic. What happens when plastic is exposed to high heat? It melts.

What does this mean for neck gaiters?

Those that had the old-school polypros see where this is going. Extreme shrinkage if you wash/dry at temps needed to disinfect. And utter melting if you try to steam iron.

This means neck gaiters cannot be effectively cleaned by people in their homes.

You need to be able to sterilize PPE, even non-medical-grade. This is why cotton is sooo important. Heck, I could boil a cotton mask and know it’ll be fine afterwords. Imagine doing that to your neck gaiters.

I get that leaders aren’t experts in every topic.

But with the suggestion to use neck gaiters and limit mask colors, I have questions about whether some leaders sought out experts.

I’m saying this not as a medical expert but as a textile enthusiast: please only use gaiters as a stopgap.

Even a bandanna is better right now because they’re woven cotton. They’re *made* to be sterilized (snot rags).

A couple of folds and some hair elastics and you have a decent improvised mask. Please. Almost anything but neck gaiters.