We're back with face coverings in public now mandated across most of the Bay Area, six counties. You probably have lingering questions. So we know just the person to answer those questions and also to show us two more ways to easily make a mask using stuff you have at home.

University of San Francisco data scientist and founder of Mass4All, Jeremy Howard joins us once again. Hey Jeremy, good to see you. Hello there. Nice to see you too. I know, I can't wait to get to the mass making because I just think that's so useful for many people. But first, I would like to clarify for our viewers under what situations they need to wear a mask now when they're out and about in the Bay Area.

Sure. So let's talk about when they're absolutely required. Yeah, so they're absolutely required both legally and practically. They're nicely aligned, which makes it easy. Basically whenever you're out and about except when you're exercising, not when you're at home and not when you're in the car with family members or on your own.

In those situations, there is no requirement under the orders to wear a mask. Okay. In fact, that is, you just answered Jonathan Rose Ahmad's question. He asked, do I need to wear a mask if I'm just going to take a walk around the neighborhood? Social distancing has been fine aligned along the sidewalk.

So you just said it's not necessary and of course it's not legally required. But should you, I mean, could it be extra beneficial given what happens when you're exercising? You know, I mean, it depends how cautious you want to be. I haven't been able to find any documented cases in the scientific literature of transmission occurring in that situation.

Transmission outside in general is about 20 times less common than transmission indoors. And the transmission that does tend to occur outside tends to be things like sports events, Mardi Gras, sing-alongs, lots of people getting together and making a lot of noise. But, you know, again, if you want to be careful, you may as well, particularly if it's not like, if it's not windy, if you're sitting close to somebody outside for a while, those kinds of situations, you may as well be careful.

Personally, when I'm jogging, I try to make sure I'm not jogging right behind somebody, so I'm not kind of in their slip strain. And of course, I try to make sure that there's a six-feet distance whenever I'm passing by, so I try to kind of wave and find a way to navigate with people so that we all stay out of each other's way.

That's right. You know, I do want to ask you because I see a new survey by True Public out today that shows 29 percent of Americans refuse to wear a mask when they leave the home. But that does mean two-thirds are now either doing it all the time or open to the idea.

Do you consider actually that's a pretty big shift in attitude about one month? Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. I'm Australian-born, I'm now based in San Francisco. Honestly, I never thought this would happen in my lifetime. I never used to wear a mask. I never cared about masks until I studied the science around this.

And if you had asked me, would people in America be wearing masks like more than half or more than half talking about it, I'd be like, "No way that's going to happen," but turns out when our lives are on the line, we can change our behavior. Absolutely. And I think there's still some confusion over the purpose of a mask, right?

Right. Is it that when we wear one, we're protecting ourselves or are we protecting others? Well, you've set up a nice, sick way here, Kristen. So the basic mask is largely about protecting other people. Here's the thing. When you're breathing in a mask, it actually creates a little humid atmosphere in that tiny space in front of your mouth.

And the droplets that come out of your mouth stay big enough to be captured by the cloth mask. So that works really well. So that means that if you're infected and don't know it, and remember, half of infections come from people that are infected and don't know it, you can protect other people from your possibly infectious droplets by wearing a mask.

It helps protect you a bit as well, but not as much because if somebody around you doesn't have a mask on and they're breathing or talking, the droplets come out and they evaporate. And after they evaporate, they become so small that to catch them requires some special tricks which I can show you if you're interested.

Right. Which we can do ourselves with those special tricks because you want to leave them at 95s that filter them out for the medical professionals. They are most exposed on the front lines. I want to fold in a question from a viewer, Lilly and Padua Marquez. She's asking how about shared rides like Lyft or Uber?

Do we need to wear a mask as well when we're taking care of those? Both legally and practically. So those workers that are giving you that ride, they're super at risk, right? And you're sitting there in an enclosed space with them. They're seeing lots of people every day. Please keep them protected by wearing a mask.

And that is required under the Bay Area requirements. Okay. And Randy wants to know, are masks required to be worn by customers in a California state building? Now, this is interesting, right? Because there are some California state buildings that are not in the counties here that are requiring them.

So the state doesn't have a ban. I mean, I'm leaving out without a mask. Right. Governor Newsom has kind of dropped the ball at this point. A lot of states are requiring masks. And both Republican and Democratic governors are getting behind this important safety issue. For whatever reason, Governor Newsom is not being as progressive as we usually see on these kinds of issues where we're not following the science yet.

And I really hope to see that change. Okay. So basically, if you're in a state building that's not in one of the cities covered by county order, then you actually don't have to, although you would say you should. As far as I know, there's nothing special protecting state buildings outside of areas like the Bay Area and Santa Cruz and other places that are doing it themselves, despite the governor's inaction.

What about the continued thought that, look, if you don't wear it right, if you don't wear it correctly, if you're futzing with it all the time, or you put it down on a surface that's contaminated, it's actually potentially more harmful for you. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are saying that, but my reaction is like, come on, think about it, right?

Like, if there's virus particles in your mask, but if two things has happened, either you're infected, in which case, too late, right? Or somebody infected around you, the mask has stopped the droplets, they're now on your mask and not in your mouth. This is a respiratory disease, you get sick if it goes into your mouth, into your nose or into your eyes, not onto the top of your mask, or even on your hands, right?

I mean, be a bit careful, take it off from the side, put it in some soapy water, but at this point, I've studied so many scientific papers, I haven't yet found a single example of transmission through cloth, so it's a pretty speculative issue anyway. It's certainly not more risky than the virus going into your face, which is literally how people get sick.

Okay, well, you've got me convinced, Jeremy, so what we're going to do in the next segment after a short break is we're going to mind the gap. You know the gap that comes around when you make your own face covering, so we're going to figure out how to cover that, and it's not that hard.

I call this leveling up your mask, we're going to level up our mask. Okay, sounds good. We'll take a short break on the air, but of course, you can continue the conversation with us over on our live streams, and we'll be back with mask making with Jeremy Howard. All right, so folks, Jeremy and I are going to show you how to make two types of masks, so what I want you to do, and Jeremy, you can pipe in, is get some sort of, if you have a mask or a covering, a homemade one, or even like a cloth, go grab it, and if you have foil, go grab it, tin foil, something like that, a wire.

Or a coffee filter foil, or just aluminium foil is fine. And then get three rubber bands, I've already tied my three together. Biggish ones, not too small. Not too small, okay, right, well, I had that problem earlier, I didn't think my face was that big, but the rubber bands didn't fit, so I had to grab a bigger or a center one, and then, Jeremy, you also recommend getting a pair of glasses, right, because of the eyes, you want to protect the eyes.

Yep, sunglasses are fine. Okay, so folks, if you also have time, and if you have paper towels, grab a paper towel, because that's another method in a pinch, and then a couple more rubber bands, and if you're doing that one, staples, please. Staples, staples, which Jeremy doesn't have, yeah, staples, exactly, they're quick, they're easy, and there's certainly a lot, you know, better than no protection, also, if you live in one of the six counties in the Bay Area that now recover, not recover, sorry, require face coverings, then you'll want to have one handy.

Now, Jeremy, I wonder if you're seeing stores yet locally that are just handing you a mask as you go in. Are you seeing that in this country, because I've seen that in some of the countries? Not in this country, a lot of countries do, you know, there's some great video online showing how Austria is doing this in every store, there's somebody at the front handing out masks to everybody coming in, but I haven't seen it yet around here, I don't know if any of the folks watching have, that would be so cool, really, that would be like such a great customer safety focus for ourself to do that.

Alright, let us know on Facebook if you've seen a store or a facility that's just handing out masks as you enter, alright, we'll come you back on in. And we are back with the University of San Francisco researcher, data scientist, and mask for all founder, Jeremy Howard. Alright, Jeremy, we promise folks that we're going to just take a few quick minutes and show people how to make a face covering more effective, mind the gap, if you will, so let's go ahead and get to work.

I love it, mind the gap, I wish I'd invented that, I'm stealing it, it's great. Okay, feel free. Alright, shall we create the gap first, with the gap-y one? Yep. So this is my mother-in-law mask, she's a genius, and she's created this lovely mask, which in the default setting, we're going to have the gap, you want to see the gap?

Yes, yes, let me see it. I will try and do this without destroying my home studio. Ah, I see, I see, I believe my nose is flatter and therefore the gap is smaller, but yes, I still have one. Yes, I mean it's true, you know, the nose is something I have and it's a sign of a, you know, a great gentleman I hear.

It truly is. So what do we do about it? Aluminum, I will try and use the American, aluminum foil, I literally just cut it out and folded it up, and you can use a coffee filter, you can see how nice and moldable this is? Yeah. So my genius mother-in-law has put this little slip in here for me, now if you don't have a genius mother-in-law, I don't, I mean my mother-in-law is a genius, but she didn't sew one for me.

Yeah, careful, then just pop it in here, or else just use tape, stick it onto whatever you're using, it doesn't matter. And the thing is, this is actually what surgical masks have in, I think they might use something more advanced than foil, but it does the same thing, because now, what I do after I pop this on is I just push, pop, right, onto my distinguished nose, and now, yeah, much less of a gap.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I get it, so that's better protection, you may have that sealed. Okay, so you want to level up another level? I do. Okay, so an apple engineer, an ex-apple engineer invented this, here are three rubber bands that I've literally just, you know, hooked into each other, and what I do is I put the middle one around my fingers, and put it over the top, this is really important, over the top, sorry, under the top of your mask, and then you can either do it under your, depending on how big it is, under your chin or under your mouth, and then behind one ear, and then swap hands, behind the other ear, and then what I do is I kind of like push the fabric in so that it's like squishes.

What does that do? It just means it doesn't fall out so much, you know, otherwise I'd kind of have to stick my lip out or get Botox or something, which isn't quite my thing. Well, there's nowhere to get it right now, so don't do that. Fair enough. Now, have a look at this.

Okay. Oh, yep, I see, now you have kind of formed a tight seal around the mouth area and the nose area. So there's actually very few spots for the air to come in now, and so doctors do a breath test at this point to kind of feel that when you breathe out, you know, are you feeling air coming out.

And this is actually, you know, it's nowhere 95, and you know, one key thing actually is if somebody around me has been, you know, rude enough to not wear a mask, they can infect me because these droplet nuclei that evaporate out spread in the air. I have stopped them from coming in a lot to the holes, but they could come straight through the fabric.

Right, so what do you do? So what I do to stop that is the genius mother-in-law I mentioned, thank you, Linda, has created a nice pocket for me here to put this wonderful nanomaterial, which under an electron microscope looks very, very much almost the same as the inner layer of surgical masks, and it's called a paper towel.

Okay. And actually somebody at the National Academy of Sciences with the laser chamber helped me with this. And he found that the, you know, the nice thick kind of bounty paper towels, just one of them does a 99% good job of stopping the droplets when they come out, and they should do a pretty good job of stopping the nuclei when they come in as well.

That's fantastic. Okay. So I wanted to ask you if we have one minute left to show me the other method, which is with the paper towel. So as I mentioned, I'm too poor to have a stapler here, so I have to sticky tape it. This is just a piece of that magic paper towel that I've got, you know, just staple a rubber band onto each end.

Okay, I'll do it. And then get the piece of foil out, which of course, now that I'm on TV, it's not going to come out for me. Yeah. So I'll get the piece of foil out, here it comes, and pop it, you know, the nice thing about these pieces of paper towel nowadays is that they have the fold in the middle.

Yep. So we can just take the foil, pop it in the middle, like so, okay? And then pop it, mold it, and then over each ear. And then the only other thing I would say for both of these cases... All right. Hey Jeremy, we've got to finish this up on our live stream because they're out of time on the air.

Okay, please put glasses on as well because they can come through your eyes. So the website is massforall.co, right? Yeah, with the number four. The number four. Okay. Go check us out on the live stream. Thank you. Okay. All right, Jeremy, we're still on Facebook, so we've got a few minutes, a couple minutes.

So I didn't do the wire for there. I still need to either tape that or just put it in the middle, right between the ears. Yeah, just chuck it in the middle. That worked for me, yep. It doesn't really fall down because at least my nose gets in the way sufficiently.

All right. So a lot of people are asking, could you use, you know, coffee filter? Yep. What else works? You know, name all the things that you could use. Those are the two I'm aware of. You know, a lot of people say microfiber cloth, I haven't studied it, but it sounds sensible to me.

You know, anything with a nice tight wave, but you know, anybody can get paper towel, I hope. Yeah, no. Do you have any idea, do we have any studies as to what percentage of people are complying in the places that do have these mask orders? Yeah, we do. It's increasing rapidly, obviously it varies by jurisdiction, but there are places in the US that are up to 70, 80% now.

And that's even, some of those even without laws in place. So people are doing a great job of protecting their communities, I think it shows a lot of care. Yeah, I mean, I always think it's kind of strange when it becomes sort of a political statement because health and politics should be completely separate.

But that does seem to be the case, if you look at what happened on the House floor today, as House members were debating the relief bill, it seemed that most of the Democratic members had their masks on and they will pull it down to speak and many of the Republicans were not wearing them.

So- Well, there's Republican senators like Senator Toomey and governors like Larry Hogan that are coming out strong pro-masks, so it's not entirely partisan. Yeah, I'm hoping that it's not partisan, right? Health when it comes to health, it's everybody's attached together. And the economy. Yeah, absolutely. All right, great information, great tricks and tips.

Thank you so much. It was fun to talk with you, Jeremy. She is. All right.