Cloth masks, especially homemade ones, were supposed to be a stop-gap measure. But almost a year into the pandemic many Americans are still wearing them. Compare that with Taiwan, which upped its manufacturing of masks early on so by April 2020, every citizen there was receiving a fresh supply of high-quality masks each week. Marco Werman talks about why the United States is so behind at regulating the quality of masks with Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist and writer at The University of North Carolina who has studied the effectiveness of different types of masks and written about it in The Atlantic.
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