With the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is spreading at an alarming rate, medical experts from around the globe wants everyone to reassess what masks they’re choosing to wear.

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“Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There’s no place for them in light of omicron,” CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, said last week, reports people.com.

“We need to be wearing at least a three-ply surgical mask,” she also said, referring to the standard disposable face covering available at most pharmacies and general goods stores. “You can wear a cloth mask on top of that, but do not just wear a cloth mask alone.”

Wen said that “If we’re going to go as far as to say that masks are required — when we don’t come from a mask-wearing culture and people don’t like wearing masks — at least recommend that they wear the most effective mask.”

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Erin Bromage, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, said, per CNN, that while cloth masks can filter and block large droplets from an infected person’s respiratory tract, more effective masks such as N95s can filter both large droplets and smaller aerosols and particles that have been proven to transmit COVID-19.

“Unfortunately there’s been so much misinformation that’s come out about masking that it’s become so polarized,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Atlantic in October, reports people.com.

“People are just divided into either you’re masked or you’re not. And that would be like saying everything that has wheels” — including a tricycle and a jetliner — “is the same.”

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Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech researcher who studies how viruses transmit in the air, told NPR this month that “cloth masks are not going to cut it with omicron,” per CNBC.

Wen also noted that various countries including Germany and Austria have “switched their standard to say that a face covering in public must be at least a medical-grade surgical mask” in certain settings.

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“We need to be promoting better high-quality masks everywhere, because right now a single-layer cloth mask just isn’t cutting it against omicron,” said former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams Thursday on CNN’s AC360. “We need more testing. We need better masking. That’s how we get through this.”