TY - JOUR T1 - Psychology of wearing face masks to prevent transition of COVID-19 JF - General Psychiatry JO - Gen Psych DO - 10.1136/gpsych-2020-100297 VL - 33 IS - 6 SP - e100297 AU - Lynda Jiwen Song AU - Shu Xu AU - Sabina Lingxiao Xu AU - Zhuoer Sun AU - Weizhi Liu Y1 - 2020/12/01 UR - http://gpsych.bmj.com/content/33/6/e100297.abstract N2 - During global pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, wearing face masks has become a focus of debate.1 In this paper, we addressed the cunning nature of COVID-19 and called for the global usage of face masks, especially for people living in low-income and middle-income countries/regions with high population density as well as high-income countries/regions with no culture of wearing face masks.Are face masks useful for preventing COVID-19? Recent research has shown that droplets from coughs and sneezes could be projected to 6–8 meters away,2 even further than the range of ‘social distance’.3 Preponderance of evidence has indicated that mask wearing reduced the transmission of infected droplets in both laboratory and clinical contexts, and public mask wearing played the most effective role in stopping the spread of the virus.4 5 Thus, more countries such as the USA and the UK are reassessing their public health recommendations on wearing face masks.COVID-19 is a ‘cunning disease’.6 First, due to its high level of contagiousness, many virus carriers are spreading the virus for several days before showing any observable symptoms.7 It is hard to identify those patients who look healthy but are actually highly contagious.Second, COVID-19 is hidden and difficult to detect. Recent research pinpointed the most contagious period of time is the first 5 days when … ER -