Some people have medical, mental health or communication issues that are legitimate reasons to be exempt from wearing a mask, says Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer of health for Toronto Public Health. She hopes people will only seek medical exemptions over masks if they truly need them. (Martin Trainor\/CBC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n
The key is to combat the misinformation they spread to members of the public who might be “mask-hesitant” \u2014 similar to people who are vaccine-hesitant \u2014 by providing clear, honest answers to their questions, experts said.\u00a0 “It’s those who are sitting on the fence who are actually rightly looking for information. We need to reach them and give them the information that they need at the right time,” said Dubey.<\/p>\n
“That’s the group that we need to spend most of our energy on,” she said, urging the public to ask health-care providers or public health authorities for information if they have questions.<\/p>\n
It’s\u00a0important for medical professionals to be respectful when people ask those questions\u00a0\u2014 including when they raise concerns based on misinformation, Goldenberg said.<\/p>\n
“If there’s one way to get people defensive, it is to disparage them and not to take them seriously,” she said.<\/p>\n
CBC\/MS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Downplaying dangers of COVID-19, taking research out of context are common strategies, experts say. As more regions across the country adopt mandatory masking policies in an effort to minimize …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":64438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3539,17411],"tags":[15842,15893],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/mask1-e1595857702308.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mileniostadium.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}