title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The WHO revised its mask guidance in June 2020, with its officials acknowledging that studies indicated asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic spread. The updated advice recommended that the general public should wear non-medical fabric masks where there is known or suspected widespread transmission and where physical distancing is not possible, and that vulnerable people (60 and over, or with underlying health risks) and people with any symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 as well as caregivers and healthcare workers should wear surgical or procedure masks. They stated that the purpose of mask usage is to prevent the wearer transmitting the virus to others (source control) and to offer protection to healthy wearers against infection (prevention).


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The WHO advises that non-medical fabric masks should comprise a minimum of three layers, suggesting an inner layer made of absorbent material (such as cotton), a middle layer made of non-woven material (such as polypropylene) which may enhance filtration or retain droplets, and an outer layer made of non-absorbent material (such as polyester or its blends) which may limit external contamination from penetration.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: On 21 August 2020, the WHO and UNICEF released an annex guidance for children. For children five and younger, they advise that masks should not be required in consideration to a child's developmental milestones, compliance challenges, and autonomy required to use a mask properly, but recognized that the evidence supporting their cut-off age is limited and countries may hold a different and lower age of cut-off. For children 6–11, they advise that mask usage should be decided in consideration of several factors including the intensity of local viral transmission, (the latest evidence about) the risk of infection for the age group, the social and cultural environment (which influences social interactions in communities and populations), the capacity to comply with appropriate mask usage, the availability of appropriate adult supervision, and the potential impact on learning and psychosocial development, as well as additional factors involving specific settings or circumstances (such as disabilities, underlying diseases, elderly people, sport activities, and schools). For children 12 and older, they advise that masks should be worn under the same conditions for adults in accordance with WHO guidance or national guidelines.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Regarding the use of non-medical fabric masks in the general population, the WHO has stated that high-quality evidence for its widespread use is limited, but advises governments to encourage its use as physical distancing may not be possible in some settings, there is some evidence for asymptomatic transmission, and masks could be helpful to provide a barrier to limit the spread of potentially infectious droplets.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Early in 2020, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it did not recommend the use of face masks for the general public. However, on 3April 2020, the CDC changed its advice to recommend that people wear cloth face coverings "in public settings when around people outside their household, especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain". In response to a media inquiry by National Public Radio, the CDC said that this change in guidelines was due to the increasing and widespread transmission of the virus, citing studies published in February and March showing pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission. In a subsequent interview and "JAMA" editorial, the CDC director Robert R. Redfield explained that the CDC's early guidance had been premised on an initial absence of evidence of disease transmission from pre- and asymptomatic individuals.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Since 28 June, the "CDC recommends that people wear cloth face coverings in public settings and when around people who don't live in your household, especially when other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain. Cloth face coverings may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others. Cloth face coverings are most likely to reduce the spread of COVID-19 when they are widely used by people in public settings." The CDC provides the caveat that cloth face coverings should not be worn by children under the age of two, people who have trouble breathing, or people who are unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance. In August 2020, the CDC added that exhalation valves or vents in masks do not help prevent the person wearing the mask from spreading COVID-19 to others.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In a November 2020 scientific brief, the CDC reiterated their recommendation for the community use of masks and specifically non-valved multi-layer cloth masks to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2. They say the community's use of masks serves two primary purposes: to reduce the emission of virus-laden droplets from exhalation into the environment (source control), which is especially relevant for asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infected wearers who feel well and may be unaware of their infectiousness to others, and to reduce inhalation of these droplets through filtration for the wearer (personal protection). For filtration, the CDC says some fabrics (such as silk) may hydrophobically repel moist droplets, whereas other fabrics (such as polyester or polypropylene) may electrostatically capture droplets. They concluded that the benefit of masking for SARS-CoV-2 control is derived from the combination of source control and personal protection, which is likely complementary and possibly synergistic, so that individual benefit increases with increasing community mask use.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The CDC said healthcare personnel should wear a NIOSH-approved N95 (or equivalent or higher-level) respirator or a face mask (if a respirator is not available) with a face shield or goggles as part of their personal protective equipment, while patients with suspected or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection should wear a face mask or cloth face covering during transport. As crisis strategy for known shortages of N95 respirators in healthcare settings, among other sequential measures, the CDC suggests use of respirators beyond the manufacturer-designated shelf life, use of respirators approved under standards used in other countries that are similar to NIOSH-approved respirators, limited re-use of respirators, use of additional respirators beyond the manufacturer-designated shelf life that have not been evaluated by NIOSH, and prioritizing the use of respirators and face masks by activity type.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In late July 2021, the CDC changed guidelines to recommend people, including those who are vaccinated, to continue masking in public indoor settings in areas with substantial and high transmission—as there are indications that the coronavirus such as the Delta variant may infect even vaccinated people in rare occasions—to help prevent transmission to other people. Previously, the CDC updated public guidance from May 2021 stated that those who are fully vaccinated can "resume activities without wearing masks or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance." However, critics posited that it was predicated on a key social factor, namely whether people can be trusted to wear a mask if they are not fully vaccinated.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: On 25 February 2022, the CDC changed their guidelines to suggest that 70% of Americans need no longer wear masks, and no longer need to social distance or avoid crowded spaces. Under the new guidance, Americans in counties designated as medium-to-low-risk can go indoors without masks. In accordance with these new CDC guidelines, a number of US states ended their mask mandates for indoor spaces. However, federal officials emphasized that regardless of local conditions, individuals with COVID-19 or COVID-19 symptoms, as well as individuals who consider themselves to be high-risk, should continue to wear facial coverings. In addition to this, the CDC also dropped its recommendation for universal school mask mandates. These new recommendations assessed COVID-19 hospitalizations as well as the proportion of beds occupied by COVID-19 patients in certain areas.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Larry Gostin, a professor of public health law, said initial CDC and WHO guidance had given the public the wrong impression that masks do not work, even though scientific evidence to the contrary was already available. The confusing changing advice from discouraging to recommending public masking has led to decreasing public trust in the CDC. In June 2020 Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious disease expert for the United States government, stated that the delay in recommending general mask use was motivated by a desire to conserve dwindling supplies for medical professionals. Since September 2021, the director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, indicated that the schools that didn't have mask mandates were 3.5 times as likely to experience COVID outbreaks as the ones that did. This statement caused controversy because the basis for it was an outlier study criticized by some experts as unreliable and basically useless to learn about effects of mask mandates.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In March 2020, when asked about the mistakes that other countries were making in the pandemic, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention director-general George Fu Gao said:


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Most countries in Europe have introduced mandatory face mask rules for public places. On 8April 2020, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) published its masking recommendations, saying that the "use of face masks in the community could be considered, especially when visiting busy, closed spaces". On 15 February 2021, ECDC updated the recommendation stating, "Although the evidence for the use of medical face masks in the community to prevent COVID-19 is limited, face masks should be considered as a non-pharmaceutical intervention in combination with other measures as part of efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic."


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The Nordic countries and the Netherlands have been a notable exception to supporting the use of face masks, but eventually started to recommend masks. For example, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, wearing a mouth/nose mask was made mandatory on public transportation per 1 June 2020. The main reasoning against masks recommendations given by officials in the Nordic countries was that public masking is deemed an unnecessary precaution when infection levels remain low. In June 2020, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said asymptomatic individuals wearing face masks was not to be recommended due to the low prevalence of COVID-19 in the country but noted that it should be reconsidered if cases rise. Similarly, on 30 July 2020, the Danish Health Authority director Søren Brostrøm said face covers did not make sense in the current situation with low infection levels, but that they needed to evaluate whether it could make sense in the long term. From 29 October, face masks are mandatory inside in any building in Denmark that has public accessfrom supermarkets and kiosks to hospitals and schools. In many Norwegian local municipalities, face masks are mandatory on public transport where a social distance of one meter is impossible to maintain.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Sweden in particular stands out as a country where face masks have not been recommended to the general public and the State Epidemiologist of Sweden, Anders Tegnell, has been an opponent to face masks among the general population, although he has said that face masks might be suitable on work places where people are one to two meter from each other's for more than fifteen minutes, something which some Swedish and foreign media have interpreted as a recommendation. This position was slightly reversed when Prime Minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven, announced that they were recommending face masks on 18 December 2020. The Public Health Agency of Sweden later clarified on their website that the recommendation would include citizens born before 2004 to wear masks during rush hour on public transportation throughout the country from 7January 2021 onward. On 20 December 2020, two days after the announcement was made, Prime Minister Löfven was paparazzied in a shopping mall in central Stockholm without wearing a face mask. By 22 January 2021 the Stockholm Public Transport estimated that about half of all passengers on trains and buses wore face masks during rush hour. Among those who chose not to follow the recommendation were Johan Carlson, the Director-General of the Public Health Agency, and Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Masks are used to limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by respiratory droplets and aerosols, which are thought to be the major pathways of infection, exhaled from infected individuals during breathing, speaking, coughing, and sneezing. Properly worn masks are effective in both limiting the spread of the virus by an infected individual and protecting an uninfected individual from infection.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The National Health Commission of China cited the following reasons for the wearing of masks by the public, including healthy individuals:


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In a comment to "The Lancet", Kar Keung Cheng, Tai Hing Lam, and Chi Chiu Leung argued that a public health rationale for mass masking is source control to protect others from respiratory droplets and underscored the importance of this approach due to asymptomatic transmission. Wang Linfa, an infectious disease expert who heads a joint Duke University and National University of Singapore research team, said masking is about "preventing the spread of disease rather than preventing getting the disease", remarking that the point is to cover the faces of people who are infected but do not know it, so it is imperative for everyone to wear one in public. The US CDC also highlighted the use of masks for source control, pointing out that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases are estimated to account for over 50% of the transmissions.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiologist from the University of Hong Kong, states a high amount of virus strands in saliva of infected people and transmission by asymptomatic carriers as the reasons why even seemingly healthy individuals should wear a mask. Kelvin Kai-Wang To "et al." (February 2020) detected live SARS-CoV-2 in the saliva of infected patients, which indicated that the virus may be transmitted directly or indirectly through saliva with or without respiratory symptoms and stated that the findings reinforced the use of surgical masks as a control measure.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Monica Gandhi, a medical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, says viral shedding at high quantities from the upper respiratory tract, characterized by unusually high levels of viral particles, means universal mask wearing is one of the best ways to limit the asymptomatic spread of the virus. Yixuan Hou "et al." (July 2020) found that the nasal cavity is the dominant initial site for SARS-CoV-2 infection with subsequent aspiration-mediated virus seeding into the lungs; the authors note that these findings argue for the widespread use of masks to prevent exposure to the nasal passages.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In a perspective, Monica Gandhi, Chris Beyrer, and Eric Goosby posit that masking reduces the dose of the virus for the wearer and thus helps lower the severity of infection. They highlighted that the proportion of asymptomatic and mild infection increased in settings adopting population-level masking. One example involved a comparison of outbreaks on cruise ships: the "Diamond Princess" had 18% asymptomatic cases among all the infected people, but this was 81% in the "Greg Mortimer" where masks were given to passengers and staff members.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Trisha Greenhalgh "et al." argue for the precautionary principle as a reason to adopt policies encouraging the wearing of face masks in public, given that there's much to gain and little to lose from adopting masks considering the seriousness of the outbreak. Others agreed, based on the evidence-based principle that the likely benefits outweighed the likely harms.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Leonardo Setti "et al." argue that face masks should be used to complement social distancing of six feet or two meters, because this inter-personal distance is more effective if people are masked as studies indicate that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted over greater distances. Chi Chiu Leung "et al." also argue that face masks complement social distancing, as a high degree of compliance for distancing is necessary to achieve the greatest impact but is not always achievable. For instance, even if social distancing is rigorously practiced, there are necessary person-to-person contacts (such as going to the supermarket and other necessary activities to sustain livelihoods), so masks would help in situations when social distancing is not feasible and maximize the effect of social distancing.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: According to Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, "Wearing a mask can reduce the propensity for people to touch their faces, which is a major source of infection without proper hand hygiene." Ka Hung Chan and Kwok-Yung Yuen argue that face masks can reduce fomite transmission (in addition to transmission through droplets or aerosol) of the virus, as masks can prevent people from spreading body fluids by touching their noses or mouths (such as trying to cover up a sneeze or cough).


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A paper by Miyu Moriyama "et al." (September 2020), which links seasonality of respiratory viral diseases to decreased air humidity due to indoor heating, argues that mask-wearing helps limiting respiratory virus transmission in winter, because masks keep the nose warm and moist.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Social media claims that masks could reduce the oxygen levels in older people were refuted by a small study of SpO levels, the results of which were published by JAMA.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A systemic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of masks published in "The BMJ" in November 2021 showed that with 95% confidence, masks reduced COVID incidence by between 25% and 71%. This result is based on six primary studies. These studies were of several different types: case control studies in Thailand and three Western countries (where cases identified whether they were wearing a mask when they had contact with a known positive patient), a randomized control study in Denmark which assessed the impact on mask wearing on the wearer, a natural experiment that compared US states that implemented mask mandates on the level of COVID, a cross sectional comparative study in China which surveyed whether a mask protected the wearer, and a retrospective cohort study in China which assessed the impact of masks worn by infected and uninfected family members. Another five studies were not included because they were not directly comparable. They assessed the impact of mask mandates across countries on mortality (finding a 45.7% reduction), of mask mandates in the US on R (finding a 29% reduction), a comparative incidence of COVID associated with mask wearing comparing HK and South Korea (finding a significant reduction), a natural experiment across US states finding a significant effect on case rates, and a cross sectional study assessing a 10% increase in mask wearing led to a 71% reduction in the risk to others. A lot of other papers had to be rejected because of the risk of confounding influences.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on face mask use showed that with 95% confidence, masks reduced respiratory infections incidence by between 3% and 19% in community setting.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: There is consistent evidence that mask wearing is effective in reducing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Population-wide masking has proven significant in reducing the transmission of COVID-19. Masks, however, are not of equal efficacy. While N95 masks outperform surgical masks in filtration, healthcare worker population studies have not shown a significant difference between the two, as of June 2021. N95 and surgical masks, both designed for single use, can be decontaminated at a loss to mask integrity and filtration efficacy. Both N95 and surgical outperform cloth masks, which the general public has used based on its greater availability during mask supply shortages. Cloth and fabric masks have protected wearers from COVID-19, with some variability, such as fabric type, layer count, and mask fit. Cloth masks are insufficient for healthcare workers and not recommended, according to two randomly controlled trials.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Observational studies have shown evidence that masks reduce the community spread of COVID-19. Randomized controlled population trials are uncommon due to ethical and logistical issues. Clinical studies had not evaluated the efficacy of cloth masks in COVID-19 transmission by the end of 2021. Several observational studies, including four reviewed in a "Lancet" meta-analysis, have found that masks offer statistically significant protection from infection, although the level of protection varies according to the mask type and setting.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Observational studies have shown evidence that masks reduce the community spread of COVID-19. Randomized controlled population trials are uncommon due to ethical and logistical issues. Clinical evidence of mask efficacy in COVID-19 transmission was limited and had become a subject of scientific debate by May 2021. Clinical studies had not evaluated the efficacy of cloth masks in COVID-19 transmission by the end of 2021. Evaluation of cloth mask efficacy is further complicated by the wide variation in fabric and fit, among other factors. Concerning the precedent of mask efficacy in limiting transmission of respiratory viral illnesses other than COVID, a clinical trial meta-analysis in May 2021 showed no significant evidence of efficacy, though the authors noted the evidence to be poor quality and subject to confounding factors like consistent mask usage adherence.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Community studies have shown some cloth masks to be effective at filtering respiratory droplets, which can carry SARS-CoV-2. Cloth masks of cotton quilt (120 thread per inch), bonded copy paper, flannel, and chiffon or silk hybrid with cotton are over 90% effective at blocking particles the size droplets that carry SARS-CoV-2, according to an October 2021 review of 42 studies. Multilayered fabrics provided improved breathability and filtration efficacy. Among readily available fabrics, two-layered 100% cotton, two-layered cotton quilt, hybrid masks, and cotton flannel performed best. Filtration effectiveness generally improves with thread count.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The use of a face mask can result in significant risk reduction of infection with epidemic-causative beta coronaviruses. N95 or similar respirators account for a larger risk reduction than disposable surgical or other similar masks. Masks are protective for both healthcare workers and people in communities exposed to infection; evidence supports masking in both healthcare and non-healthcare settings, with no striking differences detected in the effectiveness of masks between the settings.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The CDC highlighted a number of studies in their 10 November 2020 scientific brief detailing the benefits of community masking. In a study of 124 Beijing households with at least one laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, mask use by the index patient and family contacts before the index patient developed symptoms reduced secondary transmission within the households by 79%. A retrospective case-control study from Thailand documented that, among more than 1,000 people interviewed as part of contact tracing investigations, those who reported having always worn a mask during high-risk exposures experienced a greater than 70% reduced risk of acquiring infection compared with people who did not wear masks under these circumstances. A similar study in three Western countries also came up with a 70% risk reduction. Investigations involving infected passengers aboard flights longer than ten hours strongly suggest that masking prevented in-flight transmissions, as demonstrated by the absence of infection developing in other passengers and crew in the 14 days following exposure. In addition, the CDC said the benefit of universal masking, including reductions in infections and mortality, has been demonstrated in community-level analyses by a set of studies involving the Massachusetts hospital system, the German city Jena, the American state Arizona, a panel of 15 American states and Washington, D.C., Canada nationally, and the United States nationally.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In addition to studying the impact of mask wearing on transmission in a community, direct studies can be done on whether a mask filters out virus-carrying particles from the air. In August 2021, a study of the fabric of masks worn in the community found that they filtered out between half and three-quarters of the viral RNA. Respirators made to a standard such as N95 or FFP2 when properly fitted should filter out at least 95% of the virus.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In December 2021, a study in "PNAS" found that when two people wear surgical masks, while the infectious is speaking, the risk of infection remains below 30% after one hour, but when both wear a well-fitting FFP2 mask, it is 0.4%.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In February 2022, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that surgical masks worn at indoor public venues can reduce the chances of testing positive for COVID-19 by 66%, while tightfitting N95 and KN95 masks can reduce the odds of infection by 83%.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A scientific review of research about the overall efficacy of face masks in terms of product design (such as thermal comfort and flow resistance) and ways of usage found that fluid dynamics and fabrication techniques have a significant impact on performance. According to the review, studies showed that cotton and surgical masks had a microorganism filtration efficiency of 86.4% and 99.9% respectively, while the surgical mask was three times more effective in blocking transmission than the cotton mask and could lead to a decrease of the effective reproduction number to below1which could halt epidemic spread in a region where 70% of residents use them consistently in public.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: By January 2021, several lines of research recommended double-masking (wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask, along with using a mask filter, or wearing a nylon covering over a mask) as being efficacious.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: As masking became widespread during the pandemic, it gave rise to the issue that many individuals of the public are not correctly handling and wearing their masks. Suzanne Willard, a clinical professor at Rutgers School of Nursing, remarked that the general public is not used to wearing masks and lay people are asked to use a tool health care professionals are trained to use.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A commonly seen issue is that people are wearing masks pulled down below the nose, which is an incorrect way to wear a mask. Zane Saul, the chief of infectious disease at Bridgeport Hospital, remarked that "I really have observed people not covering their noses and just covering their mouths. It's just as important to cover your nose." Daniel Gottschall, the vice president of medical affairs for the Fairfield region of Hartford HealthCare and St. Vincent's Medical Center in Bridgeport, explained that "By wearing a mask you're keeping a lot of those secretions inside of you. If you wear it just over your nose or just over your mouth and you're not diligent (about keeping it in place), you're exposing the secretions that come out of that part of the body to other people."


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of information science, remarked that messaging on masking should have been used to provide proper instructions to the public (as was done for hand washing) rather than used to discourage people from masking because of the possibility that they would wear them improperly, as had happened early in the pandemic. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control highlighted that appropriate use of face masks in communities could be improved through education campaigns and is key for its effectiveness as a measure. Health institutions such as the World Health Organization have provided public guidance on the do's and don'ts on masking.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: As the epidemic accelerated, the mainland market in China saw a shortage of face masks due to increased public demand. Face masks were quickly sold out in stores throughout China. Hoarding and price gouging drove up prices, so the market regulator said it would crack down on such acts. In January 2020, price controls were imposed on all face masks on Taobao and Tmall. Other Chinese e-commerce platformsJD.com, Suning.com, Pinduoduodid likewise; third-party vendors would be subject to price caps, with violators subject to sanctions.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, the U.S.'s Strategic National Stockpile contained just twelve million N95 respirators, far fewer than estimates of the amount required. Millions of N95s and other supplies were purchased from 2005 to 2007 using congressional supplemental funding, but 85 million N95s were distributed to combat the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Congress did not make the necessary appropriations to replenish stocks. The Stockpile's primary focus has also primarily been on biodefense (defense against a terrorist or weapon of mass destruction attack) and response to natural disaster, with infectious disease a secondary focus. By 1April 2020, the Stockpile was nearly emptied of protective gear. In January and February 2020, U.S. manufacturers, with the encouragement of the Trump administration, shipped millions of face masks and other personal protective equipment to the PRC, a decision that subsequently prompted criticism given the mask shortage that the U.S. faced during the pandemic.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In France, 2009 H1N1-related spending rose to €382million, mainly on supplies and vaccines, which was later criticized. It was decided in 2011 to not replenish its stocks and rely more on supply from China and just-in-time logistics. In 2010, its stock included a billion surgical masks and 600 million FFP2 masks; in early 2020, it was 150 million and zero respectively. While stocks were progressively reduced, a 2013 rationale stated the aim to reduce costs of acquisition and storage, now distributing this effort to all private enterprises as an optional best practice to ensure their workers' protection. This was especially relevant to FFP2 masks, more costly to acquire and store. As the COVID-19 pandemic in France took an increasing toll on medical supplies, masks and PPE supplies ran low, causing national outrage. France needed forty million masks per week, according to French president Emmanuel Macron. France instructed its few remaining mask-producing factories to work 24/7 shifts, and to ramp up national production to forty million masks per month. French lawmakers opened an inquiry on the past management of these strategic stocks. The mask shortage has been called a ""scandal d'État"" (State scandal). Thousands of French individuals and companies teamed up during the outbreak to form a decentralized network of Fab labs and ad-hoc retooled production facilities, producing more than a million face shields, masks and other kinds of PPE during the height of the pandemic.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In late March and early April 2020, as Western countries were in turn dependent on China for supplies of masks and other equipment, China was seen as making soft-power play to influence world opinion. However, a batch of masks purchased by the Netherlands was rejected as being sub-standard. The Dutch health ministry issued a recall of 600,000 face masks from a Chinese supplier on 21 March which did not fit properly and whose filters did not work as intended despite them having a quality certificate. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that the customer should "double-check the instructions to make sure that you ordered, paid for and distributed the right ones. Do not use non-surgical masks for surgical purposes." Eight million of eleven million masks delivered to Canada in May also failed to meet standards.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Thefts of face masks and other personal protective equipment have been reported at hospitals in the United States and other countries.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The Naval Medical Center San Diego began mandatory random bag checks for staff members, after several incidents of theft. Hospitals in Canada reported that theft of PPE had become so commonplace that face masks had to be locked away. According to hospital staff, the policy of locking up PPE often resulted in staff requests for PPE being denied. Thefts of N95 masks were reported from a locked hospital office in South Carolina and off-loading docks at the University of Washington.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Two thousand surgical masks were stolen from a hospital in Marseille, France during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, in March. The masks were stolen from an area of the hospital that could only be accessed by surgery patients and staff. A hospital employee in Cooperstown, New York was charged with misdemeanor larceny for a similar incident. Hospital employees in West Java, Indonesia were arrested for stealing hundreds of boxes of face masks and selling them on the black market.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: One month later an Indiana hospital pharmacy reported a theft to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Along with morphine, with a street value estimated at $3000, the thieves, one of whom was an employee of the hospital and had an access card, had stolen masks and other in-demand goods. In the criminal complaint, filed in Indiana federal court, a DEA task force officer said:


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A former hospital employee in Georgia was arrested on allegations of stealing masks and gloves from the hospital on five separate occasions after he was fired. Also in April, an employee of the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center was charged with a misdemeanor for stealing disposable gowns and surgical masks from the hospital. PPE, including masks, were reported stolen by a member of the housekeeping staff at a hospital in Arizona and a physician's assistant in Florida.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: According to a BBC News report from August 2020, hospital staff in Ghana were selling PPE on the black market.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Two government workers from the Federal Law Enforcement training Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, were charged in October for conspiracy to steal PPE, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: During the Tigray War that started in November 2020, looting of the means of survival led not only to emergency conditions of acute food insecurity but also to concerns about management of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of January 2021, only five out of forty hospitals were "physically accessible" and most hospitals outside of the Tigrayan capital Mekelle had been looted or destroyed.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: N95 and FFP masks were in short supply and high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Production of N95 masks was limited due to constraints on the supply of nonwoven polypropylene fabric (which is used as the primary filter), as well as the cessation of exports from China. China controls fifty percent of global production of masks, and facing its own coronavirus epidemic, dedicated all its production for domestic use, only allowing exports through government-allocated humanitarian assistance.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In March 2020, US President Donald Trump applied the Defense Production Act against the American company 3M, which allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency to obtain N95 respirators from 3M. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said there were concerns that 3M products were not making their way to the US. 3M replied that it has not changed the prices it charges, and was unable to control the prices its dealers or retailers charge.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Jared Moskowitz, the head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, accused 3M of selling N95 masks directly to foreign countries for cash, instead of to the US. Moskowitz said 3M agreed to authorize distributors and brokers to represent they were selling the masks to Florida, but instead his team for the last several weeks "get to warehouses that are completely empty". He then said the 3M-authorized US distributors later told him the masks Florida contracted for never showed up because the company instead prioritized orders that came in later, for higher prices, from foreign countries (including Germany, Russia, and France).


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: "Forbes" reported that "roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the US had been purchased by foreign buyers [on 30 March 2020] and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the brokerand that was in "one" day," causing massive critical shortages of masks in the US.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Masks were still in short supply in late September, eight months into the pandemic. The Defense Production Act powers that averted a ventilator shortage were not used as extensively to increase N95 production, despite outcry from healthcare workers. Even though 3M has increased domestic production from 20 million to 95 million masks a month, they say "the demand is more than we, and the entire industry, can supply for the foreseeable future."


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: N95 manufacturers and other companies have been reluctant to invest more in domestic mask production because manufacturing in the United States is not profitable for them. There are some American companies who can shift production temporarily to meet the demand for masks but most of them have not received any funding through the DPA. Some have taken the initiative but there were problems with the fit of the masks and obtaining regulatory approvals. 3M and other N95 manufacturers have not entered into any corporate partnerships to share intellectual property or increase N95 production.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Trump gave Rear Admiral John Polowczyk the responsibility for PPE logistics. Polowczyk said he believed "hospital systems are making management decisions that might lead to an appearance that we still don't have masks, which is the farthest from the truth."


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: By February 2021, suppliers had increased production but not enough to meet demand. Companies cited concerns about post-pandemic demand as a reason for not entering the market. Hospitals increased supplies, but even at well-funded hospitals, healthcare workers could be expected to wear their masks for up to a month. Counterfeits continued to pose problems for purchasers. Numerous calls by public health experts had been made to provide high-filtration masks such as N95s or their equivalents to the general public in high-risk settings.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: On 19 January 2022, the Biden Administration is reported to begin freely providing 400 million N95 masks in the United States.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In early April 2020, the Berlin politician Andreas Geisel alleged that a shipment of 200,000 N95 masks it had ordered from American producer 3M's China facility were intercepted in Bangkok, Thailand and diverted to the United States. 3M said they had no knowledge of the shipment, stating "We know nothing of an order from the Berlin police for 3M masks that come from China." The US government denied any confiscation and said they use appropriate channels for all their purchases. Berlin police later confirmed that the shipment was not seized by US authorities.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: This revelation outraged the Berlin opposition, whose CDU parliamentary group leader Burkard Dregger accused Geisel of "deliberately misleading Berliners" in order "to cover up its own inability to obtain protective equipment". FDP interior expert Marcel Luthe also criticized Geisel. "Politico Europe" reported that "the Berliners are taking a page straight out of the Trump playbook and not letting facts get in the way of a good story." "The Guardian" also reported that "There is no solid proof Trump [nor any other American official] approved the [German] heist."


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: German citizens decided to contribute to solving the supply crisis by making their own masks and other types of PPE like face shields that gave masks additional protection; the largest group of makers measured 6,800 individuals, collectively producing more than 100,000 pieces of protective equipment.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: As more countries restricted the export of N95 masks, Novo Textiles in British Columbia announced plans to start producing N95 masks in Canada. AMD Medicom in Quebec had long been the main Canadian company producing N95s, but China, France, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the United States all banned exports of medical equipment, barring Medicom's factories there from exporting the masks to Canada. The Government of Canada subsequently awarded Medicom a 10-year contract to build a factory to produce masks in Montreal.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: As COVID-19 spread, enterprises in several countries quickly started or increased the production of face masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Cottage industries and volunteer groups also emerged, manufacturing cloth masks for localized use. They used various patterns, including some with a bend-to-fit nose piece insert. Individual hospitals developed and requested a library of specific patterns.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In the first five months of 2020, 70,802 new companies registered in China to make or trade face masks, a 1,256% increase compared to 2019, and 7,296 new companies registered to make or trade melt blown fabrics, a key component of face masks, a 2,277% rise from 2019.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In April, however, the Chinese government stepped in with tighter regulations. 867 producers of the melt-blown fabric were shut down in Yangzhong city alone. Many speculative manufacturers have been forced to quit due to changing export rules and tighter licensing requirements in China and weaker demand for lower quality products globally.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Some clinical stockpiles have proved inadequate in scale, and the non-medical market demand expanded dramatically as the general public determined that masks were essential, or they began obeying public health mandates, or both.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Between April and June 2020, sellers on Etsy sold 29 million cloth face masks worth an estimated $364million. Approximately four million people (about seven percent of buyers) visited the website "just" to buy masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In East Asian societies, a primary reason for mask-wearing is to protect others from oneself. The broad assumption behind the act is that anyone, including seemingly healthy people, can be a carrier of the coronavirus. The usage of masks is seen as a collective responsibility to reduce the transmission of the virus. A face mask is thus seen as a symbol of solidarity in Eastern countries. Elsewhere, the need for mask-wearing is still often seen from an individual perspective where masks only serve to protect oneself. In April 2020, a study comparing masking-related perceptions between China and three German speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) also showed that Chinese had stronger pro-masking perceptions than the European participants. However, over the course of the pandemic, people began promoting a new meaning of masking as an act of solidarity to each other. In May 2020, masking was gradually shifting to become a new social norm.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Existing cultural norms and social pressure may impede mask-wearing in public, which explains why masking has been avoided in the West. According to Joseph Tsang, a Hong Kong doctor and infectious disease expert, the promotion of universal masking may resolve perceptions against mask-wearing, because mask-wearing is intimidating if few people wear masks due to cultural barriers, but if all people wear masks it shows a message that people are in this together. A study surveying people in Spain showed that an individual's likelihood of voluntarily wearing a mask is positively correlated with the proportion of uptake in the surrounding area.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen "et al." point out that successful implementation of public masking policies, especially in communities that have no cultural traditions for such interventions, requires a reframing of social meanings and moral worth, and that public messages help to conceptualize who typically wear masks and what the moral valence of masking is. They note that the earliest members who wear face coverings may be seen as deviant when the community starts to adopt masking, but that changing narratives will generate new meanings that construe those who do not mask as deviant. Their argument is that public health messaging about face coverings should shift from masks as a medical intervention to masks as a social practice based on values such as social responsibility and solidarity, as a successful uptake requires face coverings to be grounded in the social and cultural realities of affected communities. Clemens Eisenmann and Christian Meyer argue that the question, how the meaning of wearing face masks develops in society, depends on their practical and public uses within everyday social interactions. They explain that masking has destabilized interactional infrastructures embedded in routines, revealing both taken-for-granted infrastructures of everyday lifeincluding social inequalities (such as those of people reliant on lip reading) and moral evaluations in transcultural situations (such as those involving implicit racism in which the health instructions of essential workers belonging to certain groups are disregarded)and new challenges on the interactional level.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In the Western world, the public usage of masks still often carries a large stigma, as it is seen as a sign of sickness. This stigmatization is a large obstacle to overcome, because people may feel too ashamed to wear a mask in public and therefore opt to not wear one. There is also a divide within the Western world, as seen in the Czech Republic and Slovakia where mass mobilization has occurred to reinforce the solidarity in mask-wearing since March 2020.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Mask-wearing has been called a prosocial behavior in which one protects others within their community. On social media, there has been an effort with the #masks4all campaign to encourage people to use masks. Nevertheless, there have been many occurrences of violence and hostility by people who became aggressive after they were requested to wear a mask or saw people wearing masks in customer-based establishments. Multiple people have been killed in attacks by people who refused to wear masks. It has led to concerns about worker safety, so employees have been discouraged to actively enforce masking policies due to the potential of hostile situations, while enforcement by official authorities is severely lacking.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Masking has been subjected to racial politics in Western countries. For instance, it has been heavily racialized as an Asian phenomenon. This has been reinforced in a lot of media discourses, where stories about the pandemic are often accompanied by unrelated imagery of Asian people in masks. The focus on race has brought hostility towards Asians who are confronted with the choice to wear masks as precaution while they face discrimination for it. Huang Yinxiang, a sociologist from the University of Manchester, described maskaphobia (negative prejudice, fear or bitter hatred against people wearing face masks) as making Asians in Western countries into targets for racists who want to legitimize xenophobia during the COVID-19 outbreak. Likewise, people from certain groups such as Black Americans may not feel comfortable wearing masks, especially those that are not clearly medical but homemade masks, due to concerns of racial profiling.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: There have also been concerns that wearing masks may also further isolate disadvantaged communities. Concerns had been expressed that masks would make communication difficult for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. This led to calls for wider distributions of transparent masks, which allow for lip reading.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Similar concerns over difficulty in communicating have been expressed by those who may depend on dogs for therapeutic or social reasons, as the animals depend on body language such as facial expressions. Conversely, people who are exempt from wearing masks on medical grounds or due to a disability, fear they will be subjected to abuse for not wearing a mask, even if they are legally exempt from doing so. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the charity Disability Rights UK received numerous reports about people being confronted on trains and buses. Health organizations such as the American Lung Association commented that, even though there may be people who will seek an exemption, the individual's concerns needs to be weighed against the societal needs to limit the spread of the virus. However, anti-maskers have called upon bogus claims about legal or medical exemptions in their refusal to wear masks. They have, for instance, claimed that the Americans with Disabilities Act (designed to prohibit discrimination based on disabilities) allows exemption from mask requirements, but the United States Department of Justice responded that the act "does not provide a blanket exemption to people with disabilities from complying with legitimate safety requirements necessary for safe operations".


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: There have been concerns about the effects of mask-wearing on young children's language development and social emotional development.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: There are feelings of mask fatigue among the general public, which is exacerbated by frustrations about people who are not taking the mask and other guidelines seriously as the pandemic and its intensity continues on.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Among the European countries surveyed by YouGov in the first half of 2020, the likelihood for people to wear masks was split: In Northern Europe (e.g., Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), people were very unlikely to wear a mask. In Western Europe (e.g., Italy, Spain, France, and Germany), people were initially unlikely to use a mask, but mask wearing greatly changed from low levels in March to higher levels in May. A similar, if delayed, pattern was seen in some northern European countries. For example, mask usage was very low in Denmark up until the summer of 2020, but rapidly increased in the autumn as rules on their use in publicly accessible indoor places were introduced. An exception was the United Kingdom where mask usage only grew gradually during in the first half of 2020, but it rose very quickly after official policy changes in July mandated masking in stores.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: A survey among people from the United States (conducted from April to June 2020) indicates that age was a factor on whether people were likely to wear a mask, as the likelihood rose with the age group, but the reported use of face masks increased significantly across all age groups over time. Furthermore, people who did not report mask use also reported engaging in significantly fewer other mitigation behaviors than those who did report mask use.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Gender plays a role in the willingness to wear masks during the pandemic; men are overall less inclined to wear masks in public than women. There are indications that men are more likely to feel negative emotions (such as shame) and stigma for wearing masks. It is suggested that this male behavior is driven by a sense of masculinity, where the act of masking is possibly perceived to run counter to it, which leads to an increase in men not wearing masks during the pandemic. A survey among participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk about face mask perceptions found that men and women may have different reasons when they do not wear masks in public: Men were more likely to see masks as an infringement upon their independence and women were more likely to perceive masks as being uncomfortable, while perceptions on efficacy, accessibility, compensation, inconvenience, appearance, and attention did not differ.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The pandemic has raised questions about the role of governments in mask policies, either voluntary or mandatory policies, especially in terms of the social and behavioral consequences involving the general public.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The results from a study surveying people in Germany indicate that the act of wearing a mask, independent of the policy, is considered a social contract in which compliant people perceive each other more positively and noncompliance is negatively evaluated. However, it also suggests that voluntary policies have the potential effect to increase polarization and thus cause more stigmatization. The authors recommended that countries and communities should adopt a mandatory policy along with explicit communication of the benefits of both masking (e.g., risk reduction, mutual protection, positive social signaling) and mandatory policies (e.g., fairness, less stigmatization, higher effectiveness) to encourage the public to wear masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: World leaders as role models for masking have also received much scrutiny, as they are key to convey the critical public health message to the public. For example, Slovakia has been cited as a country where its public figures (including President Zuzana Čaputová and her administration) set the example by wearing masks and played a crucial role to normalize masks. In contrast, in the United States, President Donald Trump and his administration came under criticism for communicating an inconsistent and confusing message about masking. They were often criticized for undercutting national and local public health advice to wear masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Although authorities, especially in Asia, have been recommending people to wear face masks in public, in many other parts of the world, conflicting advice has caused much confusion among the general population. Several governments and institutions, such as in the United States, initially dismissed the use of face masks by the general population, often with misleading or incomplete information about the usefulness of masks. Commentators have attributed the anti-mask messaging to efforts to manage the mask shortages, as governments did not act quickly enough, remarking that the claims go beyond the science or were simply lies. On 12 June 2020, Anthony Fauci, a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, confirmed that the American public were not told to wear masks from the beginning due to the shortages of masks and explained that masks do actually work.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In the United States, public masking has become a political issue, as opponents argue that it inhibits personal freedom and proponents emphasize the importance of masks for public health. Some people may see it as a political statement. Party affiliation partly determined how likely people were to embrace the wearing of masks in public. Democrats were more likely to wear masks than Republicans. Masks have become an aspect of the culture war that has emerged over the course of the pandemic. Commentators argue that the resistance against masks partly stems from the confusing and mixed messaging about masking.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Matthew Facciani, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University, says the uncertainty from health experts during the early days of the pandemic paved the way for political leaders to become a prominent source for guidance and clarity. He argues that, once mask wearing became informed by political beliefs, it is difficult to correct due to the motivation to protect one's identity in relation to a political group and the reinforcement from political echo chambers, no matter that scientists began to better understand the severity of the virus and the evidence in favor for mask wearing became clearer. Moreover, how people observe the masking rules seems to be different across countries and these differences may be attributed to cultural or management factors.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In April 2020, health officials from Taiwan's Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) pushed back on school bullying of boys in pink face masks. The CECC officials and Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung wore pink masks to challenge gender norms at a press conference, while various government agencies demonstrated solidarity by changing the colors on their Facebook pages to pink. The minister later tweeted "Pink is for everyone and no colour is exclusive for girls or boys. Gender Equality lies at the heart of Taiwan values." The press conference was held amid reports that male students were too embarrassed to wear their pink face masks, jeopardizing their safety and the safety of others in the face of COVID-19.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In some countries, large rallies have taken place in protest against masking mandates. In Canada, the anti-mask crowd has hailed their protests as the so-called "March to Unmask". In the United Kingdom, new protests came in the wake of the official announcement that masking will be compulsory in shops. After eight months since the beginning of the lockdown in the Czech Republic, mass manifestations against the restrictions imposed by the government arose. Some anti-mask protestors have co-opted the feminist slogan "my body, my choice" and the Black Lives Matter slogan "I can't breathe". Businesses have also been purposely disrupted by anti-maskers (purportedly in defense of their constitutional rights).


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: According to Moe Gelbart, executive director of the Thelma McMillen Recovery Center, anti-maskers' behaviors do not appear only from the facts they hear, but the problems also come from the meaning they give to those facts. He identifies several key psychological reasons that prompt them to not wear a mask: First, denial is seen in some people who feel worried and anxious by masks as it interferes with their belief and desire that everything is alright. Second is a sense of invulnerability, as some people and especially younger individuals believe nothing bad will happen to them and are thus prone to risk-taking behaviors. Third, behavioral drift is seen among some people who find it difficult to maintain behaviors intended for prevention rather than treatment. Fourth, some people may have issues related to authority due to mistrust of science or tribe identification with powerful figures. Fifth, the act of covering one's face has an association with "bad", such as criminals or as an intention to hide something one is ashamed of. Sixth, some people do not want to admit fear and vulnerability, which they associate with the act of wearing a mask.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In the United States, opposition to mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic came during then-President Donald Trump's politicization of science and more generally during decades-old period of politicization of science. American opposition to mask-wearing during pandemics is not new; during the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Anti-Mask League was established in San Francisco, California.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: In May 2021, "Vice" reported that some members of the anti-vaccine community were, promoting the use of masks and social distancing to protect themselves from those who have received vaccines, citing false claims that those vaccinated for COVID-19 "shed" spike proteins that can be harmful to people in their proximity, and former research scientist Judy Mikovits claimed that she had been kicked off a plane for wearing a mask lined with colloidal silver.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Christian clergy from the Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, and Latter-day Saint traditions, as well as those from the Jewish, Buddhist and Unitarian religions have implored people to wear masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: As the pandemic progressed people began making use of face masks as accessories, matching them to their outfits and so on. Early in the pandemic, people and businesses from the fashion industry responded to official calls for help in overcoming the shortages of protective personal equipment including face masks. These masks were sheerly utilitarian as the only consideration at the time was function. What began as a public health necessity however gradually evolved into a new category of accessories subject to similar design and marketing considerations as other accessories. Fashion brands eventually reopened their factories for production due to the increasing demand for masks and started to manufacture masks in a wider variety of styles. Smaller brands, who primarily sold their products online, found that selling masks was a good strategy to maintain sales. Etsy became a major online platform where many designers sold their masks. Designers started making masks that matched other pieces of clothing and accessories, a trend which may have begun unintentionally as even fabric remnants were repurposed.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The city of Vilnius in Lithuania held a "Mask Fashion Week" in May 2020, which was promoted with billboards (with no catwalks or displays) around the city featuring local people including Mayor Remigijus Simasius wearing face masks.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: The Walt Disney Company introduced uniform face masks for their employees at Walt Disney World and Disneyland in the United States.


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Large numbers of disposed face masks have led to an increase in plastic waste, negatively impacting the environment. Moreover, the production of face masks also contributes the emission of carbon dioxide, which accelerates global warming. Considering the risk of plastic pollution, researchers have focused on using biodegradable polymers to fabricate facemask with antimicrobial properties


title: Face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

text: Due to the rarity of their use in non-medical settings outside East Asia, many languages lacked commonly used terms for facemasks, especially since legal issues prevent the usage of terms which might imply medical standards the masks do not meet. In languages such as Saterland Frisian public competitions were held to create a neologism for the device in the language and thus not having to rely on loanwords or calques. The held a similar competition for the North Frisian language.


title: Abigail

text: Abigail () was an Israelite woman in the Hebrew Bible married to Nabal; she married the future King David after Nabal's death (1 Samuel ). Abigail was David's second wife, after Saul and Ahinoam's daughter, Michal, whom Saul later married to Palti, son of Laish, when David went into hiding.


title: Abigail

text: Abigail became the mother of one of David's sons, who is listed in the Book of Chronicles under the name "Daniel", in the Masoretic Text of the Books of Samuel as "Chileab," and in the Septuagint text of 2 Samuel 3:3 as Δαλουια, "Dalouia". Her name is spelled Abigal in in the American Standard Version.


title: Abigail

text: Derived from the Hebrew word "ab," "father", and the Hebrew root "g-y-l", "to rejoice," the name Abigail has a variety of possible meanings including "my father's joy" and "source of joy".


title: Abigail

text: In 1 Samuel 25, Nabal demonstrates ingratitude towards David, the son of Jesse (from the tribe of Judah), and Abigail attempts to placate David, in order to stop the future King from taking revenge. She gives him food, and speaks to him, urging him not to "have on his conscience the staggering burden of needless bloodshed" (verse 31, NIV) and reminding him that God will make him a "lasting dynasty" (verse 28). Jon Levenson calls this an "undeniable adumbration" of Nathan's prophecy in 2 Samuel 7. Alice Bach notes that Abigail pronounces a "crucial prophecy," and the Talmud regards her as one of the Tanakh's seven female prophets. Levenson, however, suggests that she "senses the drift of history" from intelligence rather than from special revelation.


title: Abigail

text: After Abigail reveals to Nabal what she has done, "God struck Nabal and he died" (v. 38), after which David married her. Abigail is described as intelligent and beautiful. The Talmud amplifies this idea, mentioning her as being one of the "four women of surpassing beauty in the world" (the other three being Rahab, Sarah, and Esther). Being married to the wealthy Nabal, she is also a woman of high socioeconomic status. Whether David married her because he was attracted to her, or as an astute political move, or both is unclear.


title: Abigail

text: Abigail and David's second wife, Ahinoam the Jezreelite, accompany David and his war band as they seek refuge in Philistine territory. While David and his men are encamped near Jezreel, the women are captured by Amalekites who raided the town of Ziklag and carried off the women and children. David led the pursuit, and they were subsequently rescued. Both wives then settle with David in Hebron, where Abigail gives birth to David's second son, Chileab (also called Daniel).


title: Abigail

text: Abigail is also listed as one of the seven Jewish women prophets, the other six being Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Sarah, Huldah, and Esther. In terms of her moral character, Abraham Kuyper argues that Abigail's conduct indicates "a most appealing character and unwavering faith," but Alice Bach regards her as subversive.


title: Abigail

text: Adele Berlin contrasts the story of Abigail with that of Bathsheba. In one, the wife prevents David from murdering her foolish and greedy husband. In the second, David orders the death of a good man because he desires his wife. "In the Abigail story, David, the potential king, is seen as increasingly strong and virtuous, whereas in the Bathsheba story, the reigning monarch shows his flaws ever more overtly and begins to lose control of his family."


title: Abigail

text: Levenson and Halpern suggest that Abigail may, in fact, also be the same person as Abigail, mother of Amasa. Richard M. Davidson, however, points out that "on the basis of the final form of Old Testament canon, references to Abigail in the biblical accounts indicate two different individuals."


title: Abigail

text: Abigail's self-styling as a "handmaid" led to "Abigail" being a traditional term for a waiting-woman, for example as the "waiting gentlewoman" in Beaumont and Fletcher's "The Scornful Lady", published in 1616. Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Fielding use "Abigail" in this generic sense, as does Charlotte Brontë. Scott, in The Abbot frequently refers to Lilias, Lady Avenel's maid as an “Abigail.” Anthony Trollope makes two references to "the abigail" (all lower case) in "The Eustace Diamonds", at the beginning of Chapter 42, whilst Thomas Mann makes the same reference at the start of the second chapter of Part 2 in Buddenbrooks (published in 1901). William Rose Benet notes the notoriety of Abigail Hill, better known as "Mrs Masham", a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne. George MacDonald Fraser makes mention of "an "abigail" fussing about the room" in his novel "Flashman" from "The Flashman Papers" series.


title: Abigail

text: Abigail, and especially her meeting with David, was a common subject of European artwork in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period. Artists depicting her, or them, include Antonio Molinari, Juan Antonio Escalante, and Peter Paul Rubens.


title: Abigail

text: Abigail is a featured figure on Judy Chicago's installation piece "The Dinner Party", being represented in one of the 999 tiles of the "Heritage Floor."


title: Ryan Spann

text: Ryan Jamari Spann (born August 24, 1991) is an American mixed martial artist. He currently competes in the Light Heavyweight division in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). A professional since 2013, he has also fought for the Legacy Fighting Alliance, where he was the Light Heavyweight Champion. As of December 6, 2022, he is #11 in the UFC light heavyweight rankings.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann grew up in Westwood, Memphis, Tennessee and begun training martial arts in his early childhood.


title: Ryan Spann

text: After compiling a 3–1 amateur record as a Middleweight and Welterweight, Spann started his professional career in 2013. He fought under various promotions, notably the regional


title: Ryan Spann

text: Legacy Fighting Championship and Legacy Fighting Alliance where he was the Light Heavyweight Champion. He amassed a record of 13-5 prior participated in Dana White's Contender Series.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann appeared in Dana White's Contender Series 3 on July 25, 2017 against Karl Roberson. He lost the fight by knockout due to elbows in round one.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann's second appearance in Dana White's Contender Series 10 came on June 19, 2018 against Emiliano Sordi. He won the fight via guillotine choke in round one and he was awarded a UFC contract.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann made his UFC debut on September 22, 2018 at , facing Luis Henrique, replacing an injured Mark Godbeer. He won the fight via unanimous decision.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann's second UFC fight came on 11 May 2019, 2019 at UFC 237 against Antônio Rogério Nogueira. He won the fight via knockout in the first round.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann was briefly linked to face Ovince Saint Preux on February 8, 2020 at UFC 247. However, promotion matchmakers elected to go in another direction and the pairing was scrapped from the event. Instead, Spann was booked against Paul Craig on March 21, 2020 at . However, the event was cancelled.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann faced Sam Alvey May 9, 2020 at UFC 249. Despite getting knocked down in the third round, Spann won the fight via split decision.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann was initially scheduled to face Johnny Walker at UFC Fight Night 176 on September 5, 2020. However, Walker tested positive for COVID-19 and the bout was postponed to September 19, 2020 at UFC Fight Night 178. Despite dropping Walker twice in the first round, Spann would go onto lose the fight via knockout.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann was expected to face Misha Cirkunov on December 19, 2020 at UFC Fight Night 183. However, Cirkunov pulled out in early December due to an injury. The fight was rescheduled to March 13, 2021 at UFC Fight Night 187. After initially knocking Cirkunov down during the first minute, Spann won the fight via technical knockout in round one. This win earned him the "Performance of the Night" award.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann faced Anthony Smith on September 18, 2021 at UFC Fight Night 192. He lost the fight via rear-naked choke submission in round one.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann was scheduled to face Ion Cuțelaba on February 26, 2022 at UFC Fight Night 202. However, Spann was pulled from the event due to injury and the bout was rescheduled for UFC on ESPN 36. He won the bout via guillotine choke in the first round. The win earned Spann his second "Performance of the Night" bonus award.


title: Ryan Spann

text: Spann faced Dominick Reyes on November 12, 2022 at UFC 281. At the weigh-ins, Spann weighed in at 206.6 pounds, six tenths of a pound over the light heavyweight non-title fight limit. The bout proceeded at a catchweight with Spann fined 20% of his purse, which went to his opponent Reyes. He won the fight via knockout in the first round.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: Axel Springer SE () is a German digital and popular periodical publishing house which is the largest in Europe, with numerous multimedia news brands, such as "Bild", "Die Welt", and "Fakt" and more than 15,000 employees. It generated total revenues of about €3.3 billion and an EBITDA of €559 million in the financial year 2015. The digital media activities contribute more than 60% to its revenues and nearly 70% to its EBITDA. Axel Springer’s business is divided into three segments: paid models, marketing models, and classified ad models. Since 2020, it is majority-owned by the US private equity firm KKR. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, the company is active in more than 40 countries, including subsidiaries, joint ventures, and licensing.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: It was started in 1946/1947 by journalist Axel Springer. Its current CEO is Mathias Döpfner. The Axel Springer company is the largest publishing house in Europe and controls the largest share of the German market for daily newspapers; 23.6%, largely because its flagship tabloid "Bild" is the highest-circulation newspaper in Europe with a daily readership exceeding 12 million. Upon its acquisition of "Politico" and "Business Insider", Axel Springer announced that all employees must support a free market economy, a united Europe, and Israel's right to exist.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: The media offerings of Axel Springer SE are clustered in: current news, autos, sports, computers and consumer electronics, as well as lifestyle.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In addition, the company is active in the online editorial and marketing business with its shares in aufeminin.com, Awin, and buy.at, and owns several online classified advertising platforms such as the career site StepStone, the real estate marketing portal immonet, various coupon portals, including Sparheld.de Germany and Reduc.fr in France and price comparison platform idealo. It is also a significant investor in the American digital media company Group Nine Media.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 1946, publisher Hinrich Springer (age 66) and his son Axel Springer (age 34) established the limited company Axel Springer Verlag GmbH. That year saw the launch of the "Nordwestdeutsche Hefte" and the radio and TV magazine Hörzu.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 1948, the evening newspaper "Hamburger Abendblatt" was launched, the first daily newspaper created by Axel Springer.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: The year 1952 saw the launch of the popular daily newspaper "Bild". The paper was based on the British tabloid "Daily Mirror", and peaked at circulation of 5 million in the 1980s.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 1953, Axel Springer Verlag bought the publishing house Die Welt, including the daily paper "Die Welt" and the Sunday paper "Welt am Sonntag".


title: Axel Springer SE

text: Then in 1959, the company acquired the a holding in Ullstein AG, which owned Berlin newspapers "Berliner Morgenpost" and "B.Z." and the Ullstein book-publishing business.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: The official opening of the Berlin headquarters took place in 1966. Hamburg remained an important site.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: After the attack on the student leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968, the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) began acts of violence against the company. The APO had a history of animosity with the Springer Group's allegedly biased coverage of the student movement. For instance, in the wake of the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg by the police at a student demonstration against the Shah, one Springer paper reported that "what happened yesterday in Berlin had nothing to do with politics …. It was criminal in the most sickening way." In fact, Ohnesorg, who had never attended a demonstration before, had been shot in the back while trying to leave the demonstration.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 1985, 49% of the company was offered for public subscription. Later that year Axel Springer died. Control was passed to his widow Friede Springer.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 1986, the first licensed edition of "Auto Bild" came out, in Italy. Other licensed editions and joint venture publications later appeared in twenty European countries, Indonesia and Thailand.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In May 1999, Axel Springer bought a 51% majority stake in the American television production company GRB Entertainment, but was later divested in 2002.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2001, Axel Springer and T-Online established a joint subsidiary Bild.de/T-Online AG. A year later in 2002, the launch of immonet.de took place, and Mathias Doepfner, former editor-in-chief of "Die Welt", became CEO of Axel Springer AG. Then in 2003, the name was changed to Axel Springer AG.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2009, Axel Springer AG acquired affiliate marketers Zanox and Digital Window as well as StepStone ASA. In 2010 a $635.7 million offer by Axel for leading French real estate website operator seloger.com caused seloger shares to rise as much as 32%, the most since it went public. Within 3 days Axel increased its offer 15.6% to $735 million after shareholders rejected the deal.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2012, Axel Springer formed a joint venture (Axel Springer Digital Classified) with global growth equity firm General Atlantic. The company also bought TotalJobs in the UK from Reed Elsevier that year.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2013, Springer sold its regional newspapers, women's magazines, and television magazines to Funke Mediengruppe for €920 million That same year, Publications Grand Public, a French magazine publisher owned by Springer, was sold to Reworld Media.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2015, Axel Springer AG purchased Business Insider, a business, celebrity and technology news website, in a deal that valued Business Insider at $442 million. On 8 December of the same year, Axel Springer increased its share in Axel Springer Digital Classifieds GmbH from 70 per cent to 85 per cent and was granted a purchase option to acquire the remaining 15 per cent from General Atlantic. On 9 December, Axel Springer exercised the option, acquiring the additional 15% from General Atlantic in exchange for shares of Axel Springer, leaving the growth equity firm with 8.3% holding in the company.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2020, Friede Springer transferred $1.5 billion of Axel Springer shares to CEO Mathias Doepfner, effectively making him heir of the media group. Doepfner now has control of 44% of the voting rights.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In October 2021, the firm announced that it had completed the acquisition of "Politico" for over $1 billion, after announcing its intention to do so in late August 2021. Axel Springer's Chief Executive Mathias Döpfner said that Politico staff would need to adhere to Axel Springer's principles, including support for a united Europe, "reconciliation between Germans and Jews," Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, and that staff who disagree with the principles "should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly".


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In October 2021, an article in "The New York Times" reported accusations of sexual misconduct, sexual discrimination and questionable business practices at Axel Springer SE. A day later, the publisher fired the editor-in-chief of Bild.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: According to German scholar Gudrun Kruip of the , Axel Springer SE and its subsidiaries spread a strongly pro-American view in which criticism of US foreign policy is largely absent. In an interview with The Nation, two former CIA officers alleged that Axel Springer received $7 million from the CIA to support American geopolitical interests with his publishing house. Springer reportedly agreed and began guiding the editorial bias towards supporting US foreign policy. Although no conclusive evidence has come to light, Kruip considers the CIA officers' allegations credible since Springer, according to his own autobiography, had no money to actually fund the publishing house when it was founded, and it was thus unlikely that he could finance its rapid ascent without "money from the outside". As of 2021, the Axel Springer SE names "solidarity with the libertarian values of the United States of America" as one of its core principles on its own website. Many scholars and independent observers allege a "subservience to American geopolitical interests" of the publishing house and its subsidiaries to this day. According to "Foreign Policy", Axel Springer SE "has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes."


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In 2017, was accused of editorial interference, when the head of the joint venture Mark Dekan wrote a letter to the company's Polish employees in which he disparaged the head of the conservative Law and Justice political party, calling the Polish politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski a "loser" for opposing the candidacy of Donald Tusk as President of the European Union, stating that "...we should never forget about the basic values that we represent... Here is the moment where free media, such as ours must be active. We speak for the ideas of... a United Europe." In the letter, Dekan also raised his concerns that European integration was least supported by the youngest generation of Poles and vowed to take appropriate action, suggesting "Let's tell them what to do to stay in the fast lane and not end in the parking lot."


title: Axel Springer SE

text: In March 2021, Der Spiegel reported accusations that the editor of Bild, Julian Reichelt, had promoted several young female employees in exchange for sex and sought to buy their silence before dismissing them. This was followed up by a report of the same in the New York Times in October 2021. Both reported that Axel Springer had investigated and dismissed the complaints against Reichelt, and had proceeded to suppress reporting of the controversy by other outlets. CEO Mathias Doepfner was reportedly also keen to support Reichelt on account of the latter's strong right wing political leanings. Later the same month, Axel Springer reversed course and dismissed Reichelt.


title: Axel Springer SE

text: Major competitors in the German publishing market include Bauer Media Group, Bertelsmann, Hubert Burda Media, and Holtzbrinck.


title: Shego

text: Shego is a fictional character from Disney's animated television series "Kim Possible", voiced by Nicole Sullivan. The character, ever since her first appearance in the pilot episode, "Crush" appears as Dr. Drakken's sidekick, though in some episodes acts as a mercenary for other villains. She is one of the franchise's main antagonists, and one of its most recurring characters. She made her live-action debut appearance in the 2019 film "Kim Possible", who is portrayed by Taylor Ortega.


title: Shego

text: Shego is one of the most mature characters in the franchise; unlike most other "Kim Possible" villains, she is not afflicted with megalomania or narcissism. However, despite her generally rational and sane demeanor, she is frequently impatient and quick to anger, especially when she feels that someone is being obnoxious, stupid, or a waste of her time; her brother, Hego, once summed her up as a "cranky smart-mouth, prone to excessive violence."


title: Shego

text: As a villain, Shego is dedicated to her work, but often appears unmotivated and unambitious, dividing her free time between lounging in Drakken's lair reading villain magazines, filing her clawed gloves, and vacationing at spa resorts. For the most part, she does not initiate any schemes of her own, instead preferring to assist others as an enforcer or infiltrator. Despite being one of the smartest villains (or perhaps because of this fact), she generally prefers direct tactics—often involving physical force or intimidation—instead of high technology gadgets and overly complicated schemes. Because of her effectiveness as a sidekick, Shego appears to be well respected among the villain community, as some of them have broken her out of prison in order to enlist her assistance; nevertheless, Shego has nothing but contempt for the franchise's other villains.


title: Shego

text: Despite her fearsome persona, Shego is one of the few antagonists in the franchise who have a moral compass: she has expressed concern over cruelty to animals and pauses at the thought of stealing a wheelchair from a handicapped boy, stating that it is a low act even for villains such as Drakken; however, she usually puts aside her misgivings once a plan appears to be working out. Shego has never actually killed anyone on the show, though she has demonstrated a callous disregard for human life; once, while partnered with Motor Ed, who earlier commented on Shego's "appetite for destruction", she excitedly remarked that the shockwave resulting from a high-powered rocket reaching full speed would "doom the world to chaos!"


title: Shego

text: Shego is a young woman, with long black hair, an athletic build, sharp jawline, and slanted bright green eyes. She stands about a half foot taller than Kim. Her exact age remains unknown, though it was stated that she was in her early 20s and it was revealed that she is a college graduate (unspecified degree in child development).


title: Shego

text: As a result of being struck by a glowing, rainbow colored comet as a child (see below) her skin has a pale green tinge. Her signature costume is a green and black full-body catsuit with matching gloves and boots, arranged in a harlequin's dazzle pattern. The gloves are tipped with metal claws, which she has occasionally been seen filing to keep sharp. On the occasions when Shego has been seen to wear different outfits, they typically follow the same color scheme as her signature outfit. In the "Kim Possible" movie "A Sitch In Time: Future Story", Shego conquers Middleton and she wears the same color with a matching black cape.


title: Shego

text: Shego is an expert in many fields, with infiltration and sabotage as her specialties. She possesses extensive martial arts training and impressive fitness and agility, rivaling the skills displayed by her nemesis Kim Possible. Her attack is also enhanced by metal claws on her gloves, and on occasion she has used her claw-like fingernails to similar effect. She is often seen filing them.


title: Shego

text: Shego is endowed with a unique superpower: the ability to generate green, flame-like bolts of glowing energy from her hands. This energy can be used to heat or melt anything she touches, or fired as a directed energy attack ranging from laser precision to a destructive blast. Originally, Disney described Shego's green flames as being purely concussive in nature, although in later episodes she was shown using her flames to burn or melt things. These powers were first stated by Disney as being generated by her gloves, making them a weapon rather than a superpower. However, this fact was retroactively changed during the show's second season, when these abilities were revealed to be a true superpower resulting from exposure to a rainbow-hued comet which also empowered her four brothers.


title: Shego

text: In addition to her energy attack, Shego appears to possess superhuman durability that allows her to survive situations of calamitous destruction that would probably kill other characters. In the film "", she was kicked into a live electrical signal tower, which shocked her and then proceeded to collapse on top of her. She came out of the incident with slightly torn clothes and frazzled hair.


title: Shego

text: Very little is known about Shego's early life and even her real name is never revealed. At some unknown point prior to the start of the series, a rainbow-colored comet smashed into Shego's childhood tree house, and endowed her and her four brothers with super powers. She then became a hero who, alongside her four brothers, defended Go City against a number of villains as the superhero group Team Go. Shego eventually left the team for reasons that were never fully specified, but anecdotal evidence suggests there were three primary reasons: a fascination with villainy, crankiness, and irritation with her brothers. At some point, she abandoned her family and their quest for justice for a life as a mercenary-for-hire.


title: Shego

text: It is unknown what happened with Shego right after leaving her family, but from the beginning of the series Shego has been, for the most part, in the employ of Dr. Drakken as his sidekick and enforcer. It is during this stage of her life in which the series mostly revolves, leading her and Drakken to multiple confrontations against Kim Possible. Throughout the series, Shego is repeatedly defeated by Kim Possible and sent back to jail. She is (as previously mentioned) a formidable fighter and gets the better of Kim Possible a few times, whereupon her successes are usually stopped by Ron (often accidentally), Rufus, or, on occasion, bungling from Drakken or interference from his machinery.


title: Shego

text: In the second season, one of the most notable events involving Shego was her reunion with her brothers; she had to team up with her rival Kim to retrieve their powers, which had been stolen by an old enemy of hers, Aviarius. This was the first time the show took the time to detail bits of Shego's past, delving into her previously unknown background as a once-upon-a-time teenage heroine herself.


title: Shego

text: A notable curiosity in the series, Shego is the only villain who is never given all of her basic characteristics: she lacks a common name—being known only as Shego throughout the show's run—and her age is also difficult to place. (At times, she seems to older than Kim Possible, enjoying hip-hop music, fast cars, and handsome men; she critiques the heroine on her fashion and dating choices and is found attractive by both Ron and Senor Senior Junior, who are both of a high school-college age. Still, at other times she seems to be quite a bit older, having a complex college degree in child development, dating Mister Barkin, in Sitch in Time, Shego has the same white stripe in her hair as Drakken, Monkey Fist, and Kim's parents, indicating she's older, and being characterized by Ron as "older, like, a lot older!" Of course, this also comes in the same scene in "Clean Slate" where Shego tries to convince an amnesiac Kim that she was a senior while the heroine was a freshman.)


title: Shego

text: During the fourth season, Shego's character went through some development which pointed to the possibility that she may have been growing tired of her established role as a villainous sidekick. She walked out on two separate capers, and on two occasions she actually "saved" Kim's life. Shego states her reason for doing so is because nobody is allowed to kill Kim, except for her. Finally, at the series' end, she and Drakken team up with Kim and Ron to save the world from an alien invasion. Because of this, she is greeted as a heroine once again.


title: Shego

text: Shego has a powerful rivalry with Kim on the battlefield, which is sometimes kept at a "professional" context, but usually involves a few insults. This rivalry, however, progressed along the series, becoming more and more personal for both fighters.


title: Shego

text: Like Bonnie, Shego talks down to Kim as if she were a child, often referring to her by the diminutive "Kimmie" or nicknames like "Princess" or "Pumpkin", as well as putting down both her appearance and wardrobe. However, Kim doesn't seem to be quite as affected by Shego's insults as with Bonnie's, and her retorts have a better effect against Shego. Over time, and despite their rivalry (or possibly because of it), Shego has developed a professional respect which she often shows for Kim as a rival and a fighter, and is less than impressed when she manages to ruin Drakken's scheme. In some instances they share a bond, especially when they are stuck in the same "sitch", usually leading to small and almost friendly conversations.


title: Shego

text: This relationship has somehow grown to be much more personal for Shego, also indicating a gradual development in her personality. In certain situations, Kim and Shego have teamed up against common enemies, and Shego has gone as far as to save Kim from other enemies, claiming that only she has the right to destroy her. It was even demonstrated during the events of "Stop Team Go" that they have the potential to be great friends, if only Shego weren't irritable (Shego even reveals to have been wanting to tell Kim something she couldn't while evil, though what this was is never revealed). In the episode "Mad Dogs & Aliens" Shego goes so far as to both rescue Kim from a gigantic alien who has incapacitated her, and to summon Ron and Kim's little brothers for assistance. At one point during "Stop Team Go", Kim referred to Shego as "like a big sister." (to which Ron responds, "Yes, a big sister who used to punch and kick you, AND MEAN IT!")


title: Shego

text: Dr. Drakken is Shego's usual employer; she has been stated to be his sidekick. They have worked together for most of their schemes, but she rarely shows much concern over him even though he claims that he likes to think of them as some kind of "evil family". Their relationship teeters between a familiar, cooperative interaction and annoyance or frustration with each other.


title: Shego

text: As a sidekick, she started out in the series being respectful towards Drakken. As the franchise progressed, she began to develop a stronger personality and to openly show contempt for him. Eventually, Shego became the dominant one, and began threatening him with violence if he stepped over the line with her.


title: Shego

text: She is rarely taken aback when Dr. Drakken's plans are foiled – going so far as to chide him for making overly complex or unconventional plans. On the few occasions that such schemes appear to be working, she has been seen to be pleasantly surprised and appears to be happy for his minor successes. Even though Shego's tolerance for Drakken and his failure-prone evil schemes has steadily decreased, she still remains in his service, usually without much reluctance unless she wants a vacation from him or sees a better opportunity. In fact, she reacts badly when he twice replaces her with new sidekicks (Warmonga and Frugal Lucre). As poorly as she treats him, Shego sees her place as being in Drakken's employ and has proven to actually care for him. As per confirmation from show director Steve Loter, Drakken and Shego begin a romantic relationship after the series finale, Graduation. Kim has even joked with Shego that she had feelings for Drakken.


title: Shego

text: Junior is one of the few characters that has managed to earn Shego's respect. Señor Senior Sr. hired Shego to teach his son Junior the finer points of villainy, and although the training practically started with complications, Junior eventually proved to be an apt pupil, and Shego a capable instructor. They may be in mutual pursuit of evil schemes, but their relationship seems to be based on a friendly teacher-student dynamic, although her loyalty towards him is rather questionable.