New Delhi, Jan 22 (TIWN) Prominent public health officials in the US have increasingly highlighted the limitations of cloth face masks, pushing for more effective respirator masks such as N95s as the Omicron variant is rapidly spreading across the country, a shift in messaging from earlier in the pandemic, the Washington Examiner reported.

Officials encouraged the use of cloth masks in the spring of 2020 as a desperate measure to slow the spread of Covid-19 after previously recommending against masks and continued to boost them in the months after. Now, though, more experts are saying that the masks are not helpful, the report said.  "Cloth and surgical masks do absolutely nothing for protection from ambient virus," said Chad Roy, a microbiologist at Tulane University School of Medicine, referring to the virus spreading through the air.