Bill Nye on the set of his Netflix show Bill Nye saves the world.
Eddy Chen / Netflix
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In a series of TikTok videos, television personality and science commentator Bill Nye shares the importance of wearing a face mask in the midst of Coronavirus pandemic.
“Everyone, it’s literally a matter of life and death,” said Nye on Wednesday. “And when I use the word literally, I literally mean a question of life and death.”
Nye then asks everyone to wear a mask in public and shows the difference between fabric facewear, N95 masks and surgical masks by trying to blow a candle through each mask.
“The reason we want you to wear a mask is to protect yourself,” said Nye. “But the main reason why we want you to wear a mask is to protect me from you and to protect the particles from your respiratory system from entering my respiratory system.”
By Thursday, the videos had had more than 1.2 million views and were announced on Twitter.
The US Center of Disease Control says that COVID-19 mainly spreads through breath droplets that arise when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. These droplets can then get into other people’s mouths and noses, or be inhaled into the lungs. The CDC recommends that everyone wear a fabric face covering in public, especially when other social distance measures cannot be practiced to prevent the coronavirus from spreading.