Man drowns in fish pond while running away from cops over a face mask

A middle-aged man has drowned after falling into a fish pond while running from police officers who accosted him over a face mask.

Witnesses say the deceased was being chased by police officers at Kambu in Kibwezi, Makueni county before the incident.

He reportedly managed to flee with police officers hot in his wake.

Citizen Digital understands that the police chase turned tragic after the deceased accidentally slipped into the pond where he drowned.

The latest comes just weeks after the Kenyan government warned that any person caught in public spaces without a mask would be arrested and prosecuted.

Kenya has so far confirmed 281 cases of the coronavirus amid fears that numbers may rise once the government embarks on mass testing.

Members of the public have been advised to practice social distancing, personal hygiene and don masks at all times while in public.

That the virus is spread before people feel sick is not news, hence the need for everyone to use a mask while in public.

And even if there was no asymptomatic transmission, universal or near universal mask wearing has its uses.

As others have noted, instructing only the sick to wear masks is essentially asking people to put a sign on themselves inviting fear and hostility, whereas if everyone wears a mask when outside, the sick are more likely to do so, thus protecting people around them.

The masks, have according to research carried out across Asia, been handy in slowing down respiratory infections considerably.

Writing last March, Adrien Burch, an expert in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that “despite hearing that face masks ‘don’t work,’ you probably haven’t seen any strong evidence to support that claim. That’s because it doesn’t exist.”

In fact, there is evidence of the exact opposite: that masks help prevent viral infections like the current pandemic.

Burch pointed to a Cochrane Review — a systemic analysis of published studies on a given topic — which found strong evidence during the 2003 SARS epidemic in support of wearing masks.

One study of community transmission in Beijing found that “consistently wearing a mask in public was associated with a 70% reduction in the risk of catching SARS.”