If you have hearing loss, wear hearing aids or rely on lip reading, being around people wearing masks makes communication even harder. Dr. Lindsay Bondurant, Director of the Pennsylvania Ear Institute at Salus University in Elkins Park, says there are two main issues.
"People's voices are muffled and a lot of soft sounds aren't necessarily being transmitted as well as they would be under normal circumstances," she explained. "Then we have the additional problem of the mask blocking so much of the speaker's face that you can't see all the cues on the person's mouth, the way their mouth is looking and the face is positioned."
She says if you're often around a person with hearing issues, you could get a mask with a clear panel over the mouth, but they are expensive and difficult to find. She suggests you use an iPad to write things down and show the other person, use phones for texting conversations, or stand six feet apart and lower the mask just for that conversation.
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In addition, putting that mask on and off has you touching your ears a lot more these days. Bondurant said that causes problems for people who wear hearing aids.
"Certain styles of hearing aids come off easily when they remove their mask, especially if the mask has straps that go behind the ears," she said. "We've seen an uptick in loss and damage claims, and things like that, where people don't realize their hearing aid came off and fell in a parking lot or something like that."