LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Officials with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation announced today that they have created a national billboard and transit ad campaign to promote the use of masks and face coverings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Advertisements will urge the public to #DontShareAir, which have now been placed in 16 cities in 11 states.
"As the numbers of new infections, hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID continue to climb and we head into our first full winter with the coronavirus, AHF is seeking to reinforce prudent public health messaging and practices," AHF President Michael Weinstein said. "We want to strongly encourage the general public to get back to basics and remind people that masks and social distancing are an effective, inexpensive and often free prevention tool."
Over the past few weeks from late October to early November, AHF officials said #DontShareAir billboards, bulletins, bus bench ads, interior cards and/or transit ads have been posted within the cities.
The artwork for AHF's #DontShareAir public service message looks "somewhat like a modernist or abstract art painting," the nonprofit's officials said. It features stylized graphic silhouettes of the heads of two individuals facing each other but standing a few feet apart.
The hashtag #DontShareAir appears to spill from the mouth of one person with thousands of tiny droplets making their way across the space toward the second silhouetted face, suggesting the coronavirus being transmitted.
The AHF stated its latest billboard campaign begins as the United States averaged 108,737 new COVID-19 cases per day over the past week, a record high, according to Johns Hopkins University.