Mask preferences

Do you have a favorite mask to wear? (cloth, n95, etc) I'm looking to add a few to my collection

N95 if I can get them...So far, no joy.
Homemade cloth, with face shield currently

I have worked in very dusty environments (archaeological digs) for months at a time. N95 is the best way to go (properly fitted).

I use a bandana or a buff.

I would not call this a favorite, but it did work. One time, as a child, I needed to go inside a house that had smoke damage. The smoke damage was too much for me to go in. I made a mask using Kleenex and tape. It worked.

Jeanette Isabelle

There was a local debate about the effectiveness of cloth masks, so a guy decided to "upgrade" it. He inserted a Kleenex tissue under the mask for extra protection.

Regarding the original question , we have chinese face masks made of 3-ply material. I am not sure of the quality, and to add to my confusion, I found two types in the market which seem to be identical but one type is 3 times more expensive than the other. I bought both types. One to use as general purpose low-risk areas, the other for higher risk areas (more crowded ..etc.)

I will not be surprised if they are the same.
Drug stores sell them at higher prices than discount stores.

I say, wear a mask when required, but just wear what you like and what is comfortable. They do precious little to protect you or anyone else. Evidence glasses wearers - you can't hardly see through the fogged up glasses. If water vapor can escape that easily, do you really think its going to stop microscopic viruses? And of course, no need to worry about those other people with their noses sticking out above their masks. Or even worse, the ones wearing the masks over their chin only.

Your best bet is to stay away from other people. In most places now, law or executive orders require you to wear a mask. Wear one. But don't put a whole lot of trust in it protecting you much. You'll do a little better if you know how to choose and use a mask, which 99.99% of the population evidently doesn't. I am talking about the general public here, not medical people who know how to fit test and appropriately use an N95. And it is the general public that you need to be more worried about interfacing with.

Personally, I use a cloth mask with adjustable paracord extenders on the ear loops I made (it was way too tight otherwise). Simply because this is my most comfortable mask, and I can adjust it the tightest so as not to have to put up with quite as much glasses fogging. However, I know it isn't worth a hill of beans in protecting me (or others around me). So I just keep my distance from others.

I noticed that. I was wondering why the lights in Wal Mart were getting so dim (the last time I was there) until I removed my glasses.

All of a sudden, the store was more bright and clear.

Jeanette Isabelle

Au contraire re: whether or not masks protect either the wearer of others.

The several countries with a previously existing or newly acquired culture of wearing mask have had a FAR lower incidence of COVID 19, and far lower number of deaths per capita compared to the USA, which FAR exceeds any other country:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Masks, or rather the failure to wear them, are of course just one of the reasons.
Evidence continues to accumulate of their benefit to both wearers and others:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32294341/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/

https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.19.20071779

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32232986/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32371934/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19522650/

Facebook and other social media assertions that cloth face masks, such as are recommended for the general public, cause lower oxygen levels and higher carbon dioxide levels are without any published data to back up those claims.

For glasses fogging prevention, wiping a drop of shaving cream on the lenses works well; antifog sprays are also available from the eye wear stores, or the usual mail order sources.

I'll call your statistic, and raise you one:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

The last column is "per capita". The US does NOT lead in that table.

My point is that you can't trust statistics. They have been rushed and hastily thrown together, not peer reviewed, calculated differently in different places, subject to the reporting differences "died OF covid" vs. "died of something else but WITH covid present", and most importantly - taken over by people with an agenda to push. They are simply not to be believed. Just like mainstream media. No longer credible.

You say, "Wear a mask, and it might help you." I say, "Wear a mask, but it probably won't help you". We're both agreeing on the "wear a mask" part. So is there any tangible/functional difference in our opinions?

Remember, just a few short months ago the CDC and other medical professional were saying masks were useless for the general population. Now their recommendation is 180 degrees opposite. It's not like masks are something new. They've been around forever, and should have been studied to death already. The majority of the studies I have seen that promote mask use for the general population have all been done very very recently. I find that odd.

Wear your mask. I said that before. I am saying it again now. If you want to believe this will save you, I'll be more than happy for you to believe that. I don't believe it myself, but I wear a mask anyway. In consideration of others feelings mostly.

Are Anti-Mask Masks Legal? – JONATHAN TURLEY Ya, they are and they won’t help you with anything other than complying with the law regulations.

My preference is a mask either cheap enough to throw away after one use, or easy to wash prior to reuse. In cooler weather I’ve used neck gaiters which are single layer and are machine wash/dry. In summer, I use a couple different masks which go on/off quickly. I wear when anti-social distancing isn’t possible (grocery shopping). Otherwise, distance is the rule.

There's a risk in allowing perfect to be the enemy of the good. The fact that your glasses can fog up is true but largely irrelevant. Using the same methodogy you could also sneeze in your mask then look inside- everything in your mask would have been propelled outward. We don't have good evidence at all that the CoV-2 is airborne although it may be. We do have a lot of evidence that is spreads via respiratory droplets, the majority of which are much, much larger than the virus contained in those droplets. At any rate I guess this is fast becoming a religious subject not a scientific one. Follow the law I guess; doing something good is still good even if you do it under protest.

I wear contacts most of the time but I do wear glasses and sunglasses. I've found that I don't get much of any lens fogging while wearing the Mystery Ranch Street Masks. They have a metal insert that you bend over the bridge of your nose which allows them to easily seals this area well enough to prevent fogging. Anyone looking for a mask that works well with glasses might want to check them out. As usual, no affiliation beyond the fact that I live five or ten miles from the Mystery Ranch headquarters and factory where they're made.

And, as always, where wast the control group in all these studies? Without a control group the statistics are correlation only and essentially worthless.

Haertig is correct about the number of deaths per million.
I apologize for not doing my homework.

Sorry it took so long.... Finally found the video. At 17:26 in the video, they reference the trail of mask use and transmission. Quantifiable results for transmission. IIRC it is only for surgical masks but it makes an excellent point. This was required viewing by my medical director and the training devision. Hope it helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osoPNZxnayQ&feature=youtu.be

I prefer masks that can take a replaceable PM2.5 filters, and has a nose bridge strip. I've been adding a second nose bridge strip to cut down on eyeglass fogging, and gluing the exhalation valves shut to cut any potential outgoing virus transmission (probably overkill, but better safe than sorry). They're not medical grade, but they're a whole lot better then two layers of cotton/spandex blend used for neck gaiters. Ironically, the disposable medical masks are easier to breathe through.

I also use diluted dish soap as a lens wash to cut down on fogging.

Try some cloth medical tape along the top edge of the mask - tape it to your face. Works well for fogging if you don't take your mask off often.

I agree that there is a piece of mask-wearing that is performative political correctness.
OTOH, properly fitted masks worn by properly trained and well-disciplined wearers saw me through 37 years of working with patients with TB, sars, H1N1, AIDS, Hep ABC, Pneumococcal pneumonia, and meningococcal meningitis without any of us contracting the diseases.

Properly fitted means having a good seal: if I have a good seal, my glasses do not fog.

And when I was really serious about safety, and working in a well-resourced organization, I wore a PAPR.

Masks can help, social distance can help, hand washing can help. None of them are guarantees.

I'm finding more evidence that a buff or bandana is not useful to prevent spread

Many people believe the CDC was concerned that there wouldn't be enough PPE for healthcare workers, and so de-emphasized mask use for the general population. When mask production caught up with need, there was no longer need to discourage the population from snapping up masks.

If you look at the Asian countries that have long experiences of dealing with flu epidemics from China, mask use has generally been a part of their government's public health policy. *Their* medical communities & equivalent of CDC do not have ambiguous messaging about mask use. For them, COVID-19 is not the first such pandemic they've countered. For us, it is our maiden voyage, and we're discovering the lessons they learned years ago.

How reliable is this? It's missing countries!

But if they hope to maintain one shred of credibility, then they shouldn't "de-emphasize" by lying about mask effectiveness.

Once they try the excuse "Yes, we lied to you, but it was for a good reason", who in their right mind would ever believe a word they say again?

They have all 152 countries. It is interesting to sort on death per 1,000,000 people and see how things fall out. Probably due to population density.

Fauci and the SG did mislead the public, and Fauci implicitly admitted just prior to the April 3rd announcement to wear improvised masks that the driving factor of his decision was a shortage of PPE for medical workers and fear of panic buying.

The problem here is, from both a public official and a medical professional standpoint, that it represents conduct unbecoming - you do not lie about the potential efficacy of an intervention to mitigate risk, period. It doesn't matter if he felt the reasons were noble. That destroys the public trust.

As a firefighter I often work closely with our EMA, and when doing contingency planning panic buying is a known variable that can be accounted for. So the idea that people might panic buy should have been irrelevant. The public often assumes the Government is like the special forces of management: lean, efficient and on top of things. After all, we spend billions on emergency management organizations from homeland security, CDC, FEMA, all the way down the line, whose actual day job is preparing for various eventualities.

Yet it takes a pandemic to discover our strategic national stockpile was woefully inadequate to address any sort of surge, and to discover our domestic production capability has also degraded, such that we rely upon overseas sources and "just in time" logistics for mission critical items like PPE. That's not a simple oversight, that's a national security risk, it should never have been a thing. It's like finding out something like 80% of the entire world's IV supplies come from a single facility in Puerto Rico only AFTER a hurricane knocks it out.


We had on the order of 119 million N95 masks in the strategic national stockpile in 2009 prior to the H1N1 pandemic, which was never fully restocked. Even if it had been, it's well short of what one of HHS Secretary Alex Azar's deputies testified we would actually need to address shortfalls during a nationwide pandemic of this scale: 3.5 billion. These would last on the order of a few weeks at national scale and is only supposed to be a stopgap while domestic production is ramped up. At ~$2.50/kg in material costs (pre pandemic) that would amount to a mere $200 million, and widespread availability of N95 level masks would allow those who want to wear them to do so while greatly ameliorating the issues of others refusing to, since source control oriented masks (cloth / surgical masks) tend to only work effectively if everyone is wearing them.

Unfortunately, NIOSH approved N95 masks are still not widely available a year into this, though they do pop up from time to time, Amazon still refuses to sell to ordinary individuals and they have to make due with alternatives, with other sources (like Ebay) sometimes selling fake masks.

I do have access to them thanks to work, but I do hope this sort of thing is rectified in the future and never happens again. I will certainly be incorporating lessons learned and purchasing more when available. Reusable half or full face respirators make a lot of sense given the duration involved in a pandemic of this scale (1-2 years of wearing every day)

We also had a discussion about masks here, with our national virologist saying there is no evidence that masks in the population are actually proven to help. He did say it works in a medical setting.

Since then masks have been mandatory, but looking at how masks are worn, I'm not sure if he is wrong. A properly fitted mask works. But look outside and you see that masks are worn on the tip of the nose, below the nose, below the chin, people pulling their masks down to talk, people taking them off to smoke, some people wearing very used/dirty masks, etc, etc. Honestly, I think more than half of the people here do not have the discipline or skill to wear a mask properly.

As for mask availability, surgical style masks are everywhere and dirt cheap. You can get a 50 pack shipped for €3.20, which is less than what I would need to pay as a consumer to just ship it.

There are also FFP2 (N95 equivalent) that are half the price then they were before Covid. Although the better 3M's are still rare, the cheaper model based on the KN95's is very available and as cheap as €1,20 per piece.