Oh - and a warning when purchasing any kind of mask online: be very careful of where you buy them. My husband was unfortunately taken in by a site purporting to have them for sale - at a steep price (30ish apiece) and ordered 3. The supposed shipping date came and went. No shipment notification, no masks. Some googling turned up information suggesting the site was a scam. We filed a credit card chargeback.
The same goes for any other scarce-sounding resource. There’s a run on composters, of all things - because a lot of people are doing gardening who never did before. We jumped on that bandwagon, and decided a composter might be useful. Well, the 80-90-dollar model we wanted sold out at Home Depot between the time I looked at it and the time I tried to buy it; everywhere else has it for 2-3 times the regular price… except a couple of sites I’d never heard of it, that listed it for < 60 bucks.
My spidey-sense was set off by this, and I did some googling. Two nearly-identical sites, all created in the past 6 weeks, and more googling showed they were all associated with some well-known scam sites.
I suspect that there will be some counterfeit masks sold even at reputable retailers - they don’t necessarily know where all the stock comes from. Hell, I’d be leery of buying something even through Amazon - as third-party sellers there might be dumping all kinds of crap.
There isn’t a whole lot of sanding that’s essential these days. Building a lamp shaped like an elephant? Looking to sand down those sharp edges, but don’t have a mask? Maybe it - along with house parties and group sex - can wait until the pandemic settles down.
If you just can’t control your compulsion to sand something, you might look for a real half-mask respirator with P100 filter cartridges. These have limited utility for COVID protection, since they have an unfiltered exhaust valve - in fact, this sort of respiratory protection doesn’t meet recent “wear a mask in public” requirements in some municipalities - but it provides even better protection for the wearer than an N95 mask.
Do you have any cite for any of this? I think most people are wearing them because we’ve been informed by experts that they have some effect on reducing transmissibility, particularly others if the wearer is infected but (presumably) asymptomatic.
Certainly any face covering offers some protection, but that has to be balanced against any unintended consequences. If someone with a flimsy piece of sheer linen on their face stands close to people as if they are wearing a properly fitted respirator, the negative effect outweighs the positive benefit. I’m certain the experts made their mask recommendation assuming people would wear them properly, ensure the best possible fit, and keep social distancing as much as possible. Instead, we see things like people wearing flimsy bandannas loose on their face with their nose exposed while they stand close and talk to other people.
And people are too trusting of other people wearing a mask without considering how well the mask works. If a cashier is wearing a thin mask that fits poorly, the customers should act as if the cashier is not wearing a mask at all. The mask is doing little to block transmission, yet the customers act as if the flimsy mask is 100% effective.
I’m still in favor of mask use, but we need more social pressure to ensure people understand how masks work and make critical choices of how to behave with masks.
I think people are putting too much faith in N95 masks. Studies show that less than half of people get an appropriate fit without formal fit testing and when rechecked a year later, many do not use them correctly. For the average, non fit tested person, they are likely to be about the same efficacy as surgical masks which are becoming widely available. For example this randomized prospective study showed nonsuperiority of N95 masks compared to surgical masks at preventing influenza when worn by health care providers. I would assume that most lay people are not formally fit tested and to not have formal yearly instruction in donning and doffing these masks. This can lead to a false sense of security about them. For example, I have a weak chin and despite being fit tested, I have to be careful not to tip my head down when wearing an N95 because in that case I lose the seal, even though the mask seems to still be tight to my face. In other words, you are probably just as safe with a standard surgical mask as you are wearing a random N95 mask.
On Johns Hopkins website, they have a simulated study and show n95 stop about 90% of their particles with everyday usage. In other words, how people actually use them. (Beards seems to be the biggest barrier for many mask, rendering them very ineffective).
Surgical masks are less than 20% and cloth masks were a dismal 2%.
I feel these are more a “feel good” measure than actually doing something.
If there were “plenty” of N95 masks in the US, nurses would not have to reuse them from patient to patient or even day to day. In the before times, they were one-use only, after which they went in the trash. And non-clinicians would be able to buy them in drugstores and hardware stores easily.
Since none of that is true, obviously, yes, there is still a shortage of N95 masks in the US. For that reason, I think every possible production line should be running at capacity.
True, I don’t know what the per mask cost would be to reopen them, but we’ve seen the US govt is willing to pay over $5/mask. With the ongoing shortages, it seems even a meager 7 million additional/month would still be helpful.