It always baffled me that the US government had a program to send everyone free COVID tests, but they didn’t have a program to send everyone free N95 masks, so we ended up wearing random materials that were far less effective.
With all of the mandates to wear a mask everywhere I at least would have liked to wear one that worked well. You would have thought if they could produce 6 free tests per household per month, they could produce 6 free N95 masks per household per month.
I personally received free masks. However, it was too late.
It was mostly early COVID when the masks were most needed and not available. Even the strategic stockpile essentially ran out after distributing them to vital areas. By the time they had enough to give them away, everyone had multiple masks of various qualities.
I didn't even realize they did that, interesting. Sadly, two years late and not even nearly enough if it was on time.
Kinda telling and depressing that everyone was ordering random knockoffs of varying quality from overseas, because we couldn't seem to produce enough domestically.
That’s because the U.S. population was strongly against masks. In the beginning the US public was strongly in favor of the vaccines. In fact the complaints were around the delay in vaccine availability and the way the rich and powerful could access them earlier.
It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.
It’s truly insane that vaccine deniers are now voting for Trump, when he was the one to take credit for them in the first place (and perhaps with some small justification!)
You know what else happened in late 2021? Vaccine mandates in the US (and Canada).
In the US, there were two - the first, via OSHA, affected all employers with > 100 employees. Employees would need to be vaccinated or tested weekly and required to wear a mask. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The second, via CMMS required vaccinations for all health care employees if Medicare or Medicaid money is involved. SCOTUS allowed that one.
On any issue some percent of the population will be contrarian. This is why there's much less resistance if policies are heavily encouraged instead of trying to punish dissenters. At the point where x issue becomes part of the culture war concensus becomes impossible.
> It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.
This is revisionist history. I remember many Democrats being staunchly anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and it was only when their party came into power did they turn into human pincushions nearly overnight, "believing in science" and not being able to get enough jabs into them.
Maybe it has something to do with the the medical factors in government, like Dr Fauci telling us not to wear masks. It maybe it was all if the prior research that shows that masks fit the last person were mostly ineffective.
B) money doesn’t magically turn into materials and finished goods. Someone had to make masks to distribute and they had to get their raw materials from somewhere right when the supply chain was disrupted.
N95s were in short supply for quite a while, and a result from this work is that cloth masks outperformed surgical and KN95s. People made pretty good cloth masks, so unless real N95s were distributed, distributing masks could have been a wash I think.
I’m not surprised that cloth beat surgical, but beating KN95 is kind of a shock. Of course, I’m sure there was quite a bit of variance in cloth mask quality. I wonder if anyone has done specifically a study on the home made cloth masks.
Because there was a massive shortage and they were being rationed for healthcare workers? Am I the only one that remembers collection drives for masks for doctors and nurses?
Problem is probably that the masks are supposed to be single-use when used as protection and you're meant to replace them even when moving between different places. You're also not meant to wear them for extended periods of time because they supposedly get less effective when they get wet from the moisture of the air you exhale. They also aren't washable so you would need to dispose of them after use.
The coronavirus particles are so small they go right through the filter so N95 masks have special fibers that use electrostatic charge to bind them. The electrostatic filter doesn't work effectively when damp, eg after prolonged exposure to humid breath. There's an incredible amount of engineering that goes into PPE.
The other baffling thing was how long it took cheap Covid antigen tests to reach the US market. In Europe, 1 Euro antigen tests were widely available, while in the US, they could easily cost more than $10 and were difficult to find.
At 1 Euro a test, you could easily test yourself every morning before heading to work or school.
Inexpensive is not a word I'd use to describe a mask you need multiple of in a week and monthly replacements of thereafter. For a virus that affects the entire world, "developing" and "developed", it's not an easy sell.
But this rather harmless inference could've been promoted instead of the fake initial narrative of "masks are not that useful, save them for medical staff" that happened early on in the pandemic. Policymakers should never be gatekeeping information and acting like the public is too dumb to solve resulting supply-side issues.
I've been wearing the same N95 duckbill for about 3 years now. It is getting a bit dirty but structurally it's fine. I don't wear it every day though, only in what I deem high-risk situations. Its construction is much more robust than the around-the-ears N95s.
I think one could reasonably stretch out a box of 20 duckbills for a whole year even if worn daily. They are about $1 each. While I could see that there would be places that $20/year would be too much, I don't think money is the barrier here. People just don't like wearing masks (especially respirators, which are bulkier) for many reasons.
Articles sometimes are flagged for poor or inflammatory content, but often it’s the uncivil squabbles that erupt in the comments for completely reasonable but somehow polarizing articles that triggers flagging. I think it’s seen as a regrettable cost of elevating civil discourse. Dang often appears early in such threads “don’t make me turn this car around”-ing, but his warnings are seldom heeded.
This is an interesting comparison, as there was a NIOSH study in late 2020 (released in 2021)[1] that used equipment to measure procedure masks, surgical masks, proper disposable respirators (with exhalation valves, since that was the main focus of the study) and cloth face coverings and T-shirt fabric (latter two more representative of common DIY masks).
These were sealed shut onto the test equipment using wax (ie: perfect fitment, so best case scenario). They found a much higher penetration through the materials per se for cloth coverings and procedure masks.
> Particle penetration through the surgical mask ranged from 2% to 17%. Procedure masks were
most variable and ranged from 1% to 85%
> For the six cloth face coverings, the submicron particle penetration ranged from 24% to 92%.
For the two types of fabric from cotton t-shirts, submicron particle penetration ranged from 45%
to 91%. Although this sample size was small, these penetration percentages for the cloth face
coverings and fabric from cotton t-shirts are comparable to the 40% to 90% penetration found by
previous NIOSH testing of cloth face coverings and fabrics.
For the respirators with exhalation valves their finding was the particle penetration was <1% to 55% without any additional mitigation and under 5% when using the ECG pad mitigation strategy tested. Relevant since a common earlier critique (perhaps assumption) of valved respirators was they weren't as decent as even common masks for non-wearers.
Why more importantly? For an airborne pandemic with very a long incubation period (if memory serves me right up to 2-3 weeks), lack of symptoms in many cases, preventing the spread is the number one priority on the level of a city/local/central government.
Quarantines and lockdowns are good old tested ways, but infeasible for prolonged periods of time. Having everyone wear a mask and drastically reduce the spread was such a no brainer I never understood all the panic around it.
Much of the US refuses to wear masks. If masks only prevent the virus escaping but not entering, then it is only the selfish segment of society that is being protected.
For many ordinary citizens its just panic when asked to perform something not within the usual cultural norms.
In japan this is normal behaviour, whenever you feel under the weather.
Then there were obvious propaganda lies surrounding masks. One was that soldiers wear them- and i was a soldier, with a abc-mask and we "trained" marching with them and unscrewed them to get some air.
Then some other world-unaware office worker suggested using them in freezers and cooled environments- which basically boils down to waterboarding yourself with condensing air-moisture.
Good idea, pushed by panicy people into bad policy, communicated badly, resulting in massive resistance.
It is a fair question for what one should do if healthy. Most people today are not wearing masks when sick. So how much protection does an N95 give us vs not wearing a mask at all? If we are healthy, should we bother with masks?
Not the original poster, but It’s probably more important because you can’t force people to wear masks. As such, the question is “can I protect myself?”
If you can, there’s absolutely no reason to force other people to mask anyway & you get the same benefit. That’s the ideal situation for everyone.
I think a good chunk of it was the CDC randomly changing its recommendations with no real explanation.
At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, from January to May of 2020, there was a big campaign by the CDC to discourage people from wearing masks. I remember seeing various guest "medical experts" on the news claiming that people who wore masks were actually MORE LIKELY to contract COVID. At the same time, virtually every other country was encouraging or mandating masking.
Then June of 2020 came around, masks quickly became encouraged and then mandated. Fauci only made vague and nonsensical statements like "the science changed!" and "we're moving at the speed of science!" to explain the abrupt change in policy. As if there was ever any scientific data to suggest that COVID-19 was not capable of airborne transmission or that masks wouldn't help limit said transmission.
I get that there was a shortage of masks early on and the CDC was probably just trying to prevent panic buying (which occurred anyway, there were N95s selling on amazon for $40 per mask). The ridiculous claim that "masks make you more likely to get COVID" followed by a sudden requirement to wear said "COVID causing" masks completely destroyed public confidence and fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories.
It's not the sort of membrane that only works when air is flowing in one direction. It won't protect you from getting goober in your eyes, but when it comes to inhalation, N95 material is great.
It also helps that N95 masks tend to have better nosewires for fit, and specify real head straps, which makes them practically more dependable than some masks like most KF94s.
FWIW, now that N95 masks aren't hard to get, I bought some a few months ago and holy crap they're so much better than the KN95s I had to use during COVID. I basically went maskless at times because the KN95 mask just leaked so much that I couldn't wear them. No matter how well I adjusted the metal nose bar, air leaked up when I breathed and it "tickled" my eyes so much I just stopped wearing them. I have since stockpiled a few hundred 3M N95s just in case.
Only disposable paper surgical masks (actually disposed of after single use!) worked (if the definition of worked was "reduced the transmission of at least droplets when coughing"), or real masks like KN95 or N95 certainly worked.
Those cloth masks that were reused every day did far more harm then good, especially if they were not washed. They did nothing against the pressure race of a cough, and most transmissibility was via aerosol anyway, not droplets.
The politics simply distorted the science, like when we saw Executive staff wearing logoed blue cloth masks more as a fashion statement than any real science, while subjecting the wearer to reduced air flow, exacerbating things like asthma or cardiac issues, and trapping some virus and random bacteria in a cess pool of saliva in a cloth mask that got saturated within minutes.
It's a real shame that people who knew better didn't say, "these masks work and these other masks are worse than no mask at all."
Politics took over and both sides were trapped by the nuance, and the result is a stain on the history of science and public health.
For professionals (doctors) it works, we know that for a long time. It's not fail safe, but it works.
For the rest of the population it is hard to determine a mask measure works. Even with this study it's hard to determine. Regular people tend to reuse masks too much, not care for quality labels (N95, etc), and not adjust them well.
Readit News
With all of the mandates to wear a mask everywhere I at least would have liked to wear one that worked well. You would have thought if they could produce 6 free tests per household per month, they could produce 6 free N95 masks per household per month.
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1483831305448173578
I personally received free masks. However, it was too late.
It was mostly early COVID when the masks were most needed and not available. Even the strategic stockpile essentially ran out after distributing them to vital areas. By the time they had enough to give them away, everyone had multiple masks of various qualities.
Kinda telling and depressing that everyone was ordering random knockoffs of varying quality from overseas, because we couldn't seem to produce enough domestically.
It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.
Democrats were criticising Trump for rushing the vaccine, and flaming vaccine scepticism, helped by mainstream media.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2671R8/ September 17, 20201
Democrat Biden warns against rushing out coronavirus vaccine, says Trump cannot be trusted
In the US, there were two - the first, via OSHA, affected all employers with > 100 employees. Employees would need to be vaccinated or tested weekly and required to wear a mask. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The second, via CMMS required vaccinations for all health care employees if Medicare or Medicaid money is involved. SCOTUS allowed that one.
This is revisionist history. I remember many Democrats being staunchly anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and it was only when their party came into power did they turn into human pincushions nearly overnight, "believing in science" and not being able to get enough jabs into them.
The vaccines, of course, were one and the same.
B) money doesn’t magically turn into materials and finished goods. Someone had to make masks to distribute and they had to get their raw materials from somewhere right when the supply chain was disrupted.
I’m not surprised that cloth beat surgical, but beating KN95 is kind of a shock. Of course, I’m sure there was quite a bit of variance in cloth mask quality. I wonder if anyone has done specifically a study on the home made cloth masks.
At 1 Euro a test, you could easily test yourself every morning before heading to work or school.
Inexpensive is not a word I'd use to describe a mask you need multiple of in a week and monthly replacements of thereafter. For a virus that affects the entire world, "developing" and "developed", it's not an easy sell.
But this rather harmless inference could've been promoted instead of the fake initial narrative of "masks are not that useful, save them for medical staff" that happened early on in the pandemic. Policymakers should never be gatekeeping information and acting like the public is too dumb to solve resulting supply-side issues.
I think one could reasonably stretch out a box of 20 duckbills for a whole year even if worn daily. They are about $1 each. While I could see that there would be places that $20/year would be too much, I don't think money is the barrier here. People just don't like wearing masks (especially respirators, which are bulkier) for many reasons.
Seems like a vulnerability in the system.
These were sealed shut onto the test equipment using wax (ie: perfect fitment, so best case scenario). They found a much higher penetration through the materials per se for cloth coverings and procedure masks.
> Particle penetration through the surgical mask ranged from 2% to 17%. Procedure masks were most variable and ranged from 1% to 85%
> For the six cloth face coverings, the submicron particle penetration ranged from 24% to 92%. For the two types of fabric from cotton t-shirts, submicron particle penetration ranged from 45% to 91%. Although this sample size was small, these penetration percentages for the cloth face coverings and fabric from cotton t-shirts are comparable to the 40% to 90% penetration found by previous NIOSH testing of cloth face coverings and fabrics.
For the respirators with exhalation valves their finding was the particle penetration was <1% to 55% without any additional mitigation and under 5% when using the ECG pad mitigation strategy tested. Relevant since a common earlier critique (perhaps assumption) of valved respirators was they weren't as decent as even common masks for non-wearers.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/pdfs/2021-107.pdf
Wearing face masks as a potential source for inhalation and oral uptake of inanimate toxins – A scoping review https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014765132...
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Possible toxicity of chronic carbon dioxide exposure associated with face mask use, particularly in pregnant women, children and adolescents – A scoping review https://www.cell.com/heliyon/pdf/S2405-8440(23)01324-5.pdf
Quarantines and lockdowns are good old tested ways, but infeasible for prolonged periods of time. Having everyone wear a mask and drastically reduce the spread was such a no brainer I never understood all the panic around it.
Then there were obvious propaganda lies surrounding masks. One was that soldiers wear them- and i was a soldier, with a abc-mask and we "trained" marching with them and unscrewed them to get some air. Then some other world-unaware office worker suggested using them in freezers and cooled environments- which basically boils down to waterboarding yourself with condensing air-moisture. Good idea, pushed by panicy people into bad policy, communicated badly, resulting in massive resistance.
If you can, there’s absolutely no reason to force other people to mask anyway & you get the same benefit. That’s the ideal situation for everyone.
I think a good chunk of it was the CDC randomly changing its recommendations with no real explanation.
At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, from January to May of 2020, there was a big campaign by the CDC to discourage people from wearing masks. I remember seeing various guest "medical experts" on the news claiming that people who wore masks were actually MORE LIKELY to contract COVID. At the same time, virtually every other country was encouraging or mandating masking.
Then June of 2020 came around, masks quickly became encouraged and then mandated. Fauci only made vague and nonsensical statements like "the science changed!" and "we're moving at the speed of science!" to explain the abrupt change in policy. As if there was ever any scientific data to suggest that COVID-19 was not capable of airborne transmission or that masks wouldn't help limit said transmission.
I get that there was a shortage of masks early on and the CDC was probably just trying to prevent panic buying (which occurred anyway, there were N95s selling on amazon for $40 per mask). The ridiculous claim that "masks make you more likely to get COVID" followed by a sudden requirement to wear said "COVID causing" masks completely destroyed public confidence and fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories.
Dead Comment
It also helps that N95 masks tend to have better nosewires for fit, and specify real head straps, which makes them practically more dependable than some masks like most KF94s.
Not trying to be snarky, tbh that is more important to me personally, too... but probably not in the broader sense...
Edit: With all the statistics that were bandied around in that time, I wonder how many accidents were caused by steamed-up glasses due to leaky masks.
I guess it's called boob tape because boobs like me use it?
I didn't see any need to wear a mask outdoors (except in a crowded circumstance) or when driving.
It's like when Bill Nye debated creationist Ken Ham; when asked what would convince them they're wrong, Nye said "evidence" and Ham said "nothing".
Only disposable paper surgical masks (actually disposed of after single use!) worked (if the definition of worked was "reduced the transmission of at least droplets when coughing"), or real masks like KN95 or N95 certainly worked.
Those cloth masks that were reused every day did far more harm then good, especially if they were not washed. They did nothing against the pressure race of a cough, and most transmissibility was via aerosol anyway, not droplets.
The politics simply distorted the science, like when we saw Executive staff wearing logoed blue cloth masks more as a fashion statement than any real science, while subjecting the wearer to reduced air flow, exacerbating things like asthma or cardiac issues, and trapping some virus and random bacteria in a cess pool of saliva in a cloth mask that got saturated within minutes.
It's a real shame that people who knew better didn't say, "these masks work and these other masks are worse than no mask at all."
Politics took over and both sides were trapped by the nuance, and the result is a stain on the history of science and public health.
For the rest of the population it is hard to determine a mask measure works. Even with this study it's hard to determine. Regular people tend to reuse masks too much, not care for quality labels (N95, etc), and not adjust them well.