Sep 13, 2024, 6:13 PMUntil a year or so ago, I thought that wearing an N95 was a big deal because my experience with N95s was extremely uncomfortable hard shell masks provided by an institution that I couldn't tolerate wearing for more than 20-30 minutes. It is a massive failure of public health education that I did not know that comfortable N95s exist and they cost less than a dollar each so long as you don't buy a tiny 3 pack at Walgreens.
Sep 13, 2024, 6:21 PM4 years into this airborne pandemic, I still see people wearing surgical masks in public. There's no good reason for that when actually effective masks are so cheap. It's a huge failure of public health education. The system won't educate us, so we have to educate each other.
Sep 13, 2024, 6:23 PMDid you know that not only are N95 masks very effective at protecting the wearer, they're also very effective for source control to avoid infected people spreading viruses? https://sph.umd.edu/news/study-shows-n95-masks-near-perfect-blocking-escape-airborne-covid-19
Of course symptomatic people should wear N95s without exhalation valves.