JayB
Active Member
If you're wearing a cloth mask, consider upgrading to a KN95 instead, particularly if you're in a high risk group. They're no more annoying, and but they're several times more effective than a cloth mask.
There's an abundant supply of KN95 masks now. They're cheap, and there's enough of them in the country for everyone to buy an ample supply without depriving essential workers of the protection they need (and hopefully they're all using legit N95's at this point).
This post isn't an attempt to persuade anyone to do or believe anything that they aren't inclined to believe (there are *plenty* of other places to argue about Covid on the web), but I thought I'd post this because it seems that lots of folks either aren't aware of this or have just gotten used to using a cloth mask and aren't really thinking about it anymore.
My mom is in a high-risk category, but held off on upgrading her mask because as far as she knew there still weren't enough of the "good" masks to go around, and she didn't want to deprive front line workers of them. I took it upon myself to get her a supply of KN95's before the holidays because I knew she wouldn't be willing to completely quarantine herself from folks who had been traveling, etc.
Sure enough - one of the visitors who had tested negative for Covid before traveling started coming down with symptoms on December 24, two days after an extended indoor visit with my Mom. Thankfully my Mom wore her KN95 the whole time, and isn't having any symptoms. Post hoc doesn't equal ergo propter hoc, but I'm confident that if you ran this experiment a gazillion times, the people wearing KN95's in this situation would wind up infected far less often than people wearing cloth masks. If anyone had asked me, I'd have advised against an in-person visit in the first place but that's another topic all together.
There's an abundant supply of KN95 masks now. They're cheap, and there's enough of them in the country for everyone to buy an ample supply without depriving essential workers of the protection they need (and hopefully they're all using legit N95's at this point).
This post isn't an attempt to persuade anyone to do or believe anything that they aren't inclined to believe (there are *plenty* of other places to argue about Covid on the web), but I thought I'd post this because it seems that lots of folks either aren't aware of this or have just gotten used to using a cloth mask and aren't really thinking about it anymore.
My mom is in a high-risk category, but held off on upgrading her mask because as far as she knew there still weren't enough of the "good" masks to go around, and she didn't want to deprive front line workers of them. I took it upon myself to get her a supply of KN95's before the holidays because I knew she wouldn't be willing to completely quarantine herself from folks who had been traveling, etc.
Sure enough - one of the visitors who had tested negative for Covid before traveling started coming down with symptoms on December 24, two days after an extended indoor visit with my Mom. Thankfully my Mom wore her KN95 the whole time, and isn't having any symptoms. Post hoc doesn't equal ergo propter hoc, but I'm confident that if you ran this experiment a gazillion times, the people wearing KN95's in this situation would wind up infected far less often than people wearing cloth masks. If anyone had asked me, I'd have advised against an in-person visit in the first place but that's another topic all together.
