Wear A Mask - it's airborne!

If you’re in a country that has not eliminated COVID-19, wear a mask.

Any cloth face covering is better than nothing. But you should seek to get the best mask that you can as soon as you can. Your cloth face covering:

• needs nose wire which should kept shaped to your nose while in use.
• should be multi-layer - three or more ideally
• should not have gaps at your cheeks, sides, or throat
• may concentrate virons on the outside - wash your hands after touching a dirty mask and wash/dry the mask after use.

The stretchy spandex (lycra) ones that are single layer are insufficient. If you can’t wear a mask or cloth face covering stay at home and get food delivered.

If you can afford it, get KF94 masks (not cloth or washable) for use when mixing with other in public. Citizen Scientist, Aaron Collins, reviews masks for filtration effectiveness and talks about KF94 masks quite a bit. Leave the N95 and FFP2 masks/respirators for respective medical and emergency workers.

Studies on filtration effectiveness of various masks:

• Max-Planck Institute (Germany): Aerosol filtration efficiency of household materials for homemade face masks: Influence of material properties, particle size, particle electrical charge, face velocity, and leaks - Drewnick et al. (Aug 2020)
• University of Chicago and Argonne National Labs (USA): Aerosol Filtration Efficiency of Common Fabrics Used in Respiratory Cloth Masks - Konda et al. (2020)

More Information

• Masks4all.co portal has been pushing the “masks for all” message since March. And a discussion forum on reddit for the same.
• damerousky.cz - Citizen made portal for making masks, started in the Czech Republic (Europe) and now an international multi-language effort.
• Goddard’s Journal - second exhaustive review of mask studies over the years (and that they work; video).