What's Your Corvid Mask Style These Days??

Well, our Province just came out with new Corvid rules this morning. "British Columbians once again have to wear masks in all indoor spaces starting Wednesday, Aug. 25, said Dr. Bonnie Henry". I myself wear a mask all the time but I'm curious as to what others wear? Is it the standard blue one? Is it an N95 mask? Is it custom-made?...etc.

This is what I wear...BTW the first mask has a foam insert air filter!

The N95 masks are best, but getting a good fit is crucial.

If you don't get a good fit, the N95 mask is pretty bad.

Having said that, my family and I use multi-ply tightly-knit 100% cotton masks.

I have N95 also and yeah they are great. Use it all the time when I’m spray painting. Not as popular as the cloth ones though. I think most people get put off with the hardness of it and the shape maybe?

I’m in Miami and masks are for other people and I sell them to tourists.

Iza vaxed, as well, so me no care.

Chris

This thread is doomed.

So far I think the thread is fine, but who knows about in the future.

Wearing some disposable masks I got from Amazon.

No clue if they’re authentic or fake. But they fit better than all of the KN95 masks I tried. And my sunglasses don’t fog up in them.

They fold up and fit in a pocket. They are supposedly 3M brand N95 masks model 9502+

The best mask is the one you will wear……

A fit-tested N95 is the best, but still requires a face shield if your goal is prevent getting infection with the virus through aerosol transmission. It is also the hardest to breathe through and most uncomfortable in the long term.

A 3 layer mask with a filter medium in middle is next best, followed by surgical mask. Least effective is cloth/fabric.

However…… the purpose of the mask is actually to prevent you from transmitting if you are infective (with covid you are infective before symptoms appear). As long as the mask has a dense enough matrix to capture the expelled moisture it is sufficient as the virus is present in the droplets of moisture. Denser fabric, greater capture, more restrictive breathing.


The black one is my usual wear. (the staple holds a plastic frame inside which keeps it from collapsing into my nose as I breathe.)
The pink Princess Leia one I wear to my antivax friends’ house just to bug them.
Actually I got it when we had such bad air quality from wild fires a few years ago.

No, fair enough as it is quite a sensitive topic these days. I mean just look at all the videos of mask fights lol. On the bus or restaurant or supermarket etc. I’m just curious about the “fashion” part of things. Oh, since I’ve started wearing masks, I have not gotten a cold in 2 years. Bonus! :smiley:

I’ve been running a homebrew setup for more than a year to address off-the-shelf masks’ generally meh performance, retain the mask better than ear loops, tendency to fog my eyeglasses like that’s a common design goal, as well as filter exhalation.

  • Exterior : Common surgical mask
  • Interior : Ersatz RZ mask
  • Filter media : KN95 mask modified to accept exhalation check valves

I modify the KN95 masks with an arch punch - a 3/4” / 19mm punch makes neat holes that are about the right size.

I was able to source monolithic N95 masks about a month ago, but they’re more expensive, have a shorter useful lifespan, and can’t really be modified to work with the knockoff RZ mask. Thus I’ll likely be saving the N95s for any potentially higher-risk situation I might encounter .

I was wearing a N95 mask during the colder months but it gets quite warm where I live so I’ve been wearing the standard blue surgical mask. It’s a lot easier to breathe with when it’s really hot.

I’m using cheap surgical-style masks that cost 0.40 AUD each from the hardware store.

The restrictions in my state combined with working from home mean the only occasions I’m in close proximity to people outside my household are when I’m buying food, so I don’t go through many masks.

Once things start to open up I’m hoping to switch to reusable masks but I haven’t been able to find any that fit well yet.

These ones I got from the nurse at the vaccination clinic. It's a mask with a half shield built in. It's quite beefy but light and comfy to wear. Pad feels thick like there's charcoal or something inside.

I work outside all summer though I am around the public all day. Since being vaccinated I stopped wearing masks outdoors and I haven’t been anywhere inside around people since the spring. When I did wear a mask it was just the disposable type. Probably go back to that this winter when out and about.

N95 is just a filtration specification - masks and respirator filters that meet the spec are available in a wide variety of formfactors. The variety one will come across in the likes of home improvement stores may have check valves while the varieties used in the medical field do not.

Not entirely sure who you’re addressing this to, but the answer depends on who you’re protecting. A N95 mask worn effectively offers good protection to the wearer - especially outside of an occupational situation where exposure is immensely higher than in public. Protection for others against yourself not so much so, but in my case I use a common surgical mask over the (valved) N95.

Haha oh yeah, the quick way. :smiley: You know what they say…. “Time is money”.

My bobofett helmet is in the shop, so…

I’m, like, totally gangstah with that.

Early on in the pandemic, the United States’ CDC put out odd messaging - that N95 and better masks were solely for the medical field and that the only reason for the average person to wear a mask was to protect others.

The former statement was to prevent hoarding of medical-grade PPE by the general public at a moment when the medical establishment was caught flat-footed. I remember entire shelves at the likes of Home Depot and Lowes going bare of every possible flavor of respiratory PPE practically overnight - unrated dust masks, valved N95s, cartridge respirators - to be sent to medical facilities. The situation was dire for months as the medical profession burned through stockpiles that would otherwise be years’ worth of such PPE in weeks. It wasn’t until a couple months ago that I started seeing N95 masks on the shelves again at Home Depot and Lowes.

The latter statement addressed the underlying reality of low-grade improvised PPE and what was then available to the average person in early 2020 - source control was the best such equipment could hope for. Even with a large swath of homemade cloth masks incorporating filter pockets and N95-esque (typically FFP2 - a genuine and reasonably effective filtration standard) ), fitment is apt to be meh thus the protection offered still mediocre. However, using a well-fitting mask conformant with one of the aforementioned filtration standards one can actually begin to reasonably protect one’s self - especially outside of the occupational exposure those in the healthcare field would be facing.

To your apparent point, yes one should choose a mask without a check valve over one with a check valve to protect those around you. I do not because otherwise my glasses fog relentlessly forcing me to constantly adjust my glasses and face mask to mitigate the effect as best I can and largely negating the point of wearing a face mask at all; however I do wear a surgical mask over my primary mask (with the dreaded check valve) to filter my exhalation. Do not point me to the first bits ‘helpful’ advice you might find around solving this problem - i.e. applying shmutz to my glasses, using a thick(er) wire along the ridge, or taping the mask/my face - I’ve either tried them without success, find them too inconvenient for my very occasional mask usage, or they were seemingly written by people that don’t actually wear glasses.

Finally, here’s an exhaustive rundown on PPE air filtration standards.