Yeah, this is the fundamental failure of this administration. Months ago we could have designed a high quality and visually unique mask with less than N95 efficiency but with a reasonable safety and comfort level. We should already have been manufacturing and distributing them at cost. They should be mandatory in all enclosed spaces and we could have prevented a lot of the spike in spread we are seeing now and are likely to see as more and more things open up.
There is no reason to design a worse mask than N95. They could have just manufactured more N95 masks and rationed them to prevent hoarding and speculating. Every household could get an N95 mask ration card to buy masks and decon tools like UV-C lights and sparky ozone generators.
People were not going to fit N95 masks properly or wear them for any extended period.
ADDED: In fact, I'd argue that making N95 masks mandatory (as opposed to face coverings more broadly) would be extremely bad policy even if they were readily available.
You would have to be literally retarded to not figure out how to wear an N95 mask. They fit most people, at least clean shaven ones. You just have to bend the metal nose band to fit your nose and maybe go around the edges of the mask with your fingers. Yes some tiny percentage of people probably have oddly shaped faces and they won't be able to wear them, but that doesn't mean the other 99.9% of the population cannot.
Yeah, I'm not trying to say that everyone shouldn't wear an N95, but from a pragmatic standpoint they won't. People will barely wear one today that is made out of a t-shirt and barely fits. I just think we'd get better results meeting people halfway.
It's very difficult to wear an N95; it's really constrictive and uncomformtable. You can't expect civilians to wear N95 masks all the time and you need to weigh the comfort of a mask against its effectiveness.
People say this, but I don't understand it. I regularly wear N95s for hours on end. It's not fun to do while sweating, sure. But it's not much more difficult than wearing a surgical mask, is it?
Sure the straps are tight and the nose pinches. But that's little discomfort compared to getting sick.
A lot of people already complain about wearing the regular masks and how uncomfortable it is, especially in summer. I'm sure a lot of people don't wear masks already or take it off regularly because it's so uncomfortable. I think ubiquitous use of N95s would just make that problem worse.
>> But that's little discomfort compared to getting sick
Depends on how afraid you are of getting sick. Most people that get infected do not develop any symptoms, and of those who do 95% wouldn't be able to tell them aparat from the normal flu. The only real risk group are people over 70, and while those might actually be afraid, the rest of the society is simply getting more and more pissed off with all those restrictions imposed on us.
Have other countries done this? Is the US the only country that has seen a spike as things open up? Just interested in the comment “failure of this administration,” when I haven’t seen such attempts in other countries either. Perhaps this is a failure of the WHO? There hasn’t been any notable proposals from Congress in this issue either. Were people advocating such a solution and it was ignored? Because hindsight is 20/20. As late as Feb 28, there were politicians advocating people visit restaurants in Chinatown SF and calling travel bans racist. Was that a failure too?
The point of my comment is that we can talk about “failure,” but it’s disingenuous to suggest that the right answer existed all along but it was ignored. Nobody had the answers other than perhaps Taiwan when they sealed borders on 31 December — and Taiwan was ignored because of WHO politics.
Regardless of if a new standard for masks would help (it would), the federal government's official position on masks is an obvious failure if you're paying attention, given that the first time President Trump wore a mask was July 11, 6 months after the virus should have been known to top officials in this administration.
(In particular, a surgical mask is better than nylon netting and "N95" doesn't describe how exhaled particles are treated. An N95 mask with an unfiltered exhalation valve has the wearer exhaling droplets all over the place.)
