Will the N95 mask offer keep you from getting sick or spreading disease? Nope.
Will it keep you fearful? Yep.
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Here’s what they aren’t telling you about these free N95 respirators:
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 2 hours in a hospital or similar setting with filtered air
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 30 min outdoors
- If you have facial hair, forget it. It will not seal. If you were expecting at best 1% protection before, it is now 0%.
So if 200M Americans receive two respirators each, they get around 4 hours of protection. And that only works if the respirators are fitted perfectly with no gaps and people are trained on their use. And as we noted before, even if everything was perfect, you aren’t likely to get anywhere close to 95% reduction in virions (because of the size of the particles and the rate of airflow into the respirator), and even with such a reduction, that’s unlikely to make the difference between getting infected and not getting infected.