Sadly, maybe this would work!
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Anecdotally … I have had only one upper respiratory virus infection since 2020, and it was not COVID.
Also a N-95 mask during wildfire smoke season makes life more bearable. It doesn’t catch all the crap, but it helps.
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Where I am near Boston about 95% or more of the masks I see are N95 or equivalent.
I do still occasionally see the odd cloth mask and think “are we back in 2020?” Seriously, cloth masks were an ok stopgap measure when there weren’t any real masks to go around (plus they were fun to make), but we’ve since learned that their efficacy was minimal.
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At least where I am, I have never been able to discover any N95 type mask that isn’t comically small on me (this, in spite of the fact that I’ve never had trouble with the various paper masks and heavy-duty respirators I’ve needed for various jobs).
The only things I’ve found to fit are medical and cloth masks, but it’s a good reminder: I’ll look next I’m in Canada.
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Isn’t it more of a case that the obtuse misinterpretation of “that single study probably did more damage than almost anything else to widespread attempts to get people to mask to keep themselves and others safe from COVID-19.”
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oooh check out breatheteq. i ordered some online, and they have sizes from XS to XL – the XL might work for you!
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ok, i’m editing this response. the study was flawed, AND anti-maskers wholeheartedly took its “tentative” findings and ran with it to massively spread anti-masking bullshit ideas about how “masks don’t work!!” it’s a both/and for me on this one!
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The political weaponisation of public health measures including masks and vaccines was one of the big surprises of the pandemic.
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One more word on this issue, then I have to go do other things 
masked, of course ha ha
It didn’t help that the LEAD AUTHOR of the Cochrane study publicly stated in interviews that “masks don’t work”:
(quotes below from https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/opinions/mask-mandate-cochrane-study-covid-sepkowitz-ctrp/index.html)
"The “money quote” comes from an interview that esteemed data scientist Dr. Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane study, gave in an interview: “There is just no evidence that (masks) make any difference, full stop.” If his statement were an accurate reflection of what the article found, the launching of a thousand op-eds would be understandable.
But this emphatically is not the conclusion of the twelve authors, of which Jefferson was just one voice. The actual Cochrane article concludes something directly at odds with Jefferson’s statement: “The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions… The low to moderate certainty of evidence (in favor of masks) means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect,” the article notes.
In plain English, this, at least to me as a veteran reader of these types of reviews, translates to: The primary studies are not strong enough for us to say much of anything except that we may be wrong no matter what we say.
A lead author such as Jefferson is of course free to speak his mind but, at least in the interview, he apparently did not distinguish his personal view from the consensus view of the authors. There may be a back-story to this: A professor at Oxford University, Jefferson seems to long have had his doubts about masks, writing articles in The Spectator and other journals to air out his sometimes curmudgeonly views."t
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Thank you for clarifying this!
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Your quote indicates he may not have said ‘masks don’t work’ but rather ‘there is no evidence masks work’.
This was technically correct. But he may have been deliberately making trouble knowing his comment would be taken to mean. “masks don’t work”, especially if he did not also say “there is no evidence they don’t work, either”
So he - and his statements - certainly needed debunking. That the Cochrane study found insufficient evidence either way to draw a conclusion, did not. And having read many Cochrane studies, this is a very common occurrence - and sometimes counter-intuitive. I have read Cochrane studies that come to a similar conclusion (e.g. no evidence this drug works better than the others) when the drugs to work well and often better than others, but the Cochrane methodology (look at all eligible RCTs on this subject and synthesise them to an evidential conclusion) is by its very nature going to end up doing that quite often. In many cases it is the underlying RCTs that are the problem.
I do genuinely think that if you have the ability to edit your OP, it would be clarified and improved if you included the detail about Jefferson and what the study actually said as opposed to what he said/deliberately implied.
I stick by my original language. The authors of the new study (https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23) I wrote about in my OP are pretty clear that many scientists found the actual methodology of the Cochrane study flawed (in addition to the lead author publicly stating that “There is just no evidence that (masks) make any difference, full stop”). See what I’ve bolded, below.
They state:
“The need for a new review on masks was highlighted by a widely publicized polarization in scientific opinion. The masks section of a 2023 Cochrane review of non-pharmaceutical interventions was—controversially—limited to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). It was interpreted by the press and by some but not all of its own authors to mean that “masks don’t work” and “mask mandates did nothing”. Cochrane’s editor-in-chief felt the need to state publicly that in Cochrane’s view, the review’s findings did not support such a conclusion. Some scholars were quick to question the review’s methodology, especially key flaws in the meta-analysis and omission of a vast body of non-RCT evidence.”
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Once again, thanks for your clarification… It’s appreciated!
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Can we please avoid unnecessary pedantry about the specific wording of an article that does not change the message being given?. This only (perhaps willfully) undercuts the message of the post (that masks work) to instead focus on the fact that the wording isn’t as all posters wish it to be. This is a very common tactic by those that wish to undercut scientific reporting and dilute the messages given, and we have no interest in doing that here.
Thanks.
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The Milwaukee cup-style mask is an N95 with a larger fit. Engineer and mask fit testing machine designer Aaron Collins mentioned them as an option in his “Best of Video”.
I should add that one of the reasons even the much vaunted kings of filtering facpiece respirators, N95s, often fit people poorly and leak at the face seal is that there is no human fit testing required for NIOSH approval of particulate-only masks. They literally don’t have to fit a single human being to pass.
Instead of requiring N95s to pass a diverse, statistically representative fit-test panel of people for approval, NIOSH punts fit down the road to OSHA, which requires employers to individually fit test all workers who are subject to mandatory respirator use. That leaves the general public in the lurch, unable to distinguish crappy N95s that fit few people from ones that fit most, but not all, people, such as the 3M Aura N95.
Canada now has a new domestic mask standard. And all respirators have to pass a human fit test panel prior to approval. However, only 70% of people in the panel need to pass a fit test in the model mask, and they can try each size, if availible, twice before it’s considered a fail. So there is no guarantee a Canadian approved CA-N95 will fit either. Individual fit testing is still the only way to be sure if a mask fits you.
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I think this sums up the weird dichotomy of preppers who have gas masks in their bunkers getting angry at people wearing N95s during an ongoing pandemic that killed over a million Americans. The problem being there was nobody they could shoot at, because that is their fantasy, not real, mundane actual emergencies that require real, boring preparedness and response rather than cos-play boot camp with guns.
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This, so much this. “Prepping” should be about disasters that actually happen. Hurricanes, earthquakes, recessions, pandemics. But nooooo! We need to only worry about TEOTWAWKI. Anything else is too mundane to keep our interest. Thing is, even in a TEOTWAWKI situation, it would be these same issues, just pretty much never ending. I suspect these idiots will be the first to go.
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Reminds me of how the US will spend craploads of money to rescue you off of a mountain, but if you have cancer you are own your own. We don’t do chronic conditions well.
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Wow. I’ve never really thought of it as a sort of larger mindset but you’re right I think. The bizarre fear I see both in rural people who don’t make much money and in rich city people who have to deal with decaying infrastructure they would also benefit from improving… Maybe that is the same a little. It really has always bothered me about the status quo here in the US. Like why will you pay 10-100x the money for less? People will pay 8 dollars every damned day on toll roads but tell you at least they are saving money on tax. Nah… I guarantee you are not saving money comparatively. And yes I know there are idiotic/corrupt tax deals that get made that don’t improve anything but it’s more just the actual mindset and aversion to doing the math that floors me.
So many people here are like this and I’ve honestly struggled to understand the whole cut-your-nose-off-to-spite-your-neighbor’s-face mentality even growing up in it.
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