How to buy reliable masks online - The Washington Post

If you live in an area where the delta variant is spreading fast — and that’s a lot of places now — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says you should keep wearing masks.

In Texas, local school districts can now require masks after a new state Supreme Court decision gave them the ability to do so, while major cities including Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have enacted mask mandates of their own. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase and others have also begun requiring their employees to wear masks at work, either full time or in situations where they cannot socially distance.

Throw in the effects of California’s already devastating wildfire season, and you have a host of reasons for keeping a supply of reliable masks ready to go.

The problem is that while masks are much easier to come by than they were in the earliest days of the pandemic, reliably restocking your supply can still be trickier than it needs to be.

If you’re planning to do your mask shopping online, here are a few best practices you should keep in mind.

Keep an eye out for fakes

Counterfeit masks continue to pose problems for people — and organizations — trying to build up a supply of reliable masks. Just last week, Homeland Security Investigations agents in Chicago intercepted a shipment of more than 400,000 fake N95 masks before they could be distributed. So, what can you do to avoid these dodgy options?

To start, the CDC has some helpful tips.

If you’re shopping in a sprawling online marketplace, be wary of listings that specifically refer to themselves as being “legitimate” or “genuine,” and keep tabs on prices — big fluctuations or curiously good deals could be a sign of something fishy. And if you’re looking at products from independent online mask retailers, be sure to check for typos, broken links and strange-looking URLs, as these could be signs you’re actually looking at a fly-by-night operation. (You can find the full list of CDC recommendations here.)

Despite some serious sleuthing, it’s not impossible for fake masks to slip through the cracks and land on your doorstep. Thankfully, some maskmakers offer tools to help you confirm your purchases are the real deal.

Meanwhile, Aegle, a producer of NIOSH-approved N95 masks in Brookshire, Tex., takes a more sophisticated approach. Whether you buy Aegle masks from marketplaces such as Amazon or directly from the manufacturer, each package comes with a tiny chip called an NFC (short for near-field communication) tag built into the box. You don’t need any additional gear to read these tags — most modern smartphones have NFC reading abilities built into them. Just touch your smartphone to the box, and its Web browser will open, showing you the filtration test results of masks from the lot yours came from.

“If I have to share this [information] with the government body, then why shouldn’t the end user have the same ability,” said Thomas Lopez, Aegle’s chief technical officer.

Expand your search

For many people, their search for masks begins and ends on Amazon. While you can certainly find reliable options there, it’s always worth looking at other reputable retailers. (Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

If you’ve decided that you want to wear N95 masks, try checking online outposts of major hardware store chains — Home Depot and Grainger offer a fairly wide selection and in some cases allow you to swing by a physical store to pick up your order. (Of the two, Grainger also has the easiest stock assortment to view at a glance.)

It’s also a good idea to buy masks directly from the companies that produce them, but that doesn’t always work for individuals — the minimum order size can be too high to justify an order. In cases like those, consider checking out the nonprofit Project N95, which sources masks from verified suppliers and breaks down bulk orders into smaller packages that make more sense for household purchases. And despite what the organization’s name might suggest, it doesn’t just sell standard N95 masks — it also sells well-reputed surgical and KN95 masks.

When N95 mask supplies were constrained earlier in the pandemic, KN95 emerged as viable alternatives. These masks, primarily made in China, can offer levels of protection similar to standard N95 masks when worn correctly. KF94 masks are also solid options for daily use, and at least one small-scale study suggests they’re as effective as N95 masks in preventing the virus from spreading. To ensure these masks work as well as they’re intended to, look for KF94s that were manufactured in South Korea.

As new variants of the coronavirus spread within the United States, health professionals have suggested that Americans wear two masks. (John Farrell/The Washington Post)

Read those reviews

No matter where your mask search begins, remember to take a few minutes to look through the reviews attached to each mask’s sales listing — especially the negative ones. This might sound like a no-brainer, but many people have been in your position and have already taken the plunge on products, only to find they didn’t live up to their expectations.

Apart from the materials masks are made of, the way they fit might be the important factor to pay attention to. You could always buy a few packs and try them out for yourself, but reviews from other people can be helpful in checking whether a mask you’re interested in fits snugly and comfortably. (And for those of you wearing glasses, poring over these reviews is a great way to find out if the masks you want will have you peering through a thin layer of fog all day.)

In some cases, reviewers might have even spotted potentially counterfeit masks. In one Amazon product listing we reviewed, a pack of 20 3M N95 respirators had garnered a cumulative rating of 4.4 stars, which sounds reasonable enough. But a quick look at the reviews revealed a series of older 1-star reviews that slammed the masks for their poor build quality, prompting some to believe they had inadvertently purchased a pack of fakes.

Join a community

For many people, getting a fresh shipment in the mail will be the last time they think about their masks — until the next time they need to resupply, at least. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you frequently spend a lot of time around people whose vaccination status can’t easily be determined, it might be worth joining one of a number of growing communities devoted to sharing their experiences with the masks they’ve used.

The most immediately helpful we’ve seen so far is r/Masks4All, a Reddit group with more than 12,000 members, some of whom respond to requests for advice almost immediately. In some ways, you can think of communities like this one as an outgrowth of the reviews section on most mask listings in online stores — these are people who have bought and lived with different masks, and who aren’t afraid to share what they’ve learned.

More importantly, the subreddit could be a helpful sounding board for people trying to find answers to very specific questions — like the college professor in Florida asking for advice on masks that would be well-suited to lecturing in-person with microphones.

Daily mask wear comes with a slew of irritations and annoyances. Here are solutions for mask acne, ear pain and fogged up glasses. (John Farrell, Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Another social media community has started to blossom around Aaron Collins — a.k.a. the Mask Nerd — and his YouTube videos. A mechanical engineer by trade, the Minnesota resident has made a name for himself by testing masks in his home to see if they are effective as they claim to be. (For what it’s worth, Project N95′s executive director Anne Miller vouches for his results, claiming they’re “pretty solid” for someone who doesn’t have “a $100,000 test rig in his operation.”)

Tara Cole, a writer based in Minneapolis, had never heard of Collins before discovering an earlier version of what might be his biggest project: a Google spreadsheet outlining the filtration efficiency of nearly 300 masks. She had previously bought KN95 masks she suspected might be counterfeits and stopped using them after she couldn’t find listings in Collins’s database.

“I’ve got a growing pile of masks that I don’t trust for virus protection but will probably meet my crafting project needs for the next 20 years,” she said.

It’s always worth taking other people’s online observations with a grain of salt, but if nothing else, communities like these could be a great resource for people who don’t even know where to start with masks.

Don’t sweat those ‘smart’ masks

We’ve seen a slew of high-tech “smart” masks popping up since the beginning of the pandemic.

Some claim to have “real-time protection levels” to your smartphone via Bluetooth, others have built-in wireless ear buds, and at least one concept blends air filtration with an amplifier for your voice. These could be worth a splurge if you’re a serious gadget fan, but our advice is to skip just about all of them (at least for now).

Instead, the most practical thing to do is focus on finding masks like N95s, KN95s, and KF94s that offer high levels of air filtration that actually fit well on your mouth and nose.

“That’s the thing that consumers need to look for,” said Miller of Project N95. “If you’re not comfortable, you’re not going to wear it. And it has to fit. If it doesn’t fit, you’re going to have leaks, and that’s not going to give you any benefit.”

Adblock test (Why?)

"Here" - Google News
August 21, 2021 at 11:34PM
https://ift.tt/3sD3Geb

How to buy reliable masks online - The Washington Post
"Here" - Google News
https://ift.tt/39D7kKR
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update