There has been a tremendous confusion over masks during the pandemic, even among those who followed guidelines and wore them.
One of the biggest misconceptions among anti-maskers was that all kinds of masks have the same filtration capabilities.
Since cloth masks barely protect the wearer, they would scream that all masks are useless and don’t actually stop the spread of the virus. But businesses carried versions of N95 masks during most of the pandemic if you went online, and these can effectively stop someone from catching COVID from an infected person. You could be a foot from their face, and provided you’re wearing the mask properly, you wouldn’t breathe in the infectious respiratory particles. My HVAC technician has been wearing an N95 mask since March of last year. The company he works for gets them in bulk from a special supplier and gives them to the employees on a daily basis. These N95 masks protect customers from a potentially infectious, asymptomatic employee, as well as the reverse. Even after the CDC said that vaccinated people can go maskless indoors, my HVAC supplier hasn’t changed their guidelines. They know that a lot of people still haven’t been vaccinated and quitting the use of masks is throwing caution to the wind at this point in time. Once there are more people vaccinated than those who aren’t, it would be a lot safer to go maskless in tight indoor spaces. Air conditioners are particularly sensitive because an employee could get respiratory particles inside the ductwork and they would circulate through the customer’s home while they run their cooling system.