There has been a tremendous confusion over masks while in the pandemic, even among those who followed instruction 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 do not absolutely stop the spread of the virus. But corporations 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 correctly, you wouldn’t breathe in the infectious respiratory particles. My heating and A/C worker has been wearing an N95 mask since March of last year. The supplier he works for gets them in bulk from a special business and gives them to the employees on a monthly basis. These N95 masks protect patrons from a potentially infectious, asymptomatic employee, and the reverse. Even after the CDC said that vaccinated people can go maskless indoors, my heating and A/C business hasn’t changed their instruction. 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 indoor spaces. Air conditioners are more sensitive because an employee could get respiratory particles inside the HVAC duct and they would circulate through the customer’s house while they run their cooling system.