There has been a tremendous confusion over masks during the pandemic, even among those who followed instruction and wore them. One of the largest 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 absolutely 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 given you’re wearing the mask officially, you wouldn’t breathe in the infectious respiratory particles. My HVAC serviceman has been wearing an N95 mask since April of last year. The corporation he works for gets them in bulk from a special corporation and gives them to the employees on a monthly basis. These N95 masks protect buyers from a potentially infectious, asymptomatic employee, and the reverse. Even after the CDC said that vaccinated people can go maskless indoors, our HVAC corporation hasn’t changed their instruction. They know that a lot of people still haven’t been vaccinated. In addition, 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 sensitive because an employee could get respiratory particles inside the HVAC duct and they would circulate through the customer’s new home while they run their cooling system.