There has been a tremendous confusion over masks while in the pandemic, even among those who followed instructions and wore them.
One of the greatest 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 honestly stop the spread of the virus. But companies 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, you wouldn’t breathe in the infectious respiratory particles. My heating and A/C worker has been wearing an N95 mask since April of last year. The company she works for gets them in bulk from a special business and gives them to the employees on a biweekly 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 heating and A/C business hasn’t changed their instruction. They guess 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 narrow indoor spaces. Air conditioners are particularly sensitive because an employee could get respiratory particles inside the duct work and they would circulate through the customer’s home while they run their cooling system.