Anyone that wants effective protection should wear a respirator, preferably the elastomeric kind.
While cloth and surgical masks might be okay for preventing the common cold or the flu (assuming no change in contagiousness), they don’t seem to work that well for covid, and any mask that has earloops is unlikely to provide an adequate seal, regardless of its theoretical filtration capability. Evidence: these sorts of masks seemed to have helped wipe out the flu and common cold but not covid in the winter of 2020/2021 and didn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the subsequent covid waves of 2021.
Anyone that wants effective protection should wear a respirator, preferably the elastomeric kind.
While cloth and surgical masks might be okay for preventing the common cold or the flu (assuming no change in contagiousness), they don’t seem to work that well for covid, and any mask that has earloops is unlikely to provide an adequate seal, regardless of its theoretical filtration capability. Evidence: these sorts of masks seemed to have helped wipe out the flu and common cold but not covid in the winter of 2020/2021 and didn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the subsequent covid waves of 2021.