Captain Hafski wrote: ↑Nov 24th, '20, 09:40
FWIW:
Plenty of N95 and KN95 masks available on E-Bay. From what I've read, not a whole lot of difference between the two except for where [country] they were certified. With that said, the N95's on sale look a lot more robust than the K95s [and higher price, of course, but not bank breaking]. Although I tend to agree with Brownman, not sure if buying them on E-Bay is in any real way shorting the front line worker mask availability. If that were the case, I would expect to see the E-Bay prices way higher. Looks to me like supply is OK ??
Contact lenses: I went to these thirty or so years ago solely for skiing in lieu of wearing glasses under goggles. Game changer for sure.
If one is looking for N95's or KN-95's be a bit warry of ones online if you can't verify their authenticity. Being in the healthcare field, and trying to keep adequate PPE in stock these last 8 months, has been a challenge at times. And what has happened in the PPE world, is in essence they've become not unlike futures trading where groups will buy up massive runs of say authentic 3M certified N95's and KN95's and then resell them at a mark up per unit on secondary markets. So the market is now flooded with many knock off clones, that look the same, but aren't made to the same standards as the originals. For example, the masks I typically used in my office, level 3 surgical masks, used to have a unit cost of about 25 cents a piece pre Covid. That spiked to about 2 dollars a piece back in April, leveled off a bit to about 50 cents a piece over the Summer, and now, if I can even find them, are back to about a dollar a piece. At one point, when my office was looking to get some authentic 3M N95's back in late April, the market was at a cost of $10-$12 a unit, for what used to be less than a dollar per unit.
One can also look at if the N95's or KN-95's are even significantly better than the more readily available, "traditional" surgical masks out there, since the data shows, more often than not, that the most important thing, regardless of what type of mask one is wearing, unless you're basically in direct close contact with a known COVID + person in a closed, poorly ventilated setting for an extended period of time (such as healthcare workers treating Covid patients) is are you properly putting on and taking off your properly fitting mask, in addition to using proper hand/face hygiene both before and after putting on one's mask. While not specific to COVID, there was a journal article published in the New England Journal of Medicine last fall that looked at the efficacy of the traditional level 3 surgical mask vs an N95 mask, when worn by ICU nurses at about 20 different hospitals across the country, over an accumulated something like 20,000 shifts, with respect to those nurses contracting either Influenza A or B. And the results showed essentially no statistical difference between the 2 types of masks in preventing the wearer from getting Flu A or B and in gross numbers those that wore the perceived higher level N95 mask actually contracted Flu A or B slightly more than those who wore the traditional surgical masks. The authors concluded that often use of proper infection control protocols when putting on and taking off one's mask may very well be just as, if not more important, than the actual type of mask itself
