Truly unfortunate result of the careless and contradictory narratives the public has been given by the Holy Annointed Expert Class

Literally yday I was startled to hear my dad (v. smart engineer fellow) issue a similar sentiment. What gives? Lend me your eyes for a couple tweets https://twitter.com/towongnowhite/status/1279089320419352578

Long story short

There are certain capabilities we need from masks designed for daily wear, in the case of our specific pandemic and the caps/lims of the sars-cov-2 virions and the kinematics of respiratory dispersion

Masks which create a noticeable interference with the actual airflow, like an N95 (what my dad has been wearing, turns out) or even worse (examples I’ve seen, in order: R95, N99, even P100s) offer increased safety probabilities that are so tiny they can be safely considered equal

They are meaningfully different for some things, i.e. different construction or demolition jobs and the particles you’ll be exposed to there, but for our application an N95 is the same as a P100.

But even the N95 is far from ideal and is entirely overkill for our application!

These respirators are not optimized for humans at rest or just ambling around. The design assumption is you will be exerting yourself physically and breathing heavier. With deep breaths, the pocket of “used” air trapped after exhalation is a small fraction of the volume exchanged

The result, in a functional and ~fit body, will be to increase the rate of respiration — that is, more “breaths” per minute — to adjust for you being apparently at a higher altitude or whatever (as far as your body knows) but it still takes exertion to trigger *deeper* breaths

So there my dad was, as he tells me: chilling, sitting in the waiting room of the orthodontist for root canal, politely masked, and as time progresses, becoming conscious of a tension between wearing the mask properly and feeling kinda sleepy and wanting to tug it below his nose

And so I’m like, dad, why are you wearing an N95. And he’s like, they’re not unobtainium anymore, I waited to get them! And I’m like, lol I wasn’t preparing to scold you for having one, I’m just—did you forget to bring a normal mask? And he’s like what the fuck does that mean?!

...anyway brief shades of Who’s On First before I realized, oh wtf, nope, he didn’t bring an N95 in consideration of the specific environment of a 3-hr double root canal, nurse 2 feet away & surgeon breathing hard inches from your face

he always wears N95s when he has to mask up